Semitic people explained

Semitic people or Semites is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group^{[1] [2] [3]} associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics.^[4] First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (Hebrew: שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis,^[5] together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites.

In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.^[4]

Ethnicity and race

The term Semitic in a racial sense was coined by members of the Göttingen school of history in the early 1770s. Other members of the Göttingen school of history coined the separate term Caucasian in the 1780s. These terms were used and developed by numerous other scholars over the next century. In the early 20th century, the pseudo-scientific classifications of Carleton S. Coon included the Semitic peoples in the Caucasian race, as similar in appearance to the Indo-European, Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian-speaking peoples.^[6] Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies, the term also came to be applied to the religions (ancient Semitic and Abrahamic) and ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution.^[7]

Antisemitism

See main article: Antisemitism. The terms "anti-Semite" or "antisemitism" came by a circuitous route to refer more narrowly to anyone who was hostile or discriminatory towards Jews in particular.^[8]

Anthropologists of the 19th century such as Ernest Renan readily aligned linguistic groupings with ethnicity and culture, appealing to anecdote, science and folklore in their efforts to define racial character. Moritz Steinschneider, in his periodical of Jewish letters Hamaskir (3 (Berlin 1860), 16), discusses an article by Heymann Steinthal^[9] criticising Renan's article "New Considerations on the General Character of the Semitic Peoples, In Particular Their Tendency to Monotheism".^[10] Renan had acknowledged the importance of the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Israel etc. but called the Semitic races inferior to the Aryan for their monotheism, which he held to arise from their supposed lustful, violent, unscrupulous and selfish racial instincts. Steinthal summed up these predispositions as "Semitism", and so Steinschneider characterised Renan's ideas as "anti-Semitic prejudice".^[11]

In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr began the politicisation of the term by speaking of a struggle between Jews and Germans in a pamphlet called Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum ("The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism"). He accused the Jews of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879, Marr's adherents founded the "League for Anti-Semitism",^[12] which concerned itself entirely with anti-Jewish political action.

Objections to the usage of the term, such as the obsolete nature of the term "Semitic" as a racial term, have been raised since at least the 1930s.^{[13] [14]}

See also

• Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples
• Generations of Noah
• Hamites
• Japhetites

Bibliography

• Book: Anidjar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. 2008. Stanford University Press. 978-0-8047-5694-5.
• Book: Liverani, Mario. Mario Liverani. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. https://books.google.com/books?id=6OJvO2jMCr8C&pg=PA392. January 1995. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. 978-0-8028-3784-4. 387–392. Semites.

External links

• Semitic language family tree included under "Afro-Asiatic" in SIL's Ethnologue.
• The south Arabian origin of ancient Arabs
• The Edomite Hyksos connection
• The perished Arabs
• The Midianites of the north

Notes and References

1. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:635252/FULLTEXT02.pdf On the use of the terms “(anti-)Semitic” and “(anti-) Zionist” in modern Middle Eastern discourse, Orientalia Suecana LXI Suppl. (2012)
2. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1525/aa.1965.67.4.02a00420/asset/aa.1965.67.4.02a00420.pdf?v=1&t=i4bw857p&s=4831143fafc516caded9a9a9bc60d5e350edbcde Review of "The Canaanites" (1964)
3. Book: Glöckner. Olaf. Fireberg. Haim. Being Jewish in 21st-Century Germany. 25 September 2015. De Gruyter. 978-3-11-035015-9. 200. ...there is no Semitic ethnicity, only Semitic languages.
4. Book: Lewis, Bernard. Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. W W Norton & Co Inc. 1987. 978-0393304206. Bernard Lewis. The confusion between race and language goes back a long way, and was compounded by the rapidly changing content of the word "race" in European and later in American usage. Serious scholars have pointed out–repeatedly and ineffectually-‑that "Semitic" is a linguistic and cultural classification, denoting certain languages and in some contexts the literatures and civilizations expressed in those languages. As a kind of shorthand, it was sometimes retained to designate the speakers of those languages. At one time it might thus have had a connotation of race, when that word itself was used to designate national and cultural entities. It has nothing whatever to do with race in the anthropological sense that is now common usage. A glance at the present‑day speakers of Arabic, from Khartoum to Aleppo and from Mauritania to Mosul, or even of Hebrew speakers in the modern state of Israel, will suffice to show the enormous diversity of racial types.. registration.
5. Book: Baasten, Martin. A Note on the History of 'Semitic'. 57–73. Hamlet on a Hill: Semitic and Greek Studies Presented to Professor T. Muraoka on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday. Peeters Publishers. 2003. 9789042912151. https://books.google.com/books?id=oIIvqaVaLacC&pg=PA58.
6. The Races of Europe by Carleton Stevens Coon. From Chapter XI: The Mediterranean World – Introduction: "This third racial zone stretches from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence along the southern Mediterranean shores into Arabia, East Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Persian highlands; and across Afghanistan into India."
7. "Semite". Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.
8. Web site: Anti-Semitism . Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition .
9. Reprinted G. Karpeles (ed.), Steinthal H., Ueber Juden und Judentum, Berlin 1918, pp. 91 ff.
10. Published in the Journal Asiatique, 1859
11. [Alex Bein]
12. Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism, Oxford University Press, USA, 1987
13. Book: Sevenster, Jan Nicolaas. The Roots of Pagan Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World. 1975. Brill Archive. 978-90-04-04193-6. 1–2. It has long been realised that there are objections to the term anti-Semitism and therefore an endeavour has been made to find a word which better interprets the meaning intended. Already in 1936 Bolkestein, for example, wrote an article on Het "antisemietisme" in de oudheid (Anti-Semitism in the ancient world) in which the word was placed between quotation marks and a preference was expressed for the term hatred of the Jews… Nowadays the term anti-Judaism is often preferred. It certainly expresses better than anti-Semitism the fact that it concerns the attitude to the Jews and avoids any suggestion of racial distinction, which was not or hardly, a factor of any significance in ancient times. For this reason Leipoldt preferred to speak of anti-Judaism when writing his Antisemitsmus in der alten Welt (1933). Bonsirven also preferred this word to Anti-Semitism, "mot moderne qui implique une théorie des races"..
14. Book: Zimmermann, Moshe. Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism. 5 March 1987. Oxford University Press, USA. 978-0-19-536495-8. 112. The term 'anti-Semitism' was unsuitable from the beginning for the real essence of Jew-hatred, which remained anchored, more or less, in the Christian tradition even when it moved via the natural sciences, into racism. It is doubtful whether the term which was first publicized in an institutional context (the Anti-Semitic League) would have appeared at all if the 'Anti-Chancellor League,' which fought Bismarck's policy, had not been in existence since 1875. The founders of the new Organization adopted the elements of 'anti' and 'league,' and searched for the proper term: Marr exchanged the term 'Jew' for 'Semite' which he already favored. It is possible that the shortened form 'Sem' is used with such frequency and ease by Marr (and in his writings) due to its literary advantage and because it reminded Marr of Sem Biedermann, his Jewish employer from the Vienna period..