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 (1978, Orientalism): “Semitic was Renan’s first creation, a fiction invented by him in the philological laboratory to satisfy his sense of public place and mission.” In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said wrote of Ernest Renan: "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." In Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims (1979), Edward Said criticised Ernest Renan as an outright anti-Semite in the context of nineteenth-century European racism and the Aryan/Semitic distinction: "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."
  • 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 notas Renan himself proved with his notorious race prejudice against the very Oriental Semites whose study had made his professional name26-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. 61 Indo-Europeans are the touchstone here, just as they are when Renan says that the Semitic Oriental sensibilit.

• • 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.