Ernest Renan

French philologist and historian known for his linguistic and racial theories on Semites and Jews

Ernest Renan
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Born	Template:Birth date Tréguier, France
Died	Template:Death date and age Paris, France
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Occupation	Philologist, historian, philosopher
Known for	Studies of Semitic languages; racial theories distinguishing "Aryan" and "Semitic" peoples
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Ernest Renan (28 February 1823 – 2 October 1892) was a French philologist, historian, and philosopher best known for his comparative studies of Semitic languages and for popularizing the linguistic term "Semitic" in a way that was later misused for racial theories. In his seminal 1855 work Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, Renan argued that Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, etc.) were structurally inferior to Indo-European ("Aryan") languages in their capacity for abstract thought and creativity. He repeatedly warned against conflating linguistic categories with racial ones, yet his writings contributed to 19th-century racial pseudoscience. By 1883 Renan had shifted his views significantly, treating Judaism primarily as a religion rather than a biological race and invoking the Khazar theory to explain the origins of many Ashkenazi (Yiddish-speaking) Jews.

Views on Semitic languages

Renan defined "Semitic" strictly as a linguistic family and insisted it had "only a purely conventional meaning." In 1855 he complained that the term had already caused "a multitude of confusions" when applied beyond philology. He contrasted the "monotheistic" and "desert-born" Semitic languages with the more flexible, creative Aryan ones, arguing that Semitic tongues lacked the grammatical complexity needed for philosophy or science.

Renan wrote: “La race sémitique, comparée à la race indo-européenne, représente réellement une combinaison inférieure de la nature humaine.” (The Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, really represents an inferior combination of human nature.) He listed its lacks: “ni mythologie, ni épopée, ni science, ni philosophie, ni fiction, ni arts plastiques, ni vie civile” (neither mythology, nor epic, nor science, nor philosophy, nor fiction, nor plastic arts, nor civil life).

Views on Yiddish speakers and Ashkenazim (1855)

In 1855 Renan explicitly included Ashkenazi (Yiddish-speaking) Jews as direct biological descendants of ancient Palestinian Hebrews/Semites. He argued, however, that they had lost much of their original "Semitic character" through centuries of assimilation into European civilisation.

The full passage reads: "[T]he primordial influence of race, as immense a part that it plays in the dynamics of human affairs, is offset by a crowd of other influences, which sometimes seem to overcome or even smother [étouffer] entirely that of blood. How many Israelites today, who are descended directly from the ancient inhabitants of Palestine, have nothing of the Semitic character, and are only modern men, swept along and assimilated by this great force superior to race that we call civilisation!"

Yiddish itself was for Renan further evidence of this Europeanisation: a Germanic dialect rather than a pure Semitic language.

1883 Lecture: Judaism as Race and Religion

By 1883 Renan had evolved his position. In the lecture Le Judaïsme comme race et comme religion he argued that modern European Jews were no longer a biological race but had become a religious community shaped by history, conversion, and assimilation. He questioned whether contemporary Jews could rightly claim descent from the ancient twelve tribes and concluded that Judaism had been "denationalised."

Renan invoked the Khazar theory to explain the origins of many Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim: “great masses of Jewish populations which have in all probability nothing or almost nothing that is anthropologically Jewish in them” lived along the Danube and in southern Russia because of the Khazar conversion to Judaism. He now viewed modern Jews as “integral members of the French ‘nation’ and ‘civilization’,” with race reduced to a civilisational rather than biological phenomenon.

This marked a clear shift from his 1855 emphasis on inherent Semitic racial inferiority to a view of Judaism as primarily religious and culturally assimilated.

