Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

A popular though counter-intuitive urban legend is that, notwithstanding dictionary definitions and an extensive library of literature on the subject, the word antisemitism does not mean hostility to Jews.

The purpose of this truque is to imply that any complainant about Jew hate is either lying or ignorant. An anti Jewish extremist, Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, often asserts that she, being an Arab, is a Semite, whereas Jews are not. Indeed, we are often invited to ‘go back to Poland,’ as so many of our forefathers lived there and perished there during the Shoah. My own grandparents came from Poland and Russia but spoke Yiddish, not Polish or Russian, apart from a few spicy words. They left due to anti Jewish persecutions and pogroms. Were these events antisemitic, according to the revisionists? Or were Arabs spared? Certainly Hitler was on excellent terms with Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem so, according to the newly developed meaning of the word, you could not call Hitler antisemitic.

I will spare you details of the word anti-semitism [sic] being coined by Wilhelm Marr who founded the  League of Antisemites in 1879. Strangely enough, Marr married Jewish women, consecutively not concurrently, which goes to show that some of his best friends really were Jews.

Do we think the League of Antisemites objected to the presence of Arabs being absorbed into German professions and society? If you say so.

A person who argues that there is an identity called ‘Semitism’ may be referring to the speakers of semitic languages, which include Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Maltese and Aramaic. In antiquity, Akkadian , Ugaritic and Syriac were written and, presumably, spoken. Aramaic, which is found in the Hebrew bible in parts of the books of Daniel and Ezra, is still a living language in Syria. Aramaic is also the language of much of the two Talmuds and is presumed to be the language of Jesus, with some Aramaisms absorbed into the Greek of the New Testament.

Arabic is the most widely spoken of the semitic languages, since the Muslim conquests of the 7th century CE.

Those who want to change the meaning of antisemitism to anti Arabism, islamophobia or, more often, anti Palestinianism, are avoiding the charge of Jew hate which comes their way, most often under the name antisemitism. Indeed, they turn it around, saying, ‘I am the semite so you (usually a Jewish person) are the antisemite.’ You would not think such an argument had legs, but it does. I see it every day on social media, where the popular but erroneous platitudes are promulgated, insisting that Jews are not Jews (we are Poles), Palestinians are Hebrews (the Bnei Israel of the bible), Jesus was a Palestinian (born in Bethlehem, you see) and King David, second king of Israel and also born in Bethlehem was…well they haven’t said, as far as I know.

You may think there is too much silliness in these inversions of history and religion for them to gain traction but there is also a widespread desire to point out that Santa Claus and St George were both Turkish as also is Boris Johnson, simply to confound popular belief.

Personally, I have no attachment to the word antisemitism but I would not want to lose all the insightful books and articles which have been written about it. When leaders of the nations speak about it, they are not concerned with the social media argument that it is a misnomer.

When I am called ‘kike,’ ‘chosenite’ or ‘babykiller’ on social media, I do not suppose that they are saying I am Polish, even though they so often want me back in Lodz, whence my grandparents made their own Lech Lecha.