By MICHAEL FERBER, Speaking of Words

        This series of columns has had little to say about politics, but there are some words that can hardly be discussed without getting into their political implications.  What does “democracy” mean?  It’s a Greek word: What did the Greeks mean by it?  How about “republic?”  That’s a Roman word, and our Founding Fathers were very interested in the Roman Republic.  Did they mean something specific that we have missed?  Several members of Congress call themselves “socialists,” but they mean something very different by it from what their political enemies mean.  What is “fascism”?  Has it returned?  What does “patriotism” mean today? 

        All these words deserve a column of their own, indeed a whole book, but in this column I want to say something about a pair of words that are very much in the air today, “anti-Semite” and “anti-Semitism.”  There is something strange about their origin, and of course their meanings are highly contentious.

        They entered English only in the late nineteenth century, modeled in part on German usage: antisemitisch is documented first in 1865.  Anti-Semitism—I am spelling it this way to make salient its origin—is the belief and attitude of an anti-Semite, and an anti-Semite, strictly speaking, is someone who hates or disdains Semites.  But what is a Semite?  “Semite” is clearly a racial or ethnic term here: it is someone of the Semitic race, a descendant of Shem, one of Noah’s three sons.  That is its oldest sense in English, dating from about 1600.  Genesis chapter 10 lists Shem’s own sons, five of them, as progenitors of various peoples in the Near East, such as the Assyrians, Elamites, and Arameans as well as Hebrews; one of the sons is the ancestor of Abraham, who was the father not only of Isaac but of Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs.  So both Hebrews and Arabs are Shemites or Semites, according to the Bible.  Islamic tradition names Shem as an ancestor of Muhammad.

        But in the late nineteenth century in English and most European languages “Semite” narrowed in its reference and began to mean “Jew.”  European anti-Semites were hostile to Jews but not much concerned with Arabs or other Semites.  So we are left with words that might have been ironic euphemisms at first (“Semite” as a pseudo-polite substitute for “Jew”), but are now, with their hostile prefix, confusingly narrow in reference.  Arabs may be Semites, but most anti-Semites dislike Jews, not Arabs.

        Most educated people now consider “Semite” obsolete and “Semitic” a linguistic term only.  The Semitic family of languages includes not only Hebrew and Arabic but Amharic in Ethiopia as well, along with several extinct tongues such as Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Phoenician (and its offshoot Carthaginian).  These languages have been thoroughly studied and compared and their distinctive features are well understood; they have a common ancestor, probably about 4000 BCE.  “Semitic” as a racial or ethnic term has been abandoned not only because of doubts about its reference (Jews and Arabs or Jews only?) but also because of justifiable suspicions that “race” is a term nearly useless as an objective category, though all too handy as a crude cudgel in the hands of racists, and also because many Jews are obviously of mixed “racial” origins through intermarriage, rape, and conversion.

        That said, most Jews have distinct markers in their DNA that can be traced back to the Near East, and some men even have markers of the “Cohens” (Kohanim), the priestly caste of the Hebrews, on their Y-chromosome.  I think most people who call themselves Jews do so not so much because they share a culture and beliefs as because their parents are Jewish, especially their mother, and some Jewish groups make conversion difficult.  Thus “Jew,” and by extension “Semite,” have a genetic or ethnic sense after all, but there has been so much intermixing over the centuries that large numbers of Jews have very little “Semitic” ancestry, and some have none. 

        For centuries many Christians have hated Jews because of their “race,” as their caricatures with large noses make clear enough, and many other Christians have hated them because of their beliefs and practices, such as rejecting Jesus as the Messiah or making money by lending at interest (usury).  This implies that it is possible to be “anti-Semitic,” if that means “anti-Jewish,” without being racist.  Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is often thought of as anti-Semitic in a racial sense, and it certainly has some ugly moments, but strictly speaking it is not hostile to Jews because of their ancestry or blood, for Shylock’s daughter Jessica becomes a Christian and is fully accepted by the Venetians. 

        These subtle distinctions aside, we are left with the awkward anomaly that “Semite” and “Semitic” have gone out of use but “anti-Semite” and “anti-Semitic” are still very much with us.

        So what is an anti-Semitic belief or act?  Most of them are obvious enough, and we have seen an upsurge of them recently, but the “ADL Center on Extremism,” which tracks anti-Semitic incidents in America, includes expressions of “anti-Zionism.”  When I checked its website recently I found no definition of “Zionism,” which has a range of possible meanings.  If it means belief in the establishment of a “Jewish state,” which Jews would control and where Jewish practices would have state sanction, as in today’s Israel, then it is perfectly possible to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic.  Many prominent Jews opposed the establishment of a religious state in Israel, arguing instead for a secular state where no religion is favored, and there is at least one Orthodox sect in Israel itself that opposes a Jewish state on the grounds that the Messiah has not yet come.

        If “anti-Zionism” means the belief that all Jews should leave the land that was once Palestine, that is quite a different thing: if not genocide it would certainly be ethnic cleansing,

and anti-Semitic.

        But is it anti-Semitic to denounce the Israeli destruction of Gaza with its massive death count?  If so, then hundreds of thousands of Jews in America and Israel itself are anti-Semitic.  Is it anti-Semitic to call it “genocide”?  Whether it is strictly genocide or not is debatable—the same can be said of the Hamas attack in October, which killed over a thousand civilians with barbaric cruelty and took many hostages—there are many Jews who have called the Israeli retaliation genocide, including a Jewish member of the Israeli Knesset and professor of Holocaust History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  These stubborn facts should force us to choose our words carefully.  It is difficult enough to come to a fair understanding of the rights and wrongs of Israelis and Palestinians over many decades of conflict without having our terms lose much of their meaning through slippery or thoughtless repetitions. 

        I am under no illusion that this little effort in semantic hygiene will make much difference, but I felt obliged to write it anyway.  To sum up: There is a great difference between smearing swastikas on a Jewish synagogue and throwing red paint on an Israeli consulate, and defenders of the Israeli government sometimes deliberately confound the two.  But critics of Israel’s policy toward Gaza (and the West Bank) had better beware that some of the rhetoric coming from Hamas leaders and their sympathizers here really is anti-Semitic, even genocidal.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.  I promise the next column will be more fun.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at
UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at
Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the
staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in
Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin
Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a
deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San
Francisco.

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