this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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There are approximately 330 million Semitic people in the world. Around 15.7 milllion (around 4.8%) of them are Jewish.
If the common usage of "anti-semitic" excludes the vast majority of Semitic people, it's an outdated, racist term.
We should either drop it from our vocabulary or use it in an inclusive way.
I think you misunderstand my comment. I mean "Semitic" itself is an pseudo-scientific, outdated, and perhaps racist term (other than it's usage in linguistics). It comes from the late 19th ~ early 20th century trend of linking linguistic groupings with race/physical characteristics without any reasonable scientific justification, in order to discriminate – Semitic was used in opposition to "Aryan" and sometimes "Caucasian" (equally pseudoscientific and racist usages of those terms) and was primarily part of the language of the predecessors of Nazism. You could of course guess how anti-semitism underwent semantic narrowing to specifically being discrimination against Jews based on that.
Generally the term "Semitic" shouldn't be used as a racial or ethnic categorization of Arabs/Jews/etc. just as "Aryan" shouldn't be used in its Nazi sense or "Caucasian" shouldn't be used to mean "light-skinned people from the near-Mediterranean world. But more relevantly "anti-semitic" no longer is synonymous with "bigotry against Semites", due to semantic drift it specifically means "bigotry against Jews".
That's fine. If we don't want to use the word we don't need to. If we're going to use it then let's use it in a non-racist way.
It's kind of bizzare to say claim that we shouldn't use the term "Semite" because it's outdated but then continue to use "antisemite" and claim it's only about a tiny subsection of the people that "Semite" used to refer to.
Because "antisemitic" and "Semite"/"Semitic" are completely different words. "Antisemitic" is no longer semantically just the "anti-" affix plus "Semitic". That's just how semantic drift works unfortunately. It's become pretty much completely disconnected from the base morpheme, and most people that use the word don't even know that the word "Semitic" actually exists in the original sense – it's practically a bound morpheme now, outside of its use in linguistics. Semantic narrowing is a normal part of language change.
If we're going by current usage rather than historical precedent, it doesn't matter that "antisemitc" was originally coined to refer to hatred of Jews.
In that case we would look to the very common usage that includes hatred of all the other speakers of Semitic languages.
Or we could use the extremist definition of, "Any criticism of Israel." If we go by that definition a whole lot of people (including many Jews) would also qualify.