(Jewish Group) On "antisemitism" [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

One specious argument that those of us active in Palestine solidarity hear time after time is the hoary line that “Jews are not really Semites, so why say that they are the victims of antisemitism”, or its many variants, such as “Palestinians are Semites too”.

The argument is specious because it is generally used not in a spirit of genuine inquiry, but in order to obscure and even justify incidents of anti-Jewish bigotry. But it is also specious because it uses pseudo-scientific arguments and half-understood etymological claims to make a reactionary political case.

In the first place, there is no such thing as a “Semite”. Race is a social construct, not a biological essence, and this is particularly true of the so-called “Semitic race”. Until the nineteenth century, the term “Semitic” referred solely to a linguistic group, including Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic and related languages. Significantly, neither Yiddish – the language of East European Ashkenazi Jews – nor Ladino – the language of Sefardi Jews in the Ottoman empire – is a Semitic language.

“Race science”
With the development of European “race science” in the nineteenth century, the term was expanded to suggest that all speakers of Semitic languages were also racially related. Despite Jews not speaking a Semitic language except in prayer, they were arbitrarily included in this spurious category.

And later, when Jew-hater Willhelm Marr sought to give a pseudo-scientific gloss to the bigotry he had expressed in his notorious book The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit, he named his new anti-Jewish organisation the Antisemiten-Liga.

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A very unlikely source gets it right! Hmmm, maybe things are changing, albeit very slowly.