The Semitic idea’s Christian foundation sowed its own eventual split into Jew and Arab

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

Categorization

• XREF: The internal contradiction of a unifying category connects to how other totalizing concepts (e.g. the civilizational ‘West vs Orient’ dichotomy in Said and the Law Merchant’s unified categories) unravel from within.