Semitic people

This article is about the racial and ethnic term popular 1 Ethnicity and race
in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For the history of
ancient groups who spoke Semitic languages, see ancient Further information: Archaeogenetics of the Near East,
Semitic-speaking peoples.
Caucasian race, Hamitic, and Scientic racism
The term Semitic people or Semitic cultures (from the In the racialist classications of Carleton S. Coon, the

This T and O map, from the rst printed version of Isidore of

Seville's Etymologiae, identies the three known continents as
populated by descendants of Sem (Shem), Iafeth (Japheth) and
Cham (Ham).

Semitic peoples were considered to be members of the

Caucasian race, not dissimilar in appearance to the neighbouring Indo-European, Northwest Caucasian, Berber
and Kartvelian-speaking peoples of the region.[10] As language studies are interwoven with cultural studies, the
term also came to describe the religions (ancient Semitic
and Abrahamic) and Semitic-speaking ethnicities as well
by
biblical "Shem", Hebrew: )was a term for people or as the history of these varied cultures as associated
[11]
close
geographic
and
linguistic
distribution.
cultures who speak or spoke the Semitic languages. The
terminology was rst used in the 1770s by members of Some recent genetic studies have found (by analysis of the
the Gttingen School of History, who derived the name DNA of Semitic-speaking peoples) that they have some
from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of common ancestry. Although no signicant common
Genesis.[2] The term Semitic, together with the parallel mitochondrial results have been found, Y-chromosomal
terms Hamitic and Japhetic, is now largely obsolete out- links between modern Semitic-speaking peoples of the
side of linguistics.[3][4][5] However, in archaeology, the Middle East like Arabs, Hebrews, Mandaeans, Syriacsterm is sometimes used informally as a kind of short- Arameans, Samaritans and Assyrians have proved fruithand for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.[5]
ful, despite dierences contributed from other groups
Various scholars have stated that the concept of (see Y-chromosomal Aaron).
The rst depiction of historical ethnology of the world separated into the Biblical sons of Noah: Semitic, Hamitic and
Japhetic, 1771, Gatterer's Einleitung in die Synchronistische
Universalhistorie[1]

Semitic ethnicity, culture or Proto-Semites should be A DNA study of Jews and Palestinian Arabs (including Bedouins) found that these were more closely related
avoided[6][7][8] or does not exist.[9]
1

2
to each other than to people of the Arabian Peninsula,
Ethiopian Semitic-speaking people (Amharas, Tigre people and Tigrayans), and the Arabic speakers of North
Africa.[12][13]
Genetic studies indicate that modern Jews (Ashkenazi,
Sephardic and Mizrahi specically), Levantine Arabs,
Assyrians, Samaritans, Syriacs-Arameans, Maronites,
Druze, Mandaeans, and Mhallami, all have an ancient
indigenous common Near Eastern heritage which can
be genetically mapped back to the ancient Fertile Crescent, but often also display genetic proles distinct from
one another, indicating the dierent histories of these
peoples.[14]

REFERENCES

schneider, in his periodical of Jewish letters Hamaskir

(3 (Berlin 1860), 16), discusses an article by Heymann
Steinthal[16] criticising Renans article New Considerations on the General Character of the Semitic Peoples,
In Particular Their Tendency to Monotheism.[17] 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 selsh racial instincts. Steinthal summed
up these predispositions as Semitism, and so Steinschneider characterised Renans ideas as anti-Semitic
prejudice.[18]

In 1879 the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, in a pamphlet called Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums ber
2 Antisemitism and Semiticisation das Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanicism
over Judaism), began the politicisation of the term by
speaking of a struggle between Jews and Germans. He acMain article: Antisemitism
cused them of being liberals, a people without roots who
The terms anti-Semite or antisemitism came by a
had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marrs
adherents founded the League for Anti-Semitism[19]
which concerned itself entirely with anti-Jewish political
action.
Objections to the usage of the term, such as the obsolete
nature of the term Semitic as a racial term and the exclusion of discrimination against non-Jewish Semitic peoples, have been raised since at least the 1930s.[20][21]

3 See also
Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples
Hamitic
Japhetites
Generations of Noah

4 References
[1] Einleitung in die synchronistische universalhistorie, Gatterer, 1771. Described rst ethnic use of the term Semitic
by: (1) A note on the history of 'Semitic', 2003, by Martin
Baasten; and (2) Taal-, land- en volkenkunde in de achttiende eeuw, 1994, by Han Vermeulen (in Dutch).

