The Semitic race concept was an abstraction, not a political reality, before 1914

Evidence

The ease with which Europe’s racial state abandoned the Semitic laid bare the fragility of the idea that had existed since its inception at the end of the eighteenth century, and the fissure at its core. The Christian theological basis of the concept meant that for all of the apparent commonalities between the Semites, as conceived in Western European thought, the couplets of the Jew and Judaism and the Arab and Islam possessed very different meanings and levels of cultural importance. Up until the First World War, European intellectual culture was not exposed to circumstances that might apply pressure to the Jewish-Arab connection— though we can see a very different picture in the French colonial state due to the situation in Algeria after 1870. In Europe before 1914, the Semite was an abstraction, not a political reality, which made sense because of its Christian religious architecture. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 704

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the Semite concept’s Christian theological architecture and why its internal Jewish-Arab tension stayed latent until political use forced it out.