🇵🇸 single use plastique 🏴☠️ on Nostr: yeah the concept of "semite" as a racial category is absolutely rooted in 19th ...
yeah the concept of "semite" as a racial category is absolutely rooted in 19th century race science, of course, there are Semitic languages of which Hebrew, Arabic, as well as Coptic and many African languages share common lineage, but the idea of a semitic "race" is bullshit.
It is complicated as Jews broadly trace their ancestry back to ancient Hebrews, this is partly mythologized, but even accounting for occurrences of mass conversion, the social norms that encourage Jews to marry other Jews mean such a shared common ancestry is at least plausible for many/most, and this is why many European based Jews have traits more commonly found in the middle east than Europe, but on a long enough timeline basically everyone is related, and there is no such thing as a "jewish/semitic race" nor is ancestry the sole or primary factor in Jewish identity, rather than faith or cultural affiliation.
So Anti-Jewish or Jew-Hatred is probably a more accurate terms and less nebulous. But I do think there is a broader anti-semitism that includes both hatred for Jews and Arabs and all MENA peoples that goes back a very long time. The racist stereotypes pertaining to Jews and Arabs are quite similar, for example. So i find many Zionist critiques of the term to be problematic, since they would like to reject any shared heritage with Arabs or deny that islamophobia and anti-jewish hatred are historically related -- since that would implicate themselves in their anti-arab genocide.
If we want to really go back to the roots of anti-semitism broadly speaking all roads lead to Rome, and their colonial project in the middle east and north africa was anti-semitic in the broad sense, Carthagians referred to themselves as Canaani, i.e. from Canaan, and the cultural similarities between Carthagians and Jews was not lost on the Romans. So there's obviously a connection between the Roman genocide and occupation of Carthage(modern Lybia) and that of Judea / Palestine -- to be clear the Romans didn't have our modern conception of Race, and their proto anti-semitism is very different from what we have today, but it does has a direct influence on everything that came after it.
This structural anti-semitism of Rome was inherited by Christian Europe ( jew-hatred is baked into christian theology itself ) and prefigured many historical events, like the Crusades, or the Inquisition ( the Spanish inquisition in particularly was both Anti-Muslim and Anti-Jewish )
I understand taking such a long view is very messy, serious historians are weary of making such broad strokes, for at the very least it's very difficult to prove, and i've certainly made grave oversimplifications here and shouldn't be taken too literally. But from a political point of view I think it is necessary to root out this deep sickness endemic to Western Civilization itself.
It is complicated as Jews broadly trace their ancestry back to ancient Hebrews, this is partly mythologized, but even accounting for occurrences of mass conversion, the social norms that encourage Jews to marry other Jews mean such a shared common ancestry is at least plausible for many/most, and this is why many European based Jews have traits more commonly found in the middle east than Europe, but on a long enough timeline basically everyone is related, and there is no such thing as a "jewish/semitic race" nor is ancestry the sole or primary factor in Jewish identity, rather than faith or cultural affiliation.
So Anti-Jewish or Jew-Hatred is probably a more accurate terms and less nebulous. But I do think there is a broader anti-semitism that includes both hatred for Jews and Arabs and all MENA peoples that goes back a very long time. The racist stereotypes pertaining to Jews and Arabs are quite similar, for example. So i find many Zionist critiques of the term to be problematic, since they would like to reject any shared heritage with Arabs or deny that islamophobia and anti-jewish hatred are historically related -- since that would implicate themselves in their anti-arab genocide.
If we want to really go back to the roots of anti-semitism broadly speaking all roads lead to Rome, and their colonial project in the middle east and north africa was anti-semitic in the broad sense, Carthagians referred to themselves as Canaani, i.e. from Canaan, and the cultural similarities between Carthagians and Jews was not lost on the Romans. So there's obviously a connection between the Roman genocide and occupation of Carthage(modern Lybia) and that of Judea / Palestine -- to be clear the Romans didn't have our modern conception of Race, and their proto anti-semitism is very different from what we have today, but it does has a direct influence on everything that came after it.
This structural anti-semitism of Rome was inherited by Christian Europe ( jew-hatred is baked into christian theology itself ) and prefigured many historical events, like the Crusades, or the Inquisition ( the Spanish inquisition in particularly was both Anti-Muslim and Anti-Jewish )
I understand taking such a long view is very messy, serious historians are weary of making such broad strokes, for at the very least it's very difficult to prove, and i've certainly made grave oversimplifications here and shouldn't be taken too literally. But from a political point of view I think it is necessary to root out this deep sickness endemic to Western Civilization itself.