Criticisms

• Alex Bein (1990, The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem): "The compound anti-Semitism appears to have been used first by Steinschneider, who challenged Renan on account of his 'anti-Semitic prejudices' [i.e., his derogation of the Semites as a race]."
• Avner Falk (2008, Anti-Semitism: A History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred): "The German word 'antisemitisch' was first used in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907) in the phrase 'antisemitische Vorurteile' (antisemitic prejudices). Steinschneider used this phrase to characterise the French philosopher Ernest Renan's false ideas about how 'Semitic races' were inferior to 'Aryan races'."
• Edward Said
  • Orientalism (1978): "Lastly, Semitic was Renan's first creation, a fiction invented by him in the philological laboratory to satisfy his sense of public place and mission. It should by now be clear... that Renan’s Semitic was a creation of the philological laboratory... [with] his notorious race prejudice against the very Oriental Semites whose study had made his professional name—a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races."
  • Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims (1979): "The French writer Ernest Renan, for instance, was an outright anti-Semite; Eliot was indifferent to races who could not be assimilated to European ideas." This appears in a discussion of European colonialism and the victimization of Jews by Christian Europe, framing Renan’s views within the anti-Semitic racism that Zionism sought to escape.
  • But how was it possible for Renan to hold himself and what he was saying in such a paradoxical position? For what was philology on the one hand if not a science of all humanity, a science premised on the unity of the human species and the worth of every human detail, and yet what was the philologist on the other hand if not as Renan himself proved with his notorious race prejudice against the very Oriental Semites whose study had made his professional name - a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races, a liberal critic whose work harbored the most esoteric notions of temporality, origins, development, relationship, and human worth?
  • At the same time Renan wants it understood that he speaks of a prototype, not a real Semitic type with actual existence (although he violated this too by discussing present-day Jews and Muslims with less than scientific detachment in many places in his writings)
  • Thus a knowing vocabulary developed, and its functions, as much as its style, located the Orient in a comparative framework, of the sort employed and manipulated by Renan. Such comparatism is rarely descriptive; most often, it is both evaluative and expository. Here is Renan comparing typically:

One sees that in all things the Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race, by virtue of its simplicity. This race-if I dare

use the analogy-is to the Indo-European family what a pencil sketch is to painting; it lacks that variety, that amplitude, that abundance of life which is the condition of perfectibility. Like those individuals who possess so little fecundity that, after a gracious childhood, they attain only the most mediocre virility, the Semitic nations experienced their fullest flowering in their first age and have never been able to achieve true maturity.

Indo-Europeans are the touchstone here, just as they are when Renan says that the Semitic Oriental sensibility never reached the heights attained by the Indo-Germanic races.

• • To some extent the polemical antiquarianism that Cust described

was a scholarly version of European anti-Semitism. Even the designation "modern-Semitic," which was meant to include both Muslims and Jews (and which had its origin in the so-called ancient-Semitic field pioneered by Renan), carried its racist banner with what was doubtless meant to be a decent ostentation.

• • 3. Merely Islam. So deeply entrenched is the theory of Semitic

simplicity as it is to be found in modern Orientalism that it operates with little differentiation in such well-known anti-Semitic European writings as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in remarks such as these by Chaim Weizmann to Arthur Balfour on May 30, 1 9 1 8 : The Arabs, who are superficially clever and quick witted, worship one thing, and one thing only-power and success. . . . The British authorities . . . knowing as they do the treacherous nature of the Arabs . . . have to watch carefully and constantly . . . . The fairer the English regime tries to be, the more arrogant the Arab becomes . . . . The present state of affairs would necessarily tend toward the creation of an Arab Palestine, if there were an Arab people in Palestine. It will not in fact produce that result because the fellah is at least four centuries behind the times, and the effendi . . . is dishonest, uneducated, greedy, and as unpatriotic as he is inefficient.129 The common denominator between Weizmann and the European anti-Semite is the Orientalist perspective, seeing Semites (or subdivisions thereof) as by nature lacking the desirable qualities of Occidentals. Yet the difference between Renan and Weizmann is that the latter had already gathered behind his rhetoric the solidity of institutions whereas the former had not. Is there not in twentiethcentury Orientalism that same unaging "gracious childhood"heedlessly allied now with scholarship, now with a state and all its institutions-that Renan saw as the Semites' unchanging mode of being?

• Hannah Arendt (cited in Renan analyses): Renan was probably the first to oppose the Semitic and Aryan races as a decisive division of human genres.
• Léon Poliakov (1974, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas in Europe): Harsh critique of Renan as the "chief sponsor of the Aryan myth in France" and for promoting Aryanism and racial hierarchy influencing anti-Semitism.
• Bernard Lewis (1986, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice): Discussed Renan’s philological use of "Semitic" as purely conventional (not biblical/racial) while noting the origins of anti-Semitism terminology in responses to Renan’s views on Semitic inferiority.

Bernard Lewis's assessment of Renan

Bernard Lewis discusses Renan extensively in Semites and Anti-Semites (1986) as a key early philologist who warned against the racial misuse of the term "Semite". Lewis presents Renan as correctly insisting that "Semitic" is purely linguistic and conventional, not racial.

Lewis writes: "By 1855 the French scholar Ernest Renan, one of the pioneers of Semitic philology, wrote complaining: [the term had caused] 'a multitude of confusions'. I repeat again that the name Semite here has only a purely conventional meaning."

Lewis endorses Renan’s position: "Renan was of course right in pointing to the dangers of taking 'the generations of the sons of Noah' as a racial classification."

