Joseph Ernest Renan ( ; ; 27 February 18232 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 superiority of White people over other human races.
Renan is among the first scholars to advance the 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."
He led an archaeological expedition "Mission to Phoenicia. 1864-1874" to Lebanon, Syria and Palestine trying to track the ancient Phoenicians.
Life Birth and family
He was born at Tréguier in Brittany, in northwestern France, to a family of fishermen.Kaufmann, Alfred (1924). "Renan: The Man," The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 388–398. His grandfather, having made a small fortune with his fishing smack, bought a house at Tréguier and settled there, and his father, captain of a small cutter and an ardent republican, married the daughter of a Royalist tradesman from the neighbouring town of Lannion. All his life, Renan was aware of the conflict between his father's and his mother's political beliefs. He was five years old when his father died, and his sister, Henriette, twelve years his senior, became the moral head of the household. Having in vain attempted to keep a school for girls at Tréguier, she departed and went to Paris as a teacher in a young ladies' boarding-school.
Education Ernest was educated in the ecclesiastical seminary of his native town.Loth, Joseph (1892). "Renan au Collège de Tréguier," Annales de Bretagne 8 (1), pp. 124–9. His school reports describe him as "docile, patient, diligent, painstaking, thorough". While the Catholic priests taught him mathematics and Latin, his mother completed his education. Renan's mother was half Breton. Her paternal ancestors came from Bordeaux, and Renan used to say that in his own nature, the Gascon and the Breton were constantly at odds.Galand, René (1959). L'Âme Celtique de Renan. Presses Universitaires de France.
During the summer of 1838, Renan won all the prizes at the college of Tréguier. His sister told the doctor of the school in Paris where she taught about her brother, and he informed Félix Dupanloup, who was involved in organizing the ecclesiastical college of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, a school in which the young Catholic nobility and the most talented pupils of the Catholic seminaries were to be educated together, with the idea of creating friendships between the aristocracy and the priesthood. Dupanloup sent for Renan, who was then fifteen years old and had never been outside Brittany. "I learned with stupor that knowledge was not a privilege of the Church ... I awoke to the meaning of the words talent, fame, celebrity." Religion seemed to him wholly different in Tréguier and in Paris. He came to view Abbé Dupanloup as a father figure.
Study at Issy-les-Moulineaux In 1840, Renan left Saint Nicholas to study philosophy at the Saint-Sulpice Seminary near Paris. He entered with a passion for Catholic scholasticism. Among the philosophers, Thomas Reid and Nicolas Malebranche first attracted him, and, then he turned to Hegel, Immanuel Kant and J. G. Herder. Renan began to see a contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith he professed, but an appetite for verifiable truths restrained his scepticism. "Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth; I am eager for mathematics", he wrote to Henriette. Henriette had accepted in the family of Count Zamoyski an engagement more lucrative than her former job. She exercised the strongest influence over her brother.
Study at college of St Sulpice It was not mathematics but philology which was to settle Renan's gathering doubts. His course completed at Issy, in 1844 he entered the college of St Sulpice in order to take his degree in philology prior to entering the church, and, here, he began the study of Hebrew. He realized that the second part of the Book of Isaiah differs from the first not only in style but in date, that the grammar and the history of the Pentateuch are later than the time of Moses, and that the Book of Daniel is clearly written centuries after the time in which it is set. At night he read the new novels of Victor Hugo; by day, he studied Hebrew and Syriac under Arthur-Marie Le Hir. In October 1845, Renan left Saint Sulpice for Stanislas, a lay college of the Oratorians. Still feeling too much under the domination of the church, he reluctantly ended the last of his associations with religious life and entered M. Crouzet's school for boys as a teacher.
Scholarly career
Renan, educated by priests, was to accept the scientific ideal with an extraordinary expansion of all his faculties. He became ravished by the splendor of the cosmos. At the end of his life, he wrote of Amiel, "The man who has time to keep a private diary has never understood the immensity of the universe." The certitudes of physical and natural science were revealed to Renan in 1846 by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, then a young man of eighteen, his pupil at M. Crouzet's school. To the day of Renan's death, their friendship continued. Renan was occupied as usher only during evenings. During the daytime, he continued his researches in Semitic philology. In 1847, he obtained the Volney prize, one of the principal distinctions awarded by the Academy of Inscriptions, for the manuscript of his "General History of Semitic Languages." In 1847, he took his degree as Agrégé de Philosophie – that is to say, fellow of the university – and was offered a job as master in the lycée Vendôme.
