"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 ΓΌber das Judenthum ("The Way to Victory of Germanicism 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",[19] 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 and the exclusion of discrimination against non-Jewish Semitic peoples, have been raised since at least the 1930s"
((Anidjar, Gil (2008). Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5694-5.)
Semites (Semitic people or Semitic cultures) was a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group who speak or spoke the Semitic languages.
Today, the Semitic branch includes 77 languages that are spoken by more than 500 million people across the Middle East, and North and East Africa. The most widely spoken Semitic language today is Arabic, followed by Aramaic, Tigrinya, and Hebrew.
The first depiction of historical ethnology of the world separated into the Biblical sons of Noah: Semites, Hamites and Japhetites, 1771, Gatterer's Einleitung in die Synchronistische Universalhistorie.
Gatterer explains that modern history has shown the truth of the Biblical prediction of Japhetite supremacy (1 Genesis 9:25-27)
"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 outβrepeatedly and ineffectually-βthat "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 presentβday 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."
(Lewis, Bernard (1987). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice.)
"The term "Semitic," coined by Schlozer in 1781, should be strictly limited to linguistic matters since this is the only area in which a degree of objectivity is attainable. The Semitic languages comprise a fairly distinct linguistic family, a fact appreciated long before the relationship of the Indo-European languages was recognized. The ethnography and ethnology of the various peoples who spoke or still speak Semitic languages or dialects is a much more mixed and confused matter and one over which we have little scientific control."
( Review of "The Canaanites" (1964) by Marvin Pope)
Edited by
Unknown
on Thu 09/19/19 09:04 AM