On Renan’s view of modern Jews/Ashkenazim, Lewis notes Renan’s 1855 argument that Ashkenazi Jews (Yiddish speakers) had been assimilated by European civilisation and no longer exhibited a pure "Semitic character", despite direct descent from ancient Hebrews. Lewis uses this to illustrate how even early racial theorists like Renan acknowledged extensive admixture and cultural transformation among European Jews.

Lewis does not cite Renan’s 1883 lecture Le Judaïsme comme race et comme religion or the Khazar theory in detail, but frames Renan overall as an example of 19th-century philologists who tried (unsuccessfully) to keep linguistic categories separate from emerging racial pseudoscience.

Renan's philosemitism

Quotations describing Ernest Renan as philo-Semitic are uncommon in verified scholarly sources. Most historians characterise Renan’s views on “Semitic” peoples as contributing to racial hierarchy and anti-Semitism; explicit positive descriptions of him as “philo-Semitic” are rare or absent.

Ernest Renan advanced the Khazar theory regarding Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews and expressed admiration for the Jewish people, views later remarked upon by historians and Jewish scholars.

Views and Quotations

• Ernest Renan (1883, lecture Le Judaïsme comme race et comme religion): Advanced the Khazar theory that Ashkenazi Jews descended from Turkic Khazars (non-Semitic), who adopted Judaism and later Yiddish, stating this conversion had "considerable importance regarding the origin of those Jews who dwell in the countries along the Danube and southern Russia".

• Ernest Renan (1883): "The history of the Jewish people is one of the most beautiful in existence, and I do not regret having consecrated my life to it."

• Ernest Renan (1883): "The enemies of Judaism are, generally speaking, enemies of the modern mind."

Scholarly Remarks

• Dr. H. G. Enelow (1923): Described Renan’s work as "A Non-Jew's Appreciation of Judaism".

• Anonymous author (modern analysis): Noted that "Later in his life, Renan took a more sympathetic view towards Jews and some assert that he repudiated his antisemitism with respect to them."

• Jewish Encyclopedia (early 20th century): Discussed Renan’s 1883 discourses on "Le Judaïsme Comme Race et Comme Religion" and his contributions to Jewish studies, including use of Talmudic sources.

• "Despite his repudiation of antisemitism, Renan influenced the development of antisemitic ideologies in both France and Germany. His typology of ‘Semite’ and ‘Aryan’ was adopted especially in Germany and and combined with biological concepts of race to become the foundation of the concepts of ‘Semitism’ and ‘Antisemitism’."

• Stroumsa - Although Renan maintained that, with the coming of Jesus, the Jewish

people had concluded its historical role in human history, and that this people was directly responsible for the death of Jesus, he considered scandalous the continued persecution of Jews. In this regard, the accusation of anti-­ Semitism ofen hurled at Renan is patently misplaced.38 His ambiguous intellectual legacy, which explains the accusation, in no way justifes it.39 At the beginning of the Second Empire, the young Renan, who tended to refrain from expressing himself publicly on political matters, objected loudly when a ministerial decree sought to prevent Jews from applying to the École Normale Supérieure.40 In a number of cases, Renan raised his voice to speak publicly against anti-­ Semitism. Together with Victor Hugo, for instance, in 1881 he signed a public protest against anti-­ Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe and in the Russian Empire. His own publisher, Michel Lévy, was a Jew. And yet, he retained a deep ambivalence towards Judaism and the Jews.

Renan's Islamophobia

In his book, “The Idea of Semitic Monotheism” (Oxford University Press, 2021) Guy Stroumsa discusses the views of Renan with respect to race and religion

Although Renan maintained that, with the coming of Jesus, the Jewish people had concluded its historical role in human history, and that this people

was directly responsible for the death of Jesus, he considered scandalous the continued persecution of Jews. In this regard, the accusation of anti-­ Semitism often hurled at Renan is patently misplaced.38 His ambiguous intellectual legacy, which explains the accusation, in no way justifes it.39 At the beginning of the Second Empire, the young Renan, who tended to refrain from expressing himself publicly on political matters, objected loudly when a ministerial decree sought to prevent Jews from applying to the École Normale Supérieure.40 In a number of cases, Renan raised his voice to speak publicly against anti-­ Semitism. Together with Victor Hugo, for instance, in 1881 he signed a public protest against anti-­ Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe and in the Russian Empire. His own publisher, Michel Lévy, was a Jew.