In 1856, Renan married in Paris Cornélie Scheffer, daughter of Hendrik Scheffer and niece of Ary Scheffer, both French painters of Dutch descent. They had two children, Ary Renan, born in 1858, who became a painter, and Noémi, born in 1862, who eventually married philologist Yannis Psycharis. In 1863, the American Philosophical Society elected him an international Member.
Life of Jesus Within his lifetime, Renan was best known as the author of the enormously popular Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus, 1863).Wright, Terence R. (1994). "The Letter and the Spirit: Deconstructing Renan's "Life of Jesus" and the Assumptions of Modernity," Religion & Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 55–71.Pitt, Alan (2000). "The Cultural Impact of Science in France: Ernest Renan and the Vie de Jésus," The Historical Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 79–101. Renan attributed the idea of the book to his sister, Henriette, with whom he was traveling in Ottoman Syria and Palestine when, struck with a fever, she died suddenly. With only a New Testament and copy of Josephus as references, he began writing.Hammerton, J. A. (1937). Outline of Great Books, New York: Wise & Co., p. 998. The book was first translated into English in the year of its publication by Charles E. Wilbour and has remained in print for the past 145 years.As of this writing, WorldCat reports 115 different editions of the book in 1426 different libraries. Renan's Life of Jesus was lavished with ironic praise and criticism by Albert Schweitzer in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus.Baird, William (1992). History of New Testament Research: From Deism to Tubingen. Augsburg: Fortress Press, p. 382.
Renan argued Jesus was able to purify himself of "Jewish traits" and that he became an Aryan. His Life of Jesus promoted racial ideas and infused race into theology and the person of Jesus; he depicted Jesus as a Galilean who was transformed from a Jew into a Christian, and that Christianity emerged purified of any Jewish influences. The book was based largely on the Gospel of John, and was a scholarly work. It depicted Jesus as a man but not God, and rejected the miracles of the Gospel. Renan believed by humanizing Jesus he was restoring to him a greater dignity.Chadbourne, Richard M. (1968). Ernest Renan. New York: Twayne Publishers, p. 68. The book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused controversy"Renan's 'Vie de Jesus'," The Dublin Review 2, January/April 1864, pp. 386–419. and enraged many Christians.Jules Théodose Loyson Une prétendue Vie de Jésus, ou M. Ernest Renan, historien, philosophe et poëte (Paris, Douniol, 1863)Cochin, Augustin (1863). Quelques mots sur la Vie de Jésus de M. Ernest Renan. Paris: Douniol.Instruction pastorale de Monseigneur l'évêque de Nîmes au clergé de son diocèse contre un ouvrage intitulé "Vie de Jésus" par Ernest Renan (1863)Several of the books of Henri-Joseph Crelier have polemical titles naming Renan. It likewise provoked anger within the Jewish community due to its depiction of Judaism as foolish and absurdly illogical, and for its insistence that Jesus and Christianity were superior to Judaism.
American historian George Mosse, in Toward the Final Solution. A History of European Racism (pp 88, 129–130) argues that according to Renan, the intolerance would be a Jewish and not a Christian characteristic, but biblical Judaism would have lost its importance even among the Jews themselves as civilization progressed. That is why modern Jews are no longer disadvantaged by their past and are able to make important contributions to modern progress.
Continuation of scholarly career: social views In his book on St. Paul, as in the Apostles, he shows his concern with the larger social life, his sense of fraternity, and a revival of the democratic sentiment which had inspired L'Avenir de la Science. In 1869, he presented himself as the candidate of the liberal opposition at the parliamentary election for Meaux. While his temper had become less aristocratic, his liberalism had grown more tolerant. On the eve of its dissolution, Renan was half prepared to accept the Empire, and, had he been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he would have joined the group of l'Empire liberal, but he was not elected. A year later, war was declared with Germany; the Second Empire was abolished, and Napoleon III became an exile. The Franco-Prussian War was a turning-point in Renan's history. Germany had always been to him the asylum of thought and disinterested science. Now, he saw the land of his ideal destroy and ruin the land of his birth; he beheld the German no longer as a priest, but as an invader.