The Semitic category’s inner asymmetry between Jew and Arab predetermined its collapse

Evidence

This chapter will argue that the pinpointing of when the Semite disappeared and the context of that precise moment, which has been the focus of previous scholarship, explains very little. Instead, it will be contended that the possibility of the collapse of the Semitic category was present from its very beginnings at the end of the eighteenth century, and we need to attend closely to that point of departure. The idea of the Semites was very much of the Enlightenment. The quest for origins, scientific classification and rigid boundaries led to this coalescence into a singular category of what often had been only implicit epistemological connections between Christian conceptions of the two religions. However, for all of the scientific impulses that demanded and shaped the form of the Semite idea, it will be argued that its intellectual content derived from a medieval Christian cosmology, rooted in the Bible. For this reason, the Jew and Judaism were much more significant in the Semitic concept than the Arab and Islam, and were perceived very differently. While Islam was, of course, one of the Abrahamic monotheisms and, unlike Judaism, a universalist religion that competed with Christianity, at least in theory, for adherents, it did not feature in Christian theology. Conversely, Judaism and the Jew were integral to Christian conceptions of the past, present and future of the world. This asymmetry made the Semitic idea vulnerable if at any point European understandings of the Jew and the Arab were pulled in different directions. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 627

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that the ‘Semite’ was an Enlightenment scientific category whose content actually derived from medieval Christian cosmology — and that its fatal fragility was built in from the start — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe of how the category is usually periodized and explained.
• XREF: Connects to the broader historiography challenging the secularism of post-Enlightenment Europe; echoes the reader’s existing interest in how apparently modern scientific/classificatory projects carry hidden theological content (cf. similar logic in readings on anti-racist genealogy).