The quibbling over the term’s misnomial use is rather moot since it is hardly unusual for hatred of Jews to overlap with hatred of Arabs. The tendency to liken Muslims to Judaists (as documented in Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy) is prototypical of this, and more recently there was an incident only a few years ago when some Zionists almost assaulted a taxi driver because he looked Arab instead of Ashkenazi, so he had to loudly clarify that he was Jewish. Zionism may not harm Jews as harshly as Arab gentiles, but Zionism’s harm to Arab gentiles does have an echoic effect on many (especially lower‐class) Jews.
Furthermore, there are plenty of respectful, well educated Judaists who do admit to the existence of irreligious Jews and ethnic Jews, because a common Jewish tradition is that if at least your mother is Jewish, then so are you, even if you have never practised Judaism before. This is a tradition that predates the ethnonationalist fad of the long 19th century, and it is unnecessary to argue that Judaists are ‘racist’ for agreeing with or maintaining this tradition.
I feel like this topic is turning into another one of those ‘white Jews aren’t oppressed anymore’ dramafests, so I may consider locking or eliminating it soon as such discussions are rarely productive.
There is a glaring factual error w/r/t assimilated jews: they were often the targets of expropriations that acted as a form of primitive accumulation during the emergence of capitalism. Also the concept of Jewish ‘semitism’ or Jews as a ‘semitic race’ was imposed from without by white reactionaries campaigning against the ‘nefarious influence’ of a supposed ‘lesser race’.
It’s a mostly ridiculous term now and is mostly a legacy thing. The actual content of the word does not refer to the Semitic Languages or to people of supposed Mesopotamian extraction.
crackers are dumb so they keep adopting easily falsifiable epithets like “semitic” and “aryan” which just make it harder to take them seriously (jewish crackers are still crackers)
“antisemitism” was the fresh acceptable face of “jew-hate”, afaik…
anyway, converted jews were famously treated the same as other christians in spain for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converso
“antisemitism” was the fresh acceptable face of “jew-hate”, afaik…
it’s just Judeophobia
words have meaningsconverted jews were famously treated the same as other christians in spain for example
euros killing other euros doesn’t make them non-euro
Bengalis killing Rohingya doesn’t make them not Bengali/Indian
Mizrahis killing Palestinians doesn’t make Palestinians non-Mideasternsure, not arguing that they were spanish jews being killed/harassed by spanish christians.
but european jews were not (always) accepted as soon as they converted. european antisemitism runs too deep for that.
No, the word it was replacing was “Judenhass”, literally “Jew hate”. Like you can call it judeophobia if you want, but it doesn’t have a different meaning - they all refer to the exact same phenomenon.
Arab hate is still literally antisemitic
It is well beneath us to play around obfuscating meanings by appealing to the root words - arab hate is hate against semitic peoples, but antisemitic/antisemitism is a word specifically created to describe anti Jewish sentiment. Twisting the established meaning so we can say Israel is antisemitic doesn’t help or convince anyone - There is plenty of evidence that Israel hates arabs, and plenty of evidence israel is actually antisemitic, making life worse for Jews outside of its borders. We don’t need to conflate the two to make the case for either.
but antisemitic/antisemitism is a word specifically created to describe anti Jewish sentiment
“anti-Jewish” also describes that perfectly so that argument’s a nonstarter
“antisemitism” is just another example in a very long history of “whites retconning english words to erase non-white history”
since the rest of the world speaks english out of necessity, it’s in our (non-white) interest to police the english language and keep it neutral, instead of accepting the nefarious feeling-based whims of whites, which only ever go in the direction of white supremacy
words like “Caucasian”, “Semitic”, “Aryan”, “Indian”, and many more are just retconned cracker words which were done so for white supremacist purposes
“Caucasian” was done so in order to usurp a “prestigious” zone near the Caucasus, where fossilized Indoeuropeans were found
“Aryan” in order to usurp the prestigious accomplishments of India
“Indian” in order to pretend the Native Americans were foreign to the continent
“Semitic” in order to emphasize the Ashkenazi Jews’ barely present foreign origins (even Yiddish was a vast majority Germanic language)The history of how these words came to be is literally just racist whites repeating the lie long enough in order to get the mass of white people into a fervor. I prefer no lies, and especially no white supremacist lies, so I will always go by the original definitions
So yea, anti-Palestinians are anti-semitic, and the Aryans were brown. Sorry!
It’s german, not english. I’m done here, you don’t get to speak to me until you actually do some investigation into the term and its use instead of appealing to its meaning in ancient greek.
