Replies

"... The opera, Abduction from the Seraglio was first performed in 1782....." - ladyjane

Indeed...yett I do find reading this subject matter in 150+ year old print - fascinating, especially given the impact of petroleum -

Here's but one example :
On the Influence of the Semitic Races in the History of Civilization
By Ernest Renan
Posted in The Herald of Progress No. 198,
Pages 5 & 6
Dated: December 05, 1863
Select quotes:

"The Indo-European and Semitic races are today entirely distinct. I do not speak of the Jews, to whom their singular and historical destiny has given an exceptional place in humanity; and yet, if we except France, which has created in the world a principle of civilization wholly ideal, rejecting all ideas of difference of races, the Jews almost everywhere form still a society apart. The Arab, at least, and in a more general sense the Mussulman, are today further removed from us than they have ever been. The Mussulman (the Semitic spirit is especially represented in our day by Islam, and the European are, in the presence of one another, two beings of a different species, having nothing in common in their manner of thinking and of feeling. But the march of humanity is owing to the struggle of these contrary tendencies, by a sort of polarization, in virtue of which each idea here below has its exclusive representative. It is in this collectiveness that all contradictions are harmonized, and that a supreme peace results from the clash of elements in appearance enemies. This assumed, if we seek to know what the Semitic race has given to this grand and living organic whole that we call civilization, we shall find that, first, in government, we owe them nothing. Political life is, perhaps, that which the Indo-European have the most indigenous and correct. It is they alone who have understood liberty, who have comprehended at the same time the State with the independence of the individual.

"But never among them do we find those centralized despotisms, crushing out all individuality, reducing man to the state of an abstract function without a name, as we see in Egypt, at Babylon, in China and among the Mussulmanic and Tartaric despotisms.

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The East, especially the Semitic Orientals, have never known a midway between the completest anarchy of the nomadic Arabs and a despotism at once the most sanguinary and uncompensated. The idea of public policy and public welfare fails to be conceived by these nations.

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The ancient Hebrews and the Arabs have been, or are, by moments, the freest of men, but on condition of having a chief the next day to decapitate them at his single pleasure. And whenever this arrives, there is no cry of a violated right.

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In science and philosophy we are essentially Greek. The search for causation, knowledge for its own sake, are what we have no trace of before Greece, are what we have learned of her alone. Babylon had a science, but no scientific principle par excellence - the absolute fixity of the laws of Nature. Egypt was acquainted with geometry, but did not create the elements of Euclid. The old Semitic intellect is, by its very nature, anti-philosophic and anti-scientific. In Job the search for causation is represented almost as an impiety. Ecclesiates, science is declared to be vanity. Aristotle, his contemporary nearly, and who might with more reason have said that he had exhausted the universe of knowledge, never for once speaks of his weariness. The wisdom of the Semitic never came from parables and proverbs.
We often hear of an Arabian science and philosophy, and during a century or two in the middle ages the Arabs were really our teachers, but it was only till we had comprehended the Greek originals. This science and this philosophy were but a shabby translation of the science and the philosophy of Greece. At the revival of letters, and on the appearance of authentic Greece, these worthless translations became valueless, and not without reason did all the philologists of the period undertake against them a veritable crusade. Besides, on careful examination, this Arabian science had nothing Arabian about it.
The groundwork is purely Greek, and among those who created it, there is not a pure Semitic; they were Spaniards and Persians, writing in Arabic. The philosophical part that the Jews play in the middle ages is also that of interpreters. Their philosophy is the Arabian, without modification. One page of Roger Bacon contains more veritable scientific insight than the whole of this second-hand science, respectable, surely, as a traditionary link, but utterly void of grand originality."

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"As to the future, gentlemen, I see in it more and more the triumph of the Indo-European genius. Since the seventeenth century a pregnant event, till then undecided, has been operating with marked energy; it is the definitive victory of Europe, the accomplishment of this old Semitic proverb:
"God shall enlarge Japeth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; "And Canaan [Ham,] shall be his servant."

Till this time Semitism was still master on the earth. The Eastern Mussulman defeated the West; he had better armies and a wiser policy; he supplied it with riches, knowledge, and civilization. Henceforth the order is reversed. The European genius is developing with incomparable grandeur; Islamism is slowly decomposing, and in our own day is rapidly crumbling to pieces. The essential condition now of the spread of European civilization is the destruction of the Semitic idea par excellence - the destruction of its theocratic principle, and the consequent destruction of Islamism; for Islamism can exist only as an official religion; whenever it shall be reduced to the state of a free and individual religion, it will perish. Islamism is not simply a religion of the State, as was Catholicism in France under Louis XIV, as it is now in Spain; it is a religion excluding the State; it is an organization such as the Pontifical States alone, in Europe, offered the type. Here is the unending war, which will never cease till the last son of Ismael shall have miserably perished or been banished by terror to the depths of the desert. Islam is the completest of negations; it is fanaticism, such as Spain in the time of Philip II and Italy in that of Pius V, have scarcely known; Islam is contempt for science, destruction to civil liberty; it is the terrible simplicity of the Semitic spirit - compressing the human intellect, closing it to every delicate idea, to evey refined sentiment, to every exercise of the reason, to put it in face of an eternal tautology: God is God. The future then, gentlemen, is for Europe, and for Europe alone."