Semitic people

This article is about the racial and ethnic term popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For the history of ancient groups who spoke Semitic languages, see ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.

Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group^[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics.^[6][7][8] First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis,^[9] together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites.

The first depiction of historical ethnology of the world separated into the biblical sons of Noah: Semites, Hamites and Japhetites. Gatterer's Einleitung in die Synchronistische Universalhistorie (1771) explains his view that modern history has shown the truth of the biblical prediction of Japhetite supremacy (Genesis 9:25–27).^[1] Click the image for a transcription of the text.

In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.^[8] Identification of pro-Caucasian racism has either partially or completely devalued the use of the term as a racial category, with the caveat that an inverse assessment would still be considered scientifically obsolete.

Ethnicity and race

Further information: Afroasiatic Urheimat, Proto-Semitic language § Urheimat, Hamites, Scientific racism, and Color terminology for race § Antiquity to 1600s

This T and O map, 1472, from the first printed version of Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, identifies the three known continents as populated by descendants of Sem (Shem), Iafeth (Japheth) and Cham (Ham).

Categorization of racial groups by reference to skin color was common in classical antiquity.^[10] For example, it is found in e.g. Physiognomica, a Greek treatise dated to c. 300 BC.

The transmission of the "color terminology" for race from antiquity to early anthropology in 17th century Europe took place via rabbinical literature, where the term "Semite" in a racial sense was coined. Specifically, Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer (a medieval rabbinical text dated roughly to between the 7th to 12th centuries) contains the division of mankind into three groups based on the three sons of Noah, viz. Shem, Ham and Japheth:

"He [Noah] especially blessed Shem (emphasis added) and his sons, (making them) black but comely [שחורים ונאים], and he gave them the habitable earth. He blessed Ham and his sons, (making them) black like the raven [שחורים כעורב], and he gave them as an inheritance the coast of the sea. He blessed Japheth and his sons, (making) them entirely white [כלם לבני], and he gave them for an inheritance the desert and its fields" (trans. Gerald Friedlander 1916, p. 172f.)

Jews were identified as a belonging to a subrace of the Semite greater race in this division of mankind. In Rabbi Eliezer and other rabbinical texts was it then received by Georgius Hornius (1666). In Hornius' scheme, Semites are "brownish-yellow" (flavos), and almost all Jews being neither black nor white but "light brown" (buxus, the color of boxwood), following Mishnah Sanhedrin, they accordingly are classified as Semites.^[11]

The term "Semitic" in a racial sense was coined by members of the Göttingen school of history in the early 1770s. Other members of the Göttingen school of history coined the separate term Caucasian in the 1780s. These terms were used and developed by numerous other scholars over the next century. In the early 20th century, the pseudo-scientific classifications of Carleton S. Coon included the Semitic peoples in the Caucasian race, as similar in appearance to the Indo-European, Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian-speaking peoples.^[12] Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies, the term also came to be applied to the religions (ancient Semitic and Abrahamic) and ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution.^[13]

Antisemitism

Main article: Antisemitism

Further information: Color terminology for race § Early Modern physical anthropology

1879 statute of the Antisemitic League, the organization which first popularized the term

German historian Christoph Meiners, supporter of the polygenist theory of human origins, became favorite intellectual ancestor of the Nazis. In his "binary [greater] racial scheme" of superior Caucasians and inferior Mongoloids, Meiners did not include Jews as Caucasians and ascribed them a "permanently degenerate nature".^[14] Other members of the Göttingen school of history would make the addition of Negroids.^[15]

In part he resented the French Revolution for leading to French Jewish emancipation and threatening the Germans' supposed rightful place in a racial hierarchy in which they were assessed as superior in all domains due to inheriting naturally-occurring higher purity of blood from their ancestors, yet already degenerating through indulgence in civilization's luxuries. Using a "bundle of notions" led to creations of purported subraces on a continental and state basis with implied decreased respective scientific weight.^[16] In 1772 he became extraordinary professor, and in 1775 full professor, of Weltweisheit, also at the University of Göttingen, when over the course of tenures he had the opportunity to join the Göttingen school of history of which he was a member.

The terms "anti-Semite" or "antisemitism" came by a circuitous route to refer more narrowly to anyone who was hostile or discriminatory towards Jews in particular.^[17]

Anthropologists of the 19th century such as Ernest Renan readily aligned linguistic groupings with ethnicity and culture, appealing to anecdote, science and folklore in their efforts to define racial character. Moritz Steinschneider, in his periodical of Jewish letters Hamaskir (3 (Berlin 1860), 16), discusses an article by Heymann Steinthal^[18] criticising Renan's article "New Considerations on the General Character of the Semitic Peoples, In Particular Their Tendency to Monotheism".^[19] Renan had acknowledged the importance of the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Israel etc. but called the Semitic races inferior to the Aryan for their monotheism, which he held to arise from their supposed lustful, violent, unscrupulous and selfish racial instincts. Steinthal summed up these predispositions as "Semitism", and so Steinschneider characterised Renan's ideas as "anti-Semitic prejudice".^[20]

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 über das Judenthum ("The Way to Victory of Germanism 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",^[21] which concerned itself entirely with anti-Jewish political action.

Characterizations of "Semite" as having little to no value on the socially constructed racial spectrum^[22][23][24] combined with its overuse due to popularization stemming from pro-Caucasian racism, as identification with antisemitism and as an antisemite was politically advantageous in Europe at least during the late 19th century—for example, Karl Lueger, the popular mayor of fin de siècle Vienna, skillfully exploited antisemitism as a way of channeling public discontent to his political advantage—^{[25][page needed]}thereby diluting anti-Judaism, have been made since at least the 1930s.^[26][27]

See also

• Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples
• Pan-Semitism
• Generations of Noah
• Hamites
• Japhetites