The antisemitism label applied an academic Orientalist concept to racialize European Jews as foreign

Evidence

The invoking of the term ‘antisemitism’ as a banner for an anti-Jewish politics from the end of the 1870s applied what had been an academic Orientalist concept for understanding ancient human origins to an exercise in internal European racial colonialism. For ‘antisemites’, the Semitic label functioned as a means of Orientalising contemporary European Jewry as a foreign body that was produced in Western Asia, could not co-exist with the Aryan and had to be removed. This notion was contemporaneous with increasingly rigid racial boundaries and preoccupations with purity, corruption and spatial separation in the European colonial world. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 650

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how the term ‘antisemitism’ was repurposed from orientalist scholarship into a racial-political weapon.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and its theses about how the West essentializes the Orient.