IMAGInInG ThE “ISrAElITES” • 141he asserts, that “the Semites have an important place in the history of
civilization and the state of contemporary human society. From them,
the three great religions emerged among the civilized: Judaism, Chris-
tianity, and Islam. . . . The Aryans and similar groups borrowed these
religions from them.”^35 the Semites, with whom Makaryus would cer-
tainly have identified not only the Jews (the subject of his book) but
also himself, as an arab, are the source of the world’s most important
“civilized” religions. Even the “Aryans”— who, in the minds of many
nineteenth- century european race- writers, were the most superior of
all races— borrowed their religions from their Semitic originators.^36
Concluding his discussion of the place of Jews among the races,
Makaryus explains that “the Jews, then, are Caucasian Semites.” he
traces the Jews’ lineage “back to Shem the son of Noah.” Makaryus,
notably, does not question contemporary Jews’ direct descent from
the ancient Semites. “During the days of the expansion of their sover-
eignty in palestine,” he writes, the Jews “preserved their lineages and
recorded them in books that were kept for this purpose.” When Israel
was exiled and scattered, these lineage records were lost, according to
Makaryus. “Despite this,” he contends, “they preserved their existence.
Wherever they went, they did not assimilate much [wa-lamyukthirū
minal-ikhtilāṭ] among the foreign peoples who surrounded them.” the
Jews avoided assimilation to such an extent that “it is said that those
of them who settled in europe many centuries ago still have a distinct
pronunciation of european languages from that of europeans, even to
the present day.”^37 In other words, for Makaryus, the Jews of his day—
whether his Jewish neighbors in the Middle East or those farther off
in Europe— were authentic, racial Semites, the progeny of the biblical
Israelites, and were best understood in this racial context.
Like Makaryus, Jurji Zaydan, founder of al-Hilāl and father of emile
Zaydan, also came to embrace race- thinking. Indeed, as mentioned
briefly in chapter 1, the elder Zaydan published a full book on the
subject of human races in 1912. In this book, Ṭabaqātal-umam aw as-
salāʾilal-bashariyya(Classes of the Nations, or races of Man), Zaydan
explained that, while throughout history people have been interested
in understanding the different nature and morals of man in different
(^35) Ibid., 3.
(^36) Cf. Ernest renan, who credits the Semites “with bringing about the discovery, ‘with-
out reflection nor reasoning,’ of the purest religious form humanity had ever known. This
discovery,” explains Gil Anidjar, “was, to be sure, anything but an invention. . . . rather,
a kind of ‘primitive intuition’ enabled the Semites to part from the world in a unique
way and arrive, ‘without any effort’ or meditation, at the notion of the Supreme God.’ ”
anidjar, Semites, 31.
(^37) Makaryus, Tārīkhal-isrāʾīliyyīn, 3.