The category of Semite lumped Jews and Muslims together as unassimilable Orientals

Evidence

The Orientalist and, in particular, German fondness for anti-Semitism supports Said’s contention that Orientalism and anti-Semitism are related. The Orientalist view of the Semite, those people who cannot “shake loose the pastoral, desert environment of his tent and tribe,” also reveals a hatred of Jews. In fact, the Gottingen historian August Ludwig invented the modern concept of Semitism to describe all the peoples of the Orient—Jews and Muslims—a concept that is later incorporated into the fantasies of German Aryanism and an Indo-Germanic heritage. Another key figure in this story is the Enlightenment writer John David Michaelis, who argued that the southern climate in which Jews evolved made assimilation impossible. As he put it, Jews were an “unmixed race [ ungemischte Race] of a more southern people” that “even in ten generations” could not become German. According to this view, Jews were a product of the Orient and should be deported to a “southern” climate with the “cruel heat” they were used to. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 401

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s core thesis: the monster figure is a projection container. This passage shows the category ‘Semite/Oriental’ being manufactured as a unified essence before any distinctions of real contact — ties to Said and to the tract on Orientalism. — connects to: Balfour denied Orientals any history of self-government