Origin of the Term Anti-Semite |
Anti-Semitism The
Torah tells us in Berayshit (Genesis) chapters 5-9 that Noah survived the great
flood and that his ark or boat landed on Mt. Ararat. After landing, Noah and his
three sons emerged. His sons were Shem (name), Ham, and Japheth. According to
the Torah, Shem became the father of the Jewish people, Ham moved south and
fathered the African and Egyptian people, and Japheth became the father of the
Mediterranean people. In
the 1880’s, linguists in Germany and France labeled various related languages
as belonging together. English was evidently
related to German, Danish, and Latin, and was included among the Indo-European
languages. For
convenience sake, linguists then called Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic Semitic
languages as they were all related
and because Genesis says that Shem or Sem was the father of the Jewish and other
people living in Israel and surrounding areas. In
1879, a German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, concluded that ant-Jewish hate was
gradually diminishing and that fewer people believed that Jews were drinking the
blood of Christian children or were
poisoning the drinking water or were “Christ killers.” Marr attributed this
decline in religious hate to the rise of science and therefore concluded that
anti-Jewish hate should be given a so-called scientific basis. He therefore
founded THE LEAGUE OF ANTISEMITES, claiming that Jews were biologically and
racially different from normal people and should therefore be exterminated. His
views spread first to France and then to other European countries, and are most
popular among Arabs and Muslims today. The
Nazi (German for Nazional or national) party coined the slogan “Die Religion
ist einerlei, in der Rasse liegt die Schweinerei,” or “Religion makes no
difference, the swinishness lies in the race.” This
meant that conversion to Christianity could no longer save Jews, as their very
being was viewed as unfit to live. Moreover, we were now swine, a word first
used by Spanish Christians, who called Jews Marranos, which means swine. The media repeat the phrase “anti-Semitism” although American Jews do not speak Hebrew. But then, the media claim that we have had 45 presidents when there have been only 44 including Trump, and tell us that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery when several slave states were included in the Union and not the Confederacy. Shalom
u'vracha. Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Gender, Sex, & Status (2019). |