ABSTRACT
Robertson Smith was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1846, the oldest son and second of seven children. Robertson Smith belonged to neither school but a case can be made that he belonged to the Scottish School of Totemism, in company with his close friends, John McLennan and Sir James Frazer. Whether Durkheim knew of Smith's heresy trial is doubtful as he was then closeted away in the École Normale, but he surely knew of it later as it was the last successful "heresy hunt" in the British Isles. A major figure in Smith's life was John McLennan, one of the pioneer kinship theorists. After moving to Cambridge in 1883, Smith met James Frazer a young Scotsman who Smith called "one of the Scotch contingent". Ancient Semites are important to religious scholars because all three great Western faiths—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—originated in ancient Semitic culture; and all three religions, of course, recognize the Old Testament as a sacred text.
