The Semitic concept carried an internal Christian-based imbalance from its start.

Evidence

It would be a mistake to conclude that the conflict alone could have put an end to the Semites. This explanation fails to account for the ease with which the Semitic fell from favour and what followed—the splintering of an idea that was deeply embedded in European thought into two separate categories, Jew/Judaism and Arab/Islam, belonging to two opposing camps in the European understanding of the world: the West and the Orient. This history is only intelligible if we acknowledge that the Christian foundation of the Semitic idea created an imbalance in its apparent unity from the moment that the name was articulated by von Schlözer: the figures of the Jew and the Arab had been connected, but they had never been the same. … This was the paradox of the Semites: the idea possessed tremendous cultural capital that derived from centuries of European thinking about human origins, but the source of that tradition and its power—the Christian Bible story—also held the seeds of the idea’s destruction. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 706 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The Semitic category was unstable from birth because Christianity centered it on the Jew; The Semitic concept emerged from biblical philology rather than secular linguistics.; The Semitic concept unraveled from internal Christian tension, not conflict alone. (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• The Semitic idea’s Christian foundation sowed its own eventual split into Jew and Arab #expands (0.95) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 706
• The Semitic category’s inner asymmetry between Jew and Arab predetermined its collapse #expands (0.93) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 627