‘Anti-Semitism’? No Such Thing

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa | Am Thinker | Jan 15, 2025

Image: Nazi pseudoscience about Semitic identity. Fair use.

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.

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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.”
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 and also Abraham’s wife Sarah.

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.

January 19, 2025 | 5 Comments »

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5 Comments / 5 Comments

  1. On the other hand, how do you explain all the total strangers who, assuming I’m a Jew, have come up to me and started something over the last 25 years. Looking back, I think it was all my life, but no reason was given – except once in the early ’80s by an Italian fellow anarchist room mate who shocked me by saying, “you are a Jew, aren’t you? – so I didn’t know what to make of it.

  3. Spelling of antisemitism
    In April 2015, the IHRA’s Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial addressed the issue of how to spell antisemitism.

    “In April 2015, the IHRA’s Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial addressed the issue of how to spell antisemitism.

    The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would like to address the spelling of the term “antisemitism,” often rendered as “anti-Semitism.” The IHRA’s concern is that the hyphenated spelling allows for the possibility of something called “Semitism,” which not only legitimizes a form of pseudo-scientific racial classification that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology, but also divides the term, stripping it from its meaning of opposition and hatred toward Jews.”

    https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/spelling-antisemitism

  4. Not the time to take it out of the dictionary. We have common-use language the same way we have common law. Words and expressions are colloquialisms and literal translations often don’t make sense. When a word, expression, or usage becomes common for 100 years it enters the dictionary, e.g., “iregardless” my late mother’s pet peeve.

    Antisemitism replaced the older term, “Jew Hatred. Here’s why.

    Importantly, Hitler and his followers were not anti-Semites primarily because they were racists. The relation worked more the other way around: Hitler and his followers were racists because they were anti-Semites looking for an anti-Jewish stigma deeper than any religious, economic, or political prejudice alone could provide. For if Jews were found wanting religiously, it was possible for them to convert. If their business practices or political views were somehow inappropriate, changed behavior could, in principle, correct their shortcomings. But anti-Semites in the line that ran from Marr to Hitler believed that Jews were a menace no matter what they did. As Marr put the point, “the Jews are the ‘best citizens’ of this modern, Christian state,” but they were that way, he added, because it was “in perfect harmony with their interests” to be so. Undoubtedly, Marr believed – and Hitler agreed even more so – that the interests of Jews were irreconcilably at odds with Germany’s.

    For anti-Semites of Marr’s stripe, converted Jews were still untrustworthy Jews. Jewish behavior might change in any number of ways, but the “logic” of racist anti-Semitism did not consider such changes as reasons to give up anti-Semitism. To the contrary, this anti-Semitism interpreted Jewish assimilation as infiltration, Jewish conformity as duplicity, and Jewish integration into non-Jewish society as proof of Jewish cunning that intended world domination. On the other hand, if Jews insisted on retaining their distinctively Jewish ways, that insistence provided evidence of another kind to show that Jews were an alien people. Added to earlier forms of anti-Semitism, racial theory “explained” why the Jews, no matter what appearances might suggest to the contrary, were a threat that Germans could not afford to tolerate.

    https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/wilhelm-marr

    AI Overview

    The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism is used in the HR 6090 bill in Congress. The bill defines antisemitism as the IHRA’s definition, plus examples of contemporary antisemitism.
    The IHRA definition
    Antisemitism is a perception of Jews, which can lead to hatred
    Antisemitism can be expressed through rhetoric or physical actions
    Antisemitism can be directed at Jewish or non-Jewish people, their property, Jewish community institutions, and religious facilities

    To guide IHRA in its work, the following examples may serve as illustrations:
    Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.
    Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:
    Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
    Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
    Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
    Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
    Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
    Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
    Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
    Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
    Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
    Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
    Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
    Antisemitic acts are criminal when they are so defined by law (for example, denial of the Holocaust or distribution of antisemitic materials in some countries).
    Criminal acts are antisemitic when the targets of attacks, whether they are people or property – such as buildings, schools, places of worship and cemeteries – are selected because they are, or are perceived to be, Jewish or linked to Jews.
    Antisemitic discrimination is the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to others and is illegal in many countries.

    Ireland Adopts IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Amid Row With Israel

    https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism

    https://www.algemeiner.com/2025/01/17/ireland-adopts-ihra-definition-antisemitism-amid-row-israel/

    https://www.algemeiner.com/2025/01/17/ireland-adopts-ihra-definition-antisemitism-amid-row-israel/

  5. The cynicism of all these Jew-haters is boundless. First, they go on crusades to free the holy land from the Ishmaelites, killing Jews for practice along the way and contaminating them by raping all the women of any age, then they participate in the pogroms against the Jewish communities from Portugal to Siberia, without leaving any they could find out, and now they are suddenly the Semite race?
    It is easy to determine that the reasons are more akin to shame and refusal to accept that the Jews, while mentally ahead, are physically and genetically exactly the same. Everyone knows that the kid in school that is shunned due to whatever apparent disability is most likely to be best in his class since he has nothing better to do than learn to get ahead.
    Sure, Jews are the chosen people, so are all the rest!!