In a lecture delivered at the Société des Études Juives in 1883, Renan spot-

lighted the major contribution of the Jewish people, through its prophets, to the extirpation of idolatry from the ancient world. In a sense, the “pure” religion of the future, he noted, would be a return to that of Isaiah. He also declared the opening up of the ghettos to be a task of the nineteenth century.50 In the future, the Jews, together with all liberal forces in Europe, would contribute to the social progress of humankind. “Te Bible is your true Parthenon,” he concluded, mirroring his own parallel between the Jewish miracle and the Greek one.51

Troughout his career, Renan maintained ties with Jewish scholars,

including epistolary exchanges with leading scholars of the Wissenschaf des Judentums, such as Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger in Germany, and Samuel David Luzzatto in Italy. Some of these contacts involved ongoing collaborative projects. Unlike most contemporary scholars, and despite the fact that his knowledge of rabbinic literature remained mediocre at best, Renan showed an interest in later Jewish history. For instance, he collaborated with Adolf Neubauer, a Jewish scholar from Hungary living in Paris at the time, on various aspects of late ancient and medieval Jewish history. Neubauer, who published his Géographie du Talmud in 1868, also collaborated with Renan on the publication of Les rabbins français du commencement au XIVe siècle.52

With Salomon Munk, his successor at the Collège de France, Renan

seemed to have developed a real rapport.53 The cordiality of the relationship, however, did not rule out intellectual polemics.<ref>Stroumsa, p. 123-4.</rf>

At a session of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1859, in particular, Munk confronted

Renan, criticizing his conception of Semitic monotheism, according to which the idea of God’s unity had been the (sole) contribution of the Semitic peoples to humankind.

This is from (p. 141) :

When dealing with Islam and Muslims, however, Renan’s characteristic ambivalence all but evaporated. Like most of his contemporaries, Renan despised Islam—although he tried hard to understand it as a religion. His view of Islam is deeply deprecatory: “Islam is indeed the product of a lower, or mediocre combination of human elements.”

Markus Messling has cogently observed that Renan’s anti-Semitism is, in fact, anti-Islamism. His striking identification of Islam with the essence of Semitic religion appears early, in his essay on Muhammad and the origins of Islam.

In this text, he claimed that Arabia was entirely devoid of mysticism and mythology, immediately adding that Semitic peoples were never able to imagine complexity in God’s personality.

This identification of Islam and “Semitism” was further accentuated in his inaugural lecture (or Discours d’ouverture) at the Collège de France, on February 21, 1862, when he maintained that today, the necessary condition for the propagation of European civilization is “the destruction of the Semitic thing par excellence, the destruction of the theocratic power of Islam, hence the destruction of Islam […] Islam is the most total negation of Europe. Islam is fanaticism.”

In order to appreciate such views, one must recall that France had since 1830 been deeply involved in the conquest of Algeria. After Emir Abdelkader’s surrender (1847) and the annexation of Algeria to the French Republic in 1848, colonization and constant military campaigns of “pacification” against Arab and Berber revolts were carried hand in hand, and would go on throughout the century, and beyond.

Stroumsa writes a little later (p. 143):

For Renan, Muslim peoples (among whom he includes the Ottoman Turks, who, he noted, were not racially Semites) were incapable of either science or progress. Using caustic words, he alleged the contemporary inferiority of Muslim countries, explaining it by the “intellectual nullity” of the “races” whose culture and education was essentially Islamic. For him, Islam was “the heaviest chain humanity has ever borne.”

And a page later, Stroumsa sums up:

Renan’s attitudes to both Judaism and Islam must be understood against the backdrop of his notion of the two main races of humankind, the Semitic and the Indo-European, an idea which he had already developed in his early work on the Semitic languages and which continued to inform his thought throughout his life.

In Renan’s view, the Semites represented a lower combination of human nature. As we have seen, they had for him no mythology, no epics, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts, no civil life…

In other words, the Semites did not develop any of the fields that the Europeans understand as integral to a true living culture. In religion, the lack of myths (due to the monotony of their native deserts) meant a paucity of gods.

Hence, the Semitic cults “never really overgrew simple patriarchal religion, a religion without mysticism, without a refined theology, which is almost, among the Bedouins, an absence of faith.”

There remained one thing, and only one, for the Semites to invent, and to uphold: monotheism, and its corollary, prophecy. Prophecy and monotheism reflect an essentially revolutionary character and are the fruit of an original intuition.

Renan’s perception of monotheism, the purest example of which is expressed in Islam and is quite lacking in sophistication, reflects an oversimplification of the richness of deep religiosity: “the Semitic nations…never understood variety, plurality and gender in God.”