1879 statute of the Antisemitic League, the organization which

rst popularized the term

circuitous route to refer more narrowly to anyone who was

hostile or discriminatory towards Jews in particular.[15]
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 eorts to dene racial character. Moritz Stein-

[2] Baasten, Martin (2003). A Note on the History of

'Semitic'". Hamlet on a Hill: Semitic and Greek Studies
Presented to Professor T. Muraoka on the Occasion of His
Sixty-fth Birthday. Peeters Publishers. p. 5773. ISBN
9789042912151.
[3] Anidjar 2008, p. (Foreword): This collection of essays explores the now mostly extinct notion of Semites.
Invented in the nineteenth century and essential to the
making of modern conceptions of religion and race, the
strange unity of Jew and Arab under one term, Semite
(the opposing term was Aryan), and the circumstances

that brought about its disappearance constitute the subject

of this volume.
[4] Anidjar 2008, p. 6: To a large extent, or rather, to a quite
complete extent, Semites were, like their ever so distant
relatives - the Aryans - a concrete gment of the Western imagination, the peculiar imagination that concerns
me in the chapters that follow. And just as the witches (the
simultaneous ecacy and deep unreliability of spectral
evidence), Semites were - I write in the past tense because Semites are a thing of the past, ephemeral beings
long vanished as such - Semites were, then, something of
a hypothesis (Chapter 1), contemporary with, and constitutive of, that other powerfully incarnate ction named
secularism (Chapter 2). Again, and as underscored by
Edward Said, who raIsed anew the Semitic question, the
role of the imagination can hardly be downplayed.
[5] Lewis, Bernard (1987). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conict and Prejudice. W W Norton & Co
Inc. ISBN 0393304205. The confusion between race and
language goes back a long way, and was compounded by
the rapidly changing content of the word race in European and later in American usage. Serious scholars have
pointed outrepeatedly and ineectually-that Semitic
is a linguistic and cultural classication, denoting certain
languages and in some contexts the literatures and civilizations expressed in those languages. As a kind of shorthand, it was sometimes retained to designate the speakers
of those languages. At one time it might thus have had a
connotation of race, when that word itself was used to designate national and cultural entities. It has nothing whatever to do with race in the anthropological sense that is
now common usage. A glance at the presentday speakers
of Arabic, from Khartoum to Aleppo and from Mauritania to Mosul, or even of Hebrew speakers in the modern
state of Israel, will suce to show the enormous diversity
of racial types.
[6] Liverani1995, p. 392: A more critical look at this
complex of problems should advise employing today the
term and the concept Semites exclusively in its linguistic
sense, and, on the other hand, tracing back every cultural
fact to its concrete historical environment. The use of the
term Semitic in culture, subject as it is to arbitrary simplications, shows methodological risks which exceed by
far the possibility of positive historical analysis. In any
case the Semitic character of every cultural fact is a problem which in each situation must be ascenained in its limits and in its historical setting (both in time and in the social environment), and may not be assumed as obvious or
traced back to a presumed Proto-Semitic culture, statically conceived.
[7] On the use of the terms (anti-)Semitic and (anti-) Zionist in modern Middle Eastern discourse, Orientalia Suecana LXI Suppl. (2012) by Lutz Eberhard Edzard: In linguistics context, the term Semitic is generally speaking
non-controversial... As an ethnic term, Semitic should
best be avoided these days, in spite of ongoing genetic
research (which also is supported by the Israeli scholarly
community itself) that tries to scientically underpin such
a concept.
[8] Review of The Canaanites (1964) by Marvin Pope:
The term Semitic, coined by Schlozer in 1781, should

