I just saw a comment on social media from someone who claimed they could not be antisemitic because, as an Arab, they were “semitic” themselves.
One of the ironies concerning the term “antisemitism” is that it was popularized by a Jew-hater, Wilhelm Marr, who later renounced his anti-Jewish attitudes.
The term sorta kinda originated with an Austrian Jewish writer named Moritz Steinschneider in 1860 in response to French philosopher Ernest Renan, who claimed that “Semitic Races” were inferior to “Aryan Races”. Steineschneider characterized Renan’s position as antisemitische Vorurteile (antisemitic prejudices). The thing is, Renan didn’t get the term semitic from ethnology or genealogy but rather he stole the word from the field of linguistics which, in the 18th century, had categorized a family of languages, not peoples, as “semitic”. Those languages included Hebrew, Arabic, Uggartic and other ancient Middle Eastern tongues.
Prussian nationalist Heinrich von Treitschke is notorious for coining the phrase, “the Jews are our misfortune,” later used widely by the Nazis. While Renan used the term “semitic” to refer to those ethnic groups which spoke those languages, Von Treitschke used the term almost synonymously with “Jewish”.
For all of the technological and industrial advances in the 19th century, the 1800s were filled with all sorts of oddball and pseudoscientific theories, like phrenology. In 1879, German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet, Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet (The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective). Bigots like Marr, von Treitschke, and Renan were, as odd as it seems, trying to sanitize their Jew-hatred by making it sound academic and scientific. It was the age of reason and they wanted to show that they didn’t hate the Jews because of primitive religious prejudices as earlier Jew-haters had done. No, they hated Jews for…reasons.
In that booklet Marr used the word Semitismus interchangeably with the word Judentum, using both of them to refer to both "Jewry" and "Jewishness"*.
“Antisemitismus” followed upon the use of Semitismus and in 1880, Marr published another pamphlet, Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit, which likely contains the first published use of the German word Antisemitismus, "antisemitism".
So, no, Achmed above isn’t a Semite, and yes he can be a Jew hater. Come to think of it, so too can be the “Jews”, of Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and Not In My Name, the radical leftist, pro Palestinian organizations funded by George Soros. They wear their Jewish status on their sleeves as validation of their anti-Israel attitudes.
I’d call them self-hating Jews, but they love themselves, it’s the Jewish Jews they hate.
A few years ago, because of what I knew about Marr and the history of the term and because of Arab apologists who claimed that Arabs categorically cannot be antisemitic, I started to consciously substitute the phrases Jew-hater, and Jew-hatred. I must not be the only person doing this as those terms are becoming increasingly more common.
Why obscure the meaning with a euphemism intended to obscure the meaning? If Jew-haters don’t like being called Jew-haters, maybe they could stop hating.
*If the sound of “Jewishness” evokes the term “whiteness”, au courant with the woke crowd, it might give you an indication of who the baddies are in the culture war.
I grew up in the Lutheran Church, learned all the stories of the old testament, and along the way gained great respect for the Jewish people. Yes, I learned about the Holocaust and historic persecution of Jewish people, but reading The Source by James Michener really brought it home for me when I was in high school.
You made a comment somewhere this week on avoidable Contact Forever about being Jewish means living with the idea that you might be killed for being a Jew... that hit me pretty deep also.
The horror inflicted upon Israel this month is completely black-and-white to me, and the naked hypocrisy of those who choose to ignore it, and lean into their antisemitism, is astounding and terrifying at the same time.
I’ve got an Israeli friend who’s got a bunch of family back there and all of them but the oldest have been called up to the IDF... are they and all their countrymen are in my prayers every night. I’m grateful I live in the USA.
Thank you for this, Ronnie.