Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan | |
|---|---|
Ernest Renan c. 1870s | |
| Born | Joseph Ernest Renan 28 February 1823 Tréguier, Kingdom of France |
| Died | 2 October 1892 (aged 69) Paris, French Third Republic |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 19th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy |
| Main interests | History of religion, philosophy of religion, political philosophy |
| Notable works | Life of Jesus (1863) What Is a Nation? (1882) |
| Notable ideas | Civic nationalism |
| Signature | |
Joseph Ernest Renan (/rəˈnɑːn/; French: [ʒozɛf ɛʁnɛst ʁənɑ̃]; 27 February 1823 – 2 October 1892) was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, writing on Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and critic. He wrote works on the origins of early Christianity, and espoused popular political theories especially concerning nationalism, national identity, and the alleged superiority of White people over other human "races". Hannah Arendt remarks that he was “probably the first to oppose the Semitic and Aryan races as a decisive division of human genres.”
Renan is among the first scholars to advance the debunked Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Khazars, Turkic peoples who had adopted the Jewish religion and allegedly migrated to central and eastern Europe following the collapse of their khanate. On this basis he alleged that the Jews were “an incomplete race.”