A Debate between Salomon Munk and Ernest Renan: Orientalism, German-Jewish Philology and the racist prejudices in philosophy.

The article presents the debate between Salomon Munk (1803-1867) and Ernest Renan (1823-1892) on the occasion of the pubblication of Renan’s Mémoire sur le monothéisme primitif attribué par M. E. Renan a la seule race sémitique. My article will examine the 1859 report of the session of the scholars of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, entitled: “Sur le monothéisme considéré par M. Renan comme déterminant le caractère général des races sémitiques.” , and it will focus on the arguments that Salomon Munk, a German-Jewish fellow scholar of Renan emigrated to from Prussia to Paris in 1828, used to criticize Renan’s characterization and evaluation of the distinction between Semitic and Indo-germanic languages. Munk attacked Renan’s characterization and the presuppositions of his philological methos, which far from beiing neutral has been influenced, according to Munk, by the prejudices on Judaism and Islamism and on Jewish and Arabic languages that were common among the orientalists and the philosophers of the time.