be strictly limited to linguistic matters since this is the only

area in which a degree of objectivity is attainable. The
Semitic languages comprise a fairly distinct linguistic family, a fact appreciated long before the relationship of the
Indo-European languages was recognized. The ethnography and ethnology of the various peoples who spoke or
still speak Semitic languages or dialects is a much more
mixed and confused matter and one over which we have
little scientic control.
[9] Glckner, Olaf; Fireberg, Haim (25 September 2015).
Being Jewish in 21st-Century Germany. De Gruyter. p.
200. ISBN 978-3-11-035015-9. ...there is no Semitic ethnicity, only Semitic languages
[10] The Races of Europe by Carleton Stevens Coon. From
Chapter XI: The Mediterranean World Introduction:
This third racial zone stretches from Spain across the
Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence along the
southern Mediterranean shores into Arabia, East Africa,
Mesopotamia, and the Persian highlands; and across
Afghanistan into India.
[11] Semite. Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary,
Eleventh Edition.
[12] Nebel, Almut; Filon, Dvora; Brinkmann, Bernd; Majumder, Partha P.; Faerman, Marina; Oppenheim, Ariella
(2001). The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part
of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East. American Journal of Human Genetics. 69 (5): 1095
1112. doi:10.1086/324070. PMC 1274378 . PMID
11573163.
[13] Alshamali, Farida; Pereira, Lusa; Budowle, Bruce;
Poloni, Estella S.; Currat, Mathias (2009). Local
Population Structure in Arabian Peninsula Revealed
by Y-STR Diversity. Hum Hered. 68: 4554.
doi:10.1159/000210448. PMID 19339785.
[14] Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, p.
243
[15] Anti-Semitism. Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.
[16] Reprinted G. Karpeles (ed.), Steinthal H., Ueber Juden
und Judentum, Berlin 1918, pp. 91 .
[17] Published in the Journal Asiatique, 1859
[18] Alex Bein, The Jewish Question: Biography of a World
Problem, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990, p.
594, ISBN 0-8386-3252-1 quoting the Hebrew Encyclopaedia Ozar Ysrael, (edited Jehuda Eisenstadt, London
1924, 2: 130)
[19] Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of
Anti-Semitism, Oxford University Press, USA, 1987
[20] Sevenster, Jan Nicolaas (1975). The Roots of Pagan AntiSemitism in the Ancient World. Brill Archive. pp. 1
2. ISBN 90-04-04193-1. It has long been realised that
there are objections to the term anti-Semitism and therefore an endeavour has been made to nd a word which
better interprets the meaning intended. Already in 1936

Bolkestein, for example, wrote an article on Het antisemietisme in de oudheid (Anti-Semitism in the ancient
world) in which the word was placed between quotation
marks and a preference was expressed for the term hatred of the Jews Nowadays the term anti-Judaism is
often preferred. It certainly expresses better than antiSemitism the fact that it concerns the attitude to the Jews
and avoids any suggestion of racial distinction, which
was not or hardly, a factor of any signicance in ancient times. For this reason Leipoldt preferred to speak
of anti-Judaism when writing his Antisemitsmus in der
alien Welt (l933). Bonsirven also preferred this word to
Anti-Semitism, mot moderne qui implique une thorie
des races.
[21] Zimmermann, Moshe (5 March 1987). Wilhelm Marr :
The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism: The Patriarch of AntiSemitism. Oxford University Press, USA. p. 112. ISBN
978-0-19-536495-8. The term anti-Semitism was unsuitable from the beginning for the real essence of Jewhatred, which remained anchored, more or less, in the
Christian tradition even when it moved via the natural sciences, into racism. It is doubtful whether the term which
was rst publicizes in an institutional context (the AntiSemitic League) would have appeared at all if the AntiChancellor League, which fought Bismarcks policy, had
not been in existence since 1875. The founders of the new
Organization adopted the elements of anti and league,
and searched for the proper term: Marr exchanged the
term Jew for Semite which he already favored. It is
possible that the shortened form Sem is used with such
frequency and ease by Marr (and in his writings) due to its
literary advantage and because it reminded Marr of Sem
Biedermann, his Jewish employer from the Vienna period.

Bibliography
Anidjar, Gil (2008). Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-80475694-5.
Liverani, Mario (January 1995). Semites. In Georey W. Bromiley. The International Standard
Bible Encyclopedia. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
pp. 387392. ISBN 978-0-8028-3784-4.

External links
Semitic genetics
Semitic language family tree included under AfroAsiatic in SILs Ethnologue.
The south Arabian origin of ancient Arabs
The Edomite Hyksos connection
The perished Arabs
The Midianites of the north
Ancient Semitic peoples (video)

EXTERNAL LINKS

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