Schlegel grounded aesthetic and linguistic hierarchies in an Indo-European bias against Semitic peoples.

Evidence

Although by the time he published his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier in 1808 Schlegel had practically renounced his Orientalism, he still held that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other than with the Semitic, Chinese, American, or African languages. Moreover, the Indo-European family was artistically simple and satisfactory in a way the Semitic, for one, was not. … Hebrew, he said, was made for prophetic utterance and divination; the Muslims, however, espoused a “dead empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 273

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete instance of the racialized language-family hierarchy that later philology and race-thinking readings build on. — connects to: Assimilated Jews’ role-playing bitterness fed radical critique despite claimed non-discrimination — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 166
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 273