published hurriedly a translation of a piece to which the Prussians claimed to
have scientiWc rights, and which the Briton, Charles Warren (1840–1927), had
agreed with his French colleague to publish simultaneously (Silberman 1982: ch.
11). Other examples illustrating the connection between imperialism and
archaeology will be provided later in the chapter. Regarding whether national
identity was superseded in the biblical lands by religious identity, there is no
indication in the literature that this happened, leading, for example, to collab-
oration among members of the same faith in opposition to followers of another.
Racism, anti-Semitism, and archaeologyAnother factor central to understanding the political and religious context of
archaeology in the biblical lands is the growth of racism, and especially anti-
Semitism, i.e. racism against the Jews and other Semite peoples. Racism
began to spread in the Western world mainly from the 1840s (Chapter 12).
One of its manifestations was anti-Semitism, an issue that had a long history
behind it, an issue beyond the limits of this book (Lindemann 2000; Poliakov
1975). Anti-Semitism, a term coined in the late 1870s, came to symbolize the
antagonism towards the Jews that had grown steadily from the early years of
the century. Semite was a term derived from the biblical name of Shem used
from the 1780s to denote the languages related to Hebrew, which also
included Phoenician. Following the laws of positivism, scholars tried to
rationalize the place of the Semites in the evolutionist scheme of races by
which all human races were graded from the least to the most evolved
(Bernal 1987). The French scholar Ernest Renan (1823–92), the Professor
of Hebrew in the Colle`ge de France and excavator of several sites in the
Levant in the early 1860s, considered the Aryans and the Semites theWrst
noble races (Liverani 1998: 8; Olender 1992: ch. 4), but comparing both
would say that:
The Semitic race appears to us as incomplete through its simplicity. It is, dare I say it,
to the Indo-European family what drawing is to painting or plainsong to modern
music. It lacks that variety, that scale, that superabundance of life that is necessary for
perfectibility.
(Renan 1855 in Bernal 1987: 346–7).Anti-Semitism inWltrated academia mainly from the later decades of the
second half of the nineteenth century. A few examples from theWeld of
archaeology will help to illustrate this. The British scholar Flinders Petrie
would identify the levels excavated in Tell el-Hesi, in Palestine, as the diVerent
episodes of racial domination in the area (Silberman 1999b: 73). He wrote:
136 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism