About a century before the current crop of deceitful neologisms invaded and polluted our minds—e.g. homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, etc.—”anti-Semitism” preceded them. Like the others, it is illogical and untruthful. For there to be such a thing as anti-Semitism, there first must be a thing called Semitism, when there is not now and never was.
There never in history were any Semites, either. As you read on, you will see how the very idea of Semites at its inception was fake ancient history perpetrated by post-Christian Jew-haters.
The earliest example of the word “Semitic” in the magisterial OED (Oxford English Dictionary) dates from 1826. It was a time when academic philologists were studying and categorizing different language families, e.g., the Romance languages, the Germanic, Slavic, etc., and when it came to Hebrew and its cognates, they invented the term Shemitic (sic) after the man Shem, son of Noah of Flood fame. (Over time, pronouncing the “h” fell away.)
Only the OED got it wrong when writing of the existence of a “Semitic race.” Race is something commonly visible, a biological, immutable condition everyone is born with and can do nothing about. However, there is nothing in the Jewish religion about anybody’s physical appearance. On the contrary, this people, scattered around the globe for eighteen centuries and welcoming converts, became the most racially mixed nation on earth; they come in all skin colors, hair textures, eye shapes, etc. Indeed, Hitler himself called the Jews a mongrel race because they cared nothing for “racial purity.”
Nazi pseudoscience about Semitic identity. Fair use.
The OED also got it inexcusably wrong when writing, “The Semitic race are those peoples descended from Shem as the Hebrews, Arabs, Assyrians and Arameans.” Not true, and this is not the first time a non-Jew (probably) misread the Hebrew Bible in translation.
Yes, the first Arab was Ishmael, son of the Hebrew Patriarch Abraham, who was ten generations descended from Noah via Noah’s son Shem.
However, Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, did not descend from Shem but from his brother, Ham. Hagar was a princess of Egypt, son of Ham, brother of Canaan, Put, and Cush.
The Jewish Bible also reports that Ishmael’s mother provided him with an Egyptian wife like herself, which is significant because the Jewish nation practices matrilineal descent. Therefore, Ishmael’s mother was not Semitic but Hamitic, meaning that Ishmael and his wife and progeny were Hamitic, too. Historically, there never were any Semites and Hamites, though the terms are useful as spiritual archetypes.
So, anyone who thinks Jews and Arabs are both sons of Abraham and, therefore, brother Semites who should kiss and make up doesn’t know what he is talking about.
As the philologists continued their research, society and the culture were morphing in the Enlightenment, a euphemism for the loss of faith in Christianity, which posed a problem for Jew-haters. Their traditional hostility was rooted in the belief that the Jews were all guilty Christ-killers, and the name for this verbal toxin in German was Judenhass/Jew-hatred.
But, lose your faith in the divinity and messiahship of Jesus, and you no longer can hate the Children of Israel for killing your God and Messiah.
What to do? You still hate them, but now need a new explanation. So, you pilfer the term Semitic from the study of languages and invent a race of ancient Semites living in Asia—and, to repeat, history is absent any reference to a people calling themselves Semites and being called that by others. The transformation of the Jewish nation into an Asiatic “race” made them as alien to Europe as black Africans.
The Enlightenment and Napoleon’s spread of its egalitarian spirit in Europe led to Jews receiving citizenship, a revolutionary idea. However, many Europeans who were not Enlightenment philosophers were not happy with that. In 1819, in German universities, students rioted because they did not want to sit next to a Jew in lecture halls. In the 1840s, there were more protests against too many of them in German medical schools.
Europe’s post-religious deep thinkers could no longer justify their anti-Jew hostility religiously, but they could recoil from Jews for their “Semitic” otherness. In the 19th century, it became common to refer to the “Jewish race,” which was no longer a nation scattered to the winds for its cosmic crime but a biological condition. Indeed, the OED, published in 1932, defined Zionism as “a movement among modern Jews having for its object the assured settlement of their race upon a national basis in Palestine.”
Thanks to the pogroms in Russia following the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II, with “the Jews” blamed, of course, for his murder, there was a tidal wave of Jews escaping to the West. Many Europeans objected to the Jews’ arrival in their countries of refuge.
Eventually, this resistance to the influx of Ostjuden (Jews from the east) into such countries as Austria came to be called “Anti-Semitismus.” Opposition to people not for their faith but their anatomy.
Therefore, at birth, “anti-Semitism” had nothing to do with mass murder and everything to do with objecting to the presence of Jews in the public square. People were uncomfortable in the company of these “Semites.”
In this way, the neologism “anti-Semitism” entered the mind as verbal camouflage for the old Judenhass in fake academic dress, transforming it into an ideology, an “ism.”
This dishonest conception of the Children of Israel as no longer a nation exiled from its land would lead to the Nazis paying “scientists” to study their alleged racial characteristics, measuring their skulls with calipers to record the racial (that is, biological) differences between Jews and self-styled “Aryans.” Hitler was the mortal enemy of this mongrel people because, “scientifically,” his Germans were the Master Race.
After the horrors of the Holocaust became public knowledge, “anti-Semitism” was tainted with the stench of the crematoria and was no longer acceptable in polite society. Many had seen the black and white newsreel films of the death camps, those mounds of stick-figure-like corpses, the walking skeletons of those still alive, the sickening and disgusting evidence of where anti-Semitism led. So, Jew jokes at dinner parties went out of fashion.
But today, amongst the Jew-haters, replacing the Jews’ crime against the crucified Jesus with the Jews’ injustice to the “Palestinians” justifies hating Jews and wanting to destroy their state and society that they built on land they brought back to life on territory the Muslim colonizers maintained as mournful desolation.
Thus, the afflicted like Roger Waters, Jeremy Corbyn, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and thousands of university students and professors can insist they are not antisemites; they are just opposed to the behavior of those “genocidal” Israeli soldiers murdering children in Gaza, just like Nazis—which proves that the Jews are not the Chosen People but as evil as Nazis, who deserve no pity for what was done to them on October 7. 2023.
“Anti-Semitism” always manifests as delusional lies about Jews doing evil things that have no basis in truth and reality. Two current ones: “The indigenous Palestinians had their homeland stolen from them by the racist Zionist Jews” and “The Jews are committing genocide.”
Admittedly, “Jew-hatred” is a harsher, less pleasant-sounding label than the pseudo-intellectual dishonesty of “anti-Semitism,” but a more accurate one.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.
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