The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

Abstract

Abstract In this work, a sequel to my A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion in the long nineteenth century—from the Enlightenment to the First World War. More precisely, I seek to understand the new status of Judaism and Islam in the formative period of the new discipline. In order to do that, I focus on the concept of Semitic monotheism, a concept developed by Ernest Renan around the mid-nineteenth century, on the basis of the postulated (and highly problematic) contradistinction between Aryan and Semitic families of peoples, cultures, and religions. This contradistinction grew from the Western discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship with European languages, at the time of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Together with the rise of scholarly Orientalism, this discovery offered new perspectives on the East, as a consequence of which the Near East was demoted, as it were, from its traditional status as the locus of the biblical revelations. The book essentially studies a central issue in the modern study of religion. Doing so, however, it emphasizes that the new dualistic taxonomy of religions had major consequences and sheds new light on the roots of European attitudes to Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century and up to the present day.

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