Semites have no racial psychology and only reluctantly abandoned polytheism

Evidence

Goldziher considered all that to be racist nonsense: ‘There is no such thing as a psychology particular to a given race.’ His first interest was in Hebrew mythology, but when he turned to the early beliefs of the Arabs, he pointed out that they only reluctantly abandoned polytheism under pressure from Muhammad and his supporters. Eventually, in a famous speech delivered in Budapest in 1893, entitled ‘Renan as Orientalist’, he attacked both the notion of an intuitive monotheism of the Semites and the supposed scholarship of Renan. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 345

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s critique of essentialist Orientalism and the idea that racial-psychological capacities are projected onto peoples; also to debates about whether monotheism was intrinsic to Semitic cultures.