Renan saw assimilation into civilisation as capable of erasing racial character

Evidence

[T]he primordial influence of race, as immense a part that it plays in the dynamics of human affairs, is offset by a crowd of other influences, which sometimes seem to overcome or even smother [étouffer] entirely that of blood. How many Israelites today, who are descended directly from the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, have nothing of the Semitic character, and are only modern men, swept along and assimilated by this great force superior to race that we call civilisation! — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 644

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the specifically non-biological, civilisation-based strand inside nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ racism that antisemitism scholarship often flattens into simple biologism.
• XREF: connects to: Renan attributed medieval Islamic science to Aryans, not Arabs, to preserve his racial hierarchy. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 347