I was sitting having coffee with a few friends, and of course the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel, with lots of civilians getting caught in the crossfire, came up. I mentioned it’s a problem no one seemed to want to compromise on, citing UN Resolution 181, and mentioning truthfully that it’s such a mess that it doesn’t seem like anyone was as right as they wanted to be.

It’s a mess. I don’t know enough, I’m not invested enough, I can’t trust any news source because even the news seems polarized at this point. If you say one side is doing something wrong, people are quick to say you’re supporting the other side. I don’t support the killing or injuring of civilians, so I don’t neatly have a side to pick. It’s not as clean cut as Ukrainians defending their borders against Russia. Criticize Israel, suddenly you’re branded as anti-semitic and people with pitchforks and torches appear out of nowhere. Criticize Hamas, much the same happens. Geography matters in this regard, and since I’m not in the continental United States I do hear a lot more of the anti-American and thus anti-Israel rhetoric as well.

It’s safer to say nothing, really. To do nothing. Yet a history of that has pretty much gotten the world to where it is, and so it gets violent because we didn’t address things when we should have. That’s the story of the world.

It’s a mess, and this post isn’t about that mess but rather an interesting way a meaning has changed for at least some, arguably most, people in English. This is an academic exercise.

Someone brought up that the word ‘semitic’ actually was related to the semitic languages, and that it had become bastardized to mean ‘Jewish’. Since I’m pretty interested in words, I dug in. Here I am, over half a century spinning on the planet, learning that.

Semitic Languages.

Semitic languages are languages that derived from Afro-Asiatic languages, which to me demonstrated how ignorant I was on the topic because I’ve never traipsed through the history of language.

The major Semitic languages are:

• Arabic,
• Amharic (Spoken in Ethiopia)
• Aramaic (Spoken in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria)
• Hebrew,
• Maltese and
• Tigre (Spoken in Sudan)

There are, according to different places, dozens of Semitic languages. Aramaic, being the ‘Language of Jesus‘, surprised me with how widespread it’s usage still is. The world is very big and our thoughts on it almost always too small.

Therefore, it’s peculiar that we use it in the context of only one, Hebrew, these days, but apparently not everyone does otherwise I would not have been told about it. In learning this, I had to dig in.

The Modern Use of Semitic.

These days it seems the most popular use of the word semitic is in ‘anti-semitic’, used to say that something or someone is against Jews for some reason. I’m not, but I have met people who are so I know it’s a real thing.

The use of ‘anti-semitism’ first showed up with Willhelm Marr. Marr’s theories would be a part of the foundation of the genocide the world knew in the Nazi era based on pseudoscience. Marr later allegedly renounced anti-semitism according to Moshe Zimmerman, an Israeli historian.

Still, he introduced the pseudo-scientific racial component into that period. It’s pseudo-science because race is a social contruct and isn’t very scientific at all.

It boggles the mind that we’re still using an inaccurate phrase coined by someone who helped pave the way to the Holocaust, but there it is. We don’t like swastikas or reminders of that terrible part of human history, yet we retain one of it’s labels in it’s original form.

I’m not going to say that we should stop using it. That would be like trying to change the wind by blowing and flapping my hands in the opposite direction, but it shows how things persist even when they’re wrong.

In fact, one could argue that the modern use of the phrase ‘anti-semitic’ is ‘anti-semitic’ in both the modern context of the use of the word (loosely, ‘against Jews’) based on who coined the phrase in the first place, or even against everyone else who speaks a semitic language other than Hebrew and is being afforded no context.

Speaking for myself, from now on if people have a problem with Jews, I’ll use ‘anti-Jewish’, but I won’t wander around correcting people.

Putting that all into context, we have two linguistically Semitic people at war and only one side is considered Semitic, which seems odd too. I don’t have answers. I’m just boggled by humanity once again, using words that could be connecting people but instead using it in divisive ways.

We are such strange creatures.