In a 2002 article in History of Religions , Bruce Lincoln reviews the revisionist theory of William “Oriental” Jones regarding the origins of languages and races. As much as his predecessors and contemporaries (such as Isaac Newton, whose History of Ancient Kingdoms – A Complete Chronology 
Jones “marshaled his then-unsurpassed then-unsurpassed encyclopedic knowledge of Asia in support of his major thesis, to wit, that all the world’s peoples derived from three primordial groups. In this context, he spoke of them as the Hindu, Arabian, and Tartarian races, but these groups are recognizably continuous with the civilized Persians, wild Arabs, and wilder Tartars of his 1773 essay. What is more, he now brought these same three groups into alignment with Noah’s three sons by tracing the Hindu race to Ham, the Arabian race to Shem, and the Tartarian race to Japheth.”
Along the way, he demoted Shem from his traditional primacy:
“Newton held that the descendants of Ham and Japheth had succumbed to polytheistic errors almost immediately, as did most of those descended from Shem. The chief exception was the line that became Israel, which preserved its basic ethical tenets and its faith in a single creator. In contrast, Jones allowed that these basic truths had been preserved for a while by peoples in all three of his racial groupings. To be sure, the Tartars fell into ‘gross idolatry’ within a few generations, and members of the Hindu race maintained their monotheist faith only during the reign of their first royal dynasty, since ‘a system so pure and sublime could hardly among mortals be of long duration.’” Ham took on a higher profile than Shem. Shem still showed genius in the area of religion. But Hamites were the civilizing race.
Lincoln smells something foul here: While admitted that “there is something liberating, humane, and admirable in Jones’s having championed the peoples of Asia,” he adds that “one also perceives troubling aspects to his project, one motive of which was ressentiment of the privilege accorded to Israelite history, religion, and Scripture. Particularly dangerous was his reduction of human diversity to three primal categories and the scholarly cum mythic narrative through which he sought to redistribute privilege from one racialized group to another.”
