The ‘Semitic’ field reduced individual people to signs within a scholarly construct

Evidence

Lawrence is backed in such statements by a respectable tradition stretching like a lighthouse beam through the whole nineteenth century; at its light-emanating center, of course, is “the Orient,” and that is powerful enough to light up both the gross and the refined topographies within its range. The Jew, the worshipper of Adonis, the Damascene lecher, are signs not so much of humanity, let us say, as of a semiotic field called Semitic and built into coherence by the Semitic branch of Orientalism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 611

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘semiotic field’ mechanism — how a scholarly category gains coherence and then substitutes for human particularity.
• QUESTION: Would be worth mapping how the ‘Semitic’ construction prefigures contemporary ‘Muslim world’ or ‘civilization’ framing in Islamophobia discourse.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 611