T.E. Lawrence redefined Jews as non-Semites to exclude them from Arab identity.

Evidence

In contrast to dynamic Christianity and Islam, Jewry was, he wrote, ‘unchanging’, and, unlike the vast majority of Semites, could exist outside of Western Asia. In Palestine itself, Jewish colonists ‘had introduced strange manners, and strange crops, and European houses’. … At one point, Seven Pillars seems to suggest that Zionists had ceased entirely to be Semites. In Renan’s original account of the Semites in 1855, he specified that they lacked ‘almost completely the capacity to laugh’. Perhaps in tribute to Renan, Lawrence used the latter’s Semitic criteria to debunk the existence of the Jewish Semite; damningly, he wrote of the ‘watchmen at Zion’s gate who drank beer and laughed in Zion because they were Zionists’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 700

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Renan’s racial Semitic framework and how racial categories were weaponized against Jews specifically — echoes the ‘shared story’ thesis between antisemitism and Islamophobia.
• SEED: An article angle: how a single laugh — Renan denying Semites capacity to laugh, Lawrence using laughter to disqualify Jews from Semiteness — shows racial theory being reverse-engineered to fit political goals.