Let’s talk about antisemitism. More specifically let’s talk about the word itself, since there’s evidently a lot of confusion surrounding it

Why is the word for prejudice or bigotry against Jews ‘antisemitism’ when ‘semites’ are such a vague, ill-defined category? Does this affect how we should think about antisemitism? If the word is misleading, should it be changed? Or is there a utility in keeping it?

This is something I’ve always brought up when talking about antisemitism because a sentiment I hear far too often, especially on the left, is that ‘antisemitism’ isn’t specific to Jews or worse doesn’t really exist because ‘Semites’ aren’t a properly defined group of people

Which is the equivalent of the lazy reactionary argument that Muslims don’t face racism or prejudice and Islamophobia isn’t real because ‘Islam isn’t a race’

I’m sure it’s struck a few of you as odd that the word for anti-Jewish prejudice is antisemitism and not something along the lines of ‘Judeophobia,’ and you’d be right in thinking that something is amiss here

‘Antisemitism’ didn’t have any common usage until the late 19th century, since Semitic refers to the grouping of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

We can trace its roots back to the French philosopher Ernest Renan (pictured), who wrote about the ‘Semitic races’ in terms of their inferiority to the higher so-called ‘Aryan races’

Should note that while Renan had a lot of views we’d considered bigoted and racist, his work is typically rejected by so-called ‘racial antisemites’ because he argued against Jews being a single racial category

Yes he had his own weird antisemitic racial theories but these aren’t from the same antisemitic well the Nazis drew from

The word ‘antisemitism’ was originally coined as part of a critical response to Renan’s ideas on racial hierarchies by Jewish Austrian academic Moritz Steinschneider (pictured)

Even at the time a lot of critics were concerned about this misuse of the word ‘semitic’ and the possibility of it detracting from the anti-Jewish prejudice at its core

This is why most modern scholars prefer to use ‘antisemitism’ over ‘anti-Semitism.’ Because it denotes it as a term specified to prejudice against Jews rather than the vaguely categorised ‘semites’

There was at one point a concerted effort led by figures like Leon Pinsker to establish ‘Judeophobia’ as an alternative but this failed to gain traction and we’ve been stuck with antisemitism ever since

If I've succeeded here you should now know where the word ‘antisemitism’ comes from and can correct people who try to use its vagueness to detract from the lived realities it describes

But the practical details still leave questions about the use and utility of the word itself, debates around which remain ongoing

I’ve got my personal views on this topic but I’ll outline those separately since they shouldn't be mixed in with the straightforward factual information gathering I've done here