Words Mean Things

For our inaugural entry, let’s look at a word whose construction is considerably more misleading than its meaning: ANTISEMITIC.

“Anti” is easy enough. It means “against” or “opposed to.” “Semitic” is where things get …weird.

Semitic refers primarily to a family of languages, not a religion, ethnicity or nationality. Modern Semitic languages include Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic, along with others such as Aramaic. They descend from earlier related languages spoken across parts of what we now call the Middle East and northeastern Africa.

The term itself has an odd history. European scholars began using “Semitic” as a linguistic classification in the late 18th century, deriving it from Shem, one of the sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible.

So if you simply take the word apart, antisemitic appears straightforward: ANTI + SEMITIC—opposed to Semitic things.

A sufficiently determined linguistic pedant might therefore conclude that antisemitism ought to mean hostility toward speakers of Semitic languages. Follow that logic and it could apply not only to Jews and Israelis, but also to Arabic-speaking Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis, Egyptians and plenty of others, as well as Amharic speakers in Ethiopia.

There is only one problem—that’s not what the word means. Furthermore, it never did.

The term antisemitic emerged in German in the late 19th century and was used specifically to describe hostility toward Jews. German journalist Wilhelm Marr is closely associated with popularizing Antisemitismus in 1879 as a supposedly more modern, political and even “scientific” term for anti-Jewish prejudice.

That “scientific” part deserves quotation marks large enough to be seen from orbit, because 19th-century European racial theorists had an nasty habit of taking classifications that made some sense when applied to languages and pretending they also described distinct biological races. Thus a legitimate linguistic category—Semitic languages—was transformed into the fictional concept of a “Semitic race.”

They then placed Jews into that imaginary racial category, and antisemitism was the word constructed to describe hostility toward them. So what the word truly does is preserve bad 19th-century anthropology.

This is also why parsing the word literally can send you completely off the rails.

A person who hates Arabic speakers is not, by virtue of Arabic being a Semitic language, therefore “antisemitic.” A person prejudiced against Ethiopians is not antisemitic because many Ethiopians speak Amharic. And hostility toward Palestinians does not automatically become antisemitism because Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family.

Antisemitism means prejudice, hostility or discrimination directed against Jews.

That is not some watered-down modern reinterpretation. That has essentially been the word’s meaning from the beginning.

You may also have noticed that I’m writing it antisemitism, rather than anti-Semitism. The hyphenated spelling can visually reinforce the mistaken idea that there is some identifiable thing called “Semitism,” or some coherent group of people called “Semites,” against which one can be “anti.” Increasingly, scholars and organizations concerned with antisemitism prefer the unhyphenated spelling precisely because no such unified ethnic or racial category exists.

What we have here is an exception to one of the Professor’s favorite habits, which is taking words apart to better understand them. Only sometimes it doesn’t quite work the way we think it will because history has a way of sticking things together in a way that produces a meaning you cannot reliably reconstruct from the roots alone.

To recap:

*** Semitic: A linguistic classification encompassing languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic.

*** Antisemitic: Hostile toward, prejudiced against or discriminatory toward Jews.

Those two words don’t neatly line up simply because 19th-century racial theorists took a linguistic category, pretended it was a racial one, and left us with the terminology.

The next time you accuse somebody of being antisemitic, take a moment and think about what you actually mean and what you are actually trying to say. Not because the word secretly means something else, but Because it means something quite specific. Be precise in your word choices.

It matters…because WORDS MEAN THINGS.