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Historiographical Reviews
I would like to distinguish between the Renan of legend and the Renan of reality.
Émile Zola (1878)1
The winter of 2009-10 greeted the English translations of two books from Israel that offered entirely contradictory visions of Ernest Renan's significance to the history of European racial thought. In his expansive study, The anti-Enlightenment tradition, the venerable historian Zeev Sternhell sought to defend the claims of Enlightenment universalism against its historical enemies. Renan featured here as a founding father of modern biological racism whose anti-democratic doctrines foreshadowed and indirectly germinated the horrors of the twentieth century.2According to this interpretation, which the 'liberal Zionist' Sternhell had developed across his previous historical works on the French Right and political essays on Israel, Renan's 'clear anti-Semitic bias' formed a central plank in the parallel nineteenth-century developments of modern anti-Semitism and Zionism.3By contrast, Shlomo Sand's The invention of the Jewish people, a contentious bestseller which sought to dismantle the 'myth' of Jewish racial essentialism, lauded Renan as 'the Jean-Paul Sartre' of the late nineteenth century.4A self-professed 'post-Zionist', Sand praised Renan's outspoken support of the Jews and celebrated his cultural definition of nationality as a vital weapon in the fight against the shared biological prejudices of anti-Semitism and Zionism. He subsequently edited a Hebrew translation of two of Renan's major essays, which Verso then released in English.5
Such a stark disagreement over the racial views of a major writer born nearly two centuries ago is startling. It is difficult not to feel sympathetic for the readers of these and other recent books, who might be left posing a deceptively simple question: what did Renan really think about race? Confused twenty-first-century students might take some comfort in knowing that the cauldron of contradictory views on the subject is as old as modern anti-Semitism itself. In his notorious late-nineteenth-century screed La France juive, for example, the anti-Semite Édouard Drumont enthusiastically cited Renan's pronouncements on racial determinism while writing of his 'invincible repugnance' for the historian's scholarly acquaintances and religious beliefs.6To Drumont, Renan was both a pioneering race theorist and an anti-Catholic, money-grubbing friend of the Jews. Renan's best-selling Vie de Jésus,...