Some really important words tend to become more vague and generalized to the point where they don’t mean what they used to. A lot of times that’s fine – doesn’t create a lot of problems. Other times, it makes it hard for us to know what each of us is talking about. Or it makes it easy to use a word as a tool, on the assumption that people will not know that it doesn’t mean what it used to.
I showed how that is true of the terms “consciousness,” and “socialism” in the previous post. Now I turn to a term that is far more fraught on a number of levels: “antisemitism.”
It’s a term that once had, can have, and should have, a specific meaning, and most people don’t know it. When used with precision, the term does not refer to opposition to Jews for their religious practices and culture, to Judaism as a whole, to the modern state of Israel, or to the policies and practices of any particular Israeli government and military. All these things themselves of course ARE opposed by many people, and the conflicts engendered by the antagonism can and has led to very serious – often completely horrific – problems.
But they aren’t the same thing as antisemitism and if we don’t use our terms precisely we end up creating more problems for ourselves and others.
Antisemitism (in its technical meaning) did not and could not
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The Nazis admired the American development of eugenics, which claimed to make a science of assessing people’s genetic quality and was used to justify forced sterilization. Previously, racial ideas aimed to stratify the population, but eugenics sought to eliminate “bad genes” from the population. The Nazis took advantage of this veneer of science.
In Sunday school, I learned “Red or yellow, black or white … Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Did you?
Well, I will say any sort of prejudice against any individual that is based on a preconceived notion concerning that person’s religion or ethnicity is still a bad way to start a conversation with a goal for mutual understanding! I will say, facetiously, in a perfect world we’d all be the same.
Tangential to the discussion, I’ve always been interested in how Jews were vilified as “Christ killers”, when the apparent goal of God was to sacrifice his son for the good of mankind. In this light the actions of the Jews before Pilate was an integral part of divine plan, right? Should not their actions have been necessary – even directed by God and ultimately acceptable?
That’s an issue often raised with respect to Judas. In his case, what he did really did lead to Jesus’ death. But I don’t think most people would say, “Judas crucified Jesus” (and mean it literally)
Good point. Historically it is well documented and acknowledged that Rome crucified Jesus. The Bible may not be the best stifle history. Yes, the high Jewish court—-not the Jewish people—acting as a puppet government may have enabled Rome. To use the label “Christ killers” is one more atrocity committed by the state church of Rome and perpetrated by the Vatican.
Do you think anti-semitic tropes and harmful conspiracy theories that have historically been and continue to be associated with Jews complicates your distinction or do they fit into the category of “opposition to Jews due to their genetic makeup?”
I’d say that it is horrible, often terrifying, crazily dangerous, and many times life-threatening; but it’s different. It’s a different excuse for persecuting and even killing people you don’t like and don’t want around.
I’ve heard “Red brown yellow, black and white”
Bart, An excellent and well-needed post!
Understanding and using accurate language and words is often difficult. People have gotten lazy with grammar, enamored with slang de jour and fond of compressed and frequently over-hyped messaging. Many have trouble understanding why certain words or phrases are much more hurtful than expected. The misuse of the terms anti-Judaism, antisemitism and Zionism seem to be everywhere and rarely are the terms clearly defined — which creates many unfortunate problems. The similar challenges with defining consciousness (or sanity!) and explaining various political and economic systems add to the confusion.
As a member of an interfaith organization, if have seen the many problems with just defining a religion. The world populations have grown tremendously while cultural roots that supported faith understandings have been fading away. In this blog, we see how far removed we have become from a 1st century understanding of Christianity and Judaism. So many meanings have been hijacked over the centuries.
Q: Besides what was covered here, what is your biggest (or dangerous) pet-peeve of misused words or phrases from NT biblical studies? (excluding the OT since there is abundance of words and phrases to choose from there already…)
Ah… I suppose sticking with modern social issues, the modern opposition to “homosexuality” because of “what the Bible says.” With respect to interpretive issues, maybe the claim that Jesus had a “spiritual body” at the resurrectoin shows that he was raised in the spirit, not physcially. Long stories on both of them.
As a “definitions” guy, I appreciate your post (I have the book, too). If you want to tackle another misused/overused term, how about “lie, lying, liar”, etc. What is a “lie”? For a more nuanced overused word, try “hate, hater” etc. Define ‘hate” (may get the same response as the classic definition of “pornography”*) These are polemics used in direct proportion to the degree of ideology of the user. I suspect biblical scholarship is not exempt from this sort of thing. *” Can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”
Yup. When I did my books on forgery I had to be very precise on wht I meant byt “lie.” And “hate” of course, is a problem most bible readers haven’t thought much about, since the Gospel of Luke says you have to hate our parents if you want to follow Jesus!
In looking at the many definitions of Jew, Jewish, Semite, and Antisemite online, it is clear that there is no generally agreed upon meaning. The definitions of Antisemite generally involve hatred or bad treatment to people because they are Jewish. But then there are many conflicting definitions of Jewish. And that means the word “Antisemite” is ambiguous. The racial theories that you mention is one possible way of looking at it. But “Jewish” people have been systematically mistreated centuries before race theory was formulated.
The ambiguity of these words has company in the ongoing debate over how words like “atheist” and “agnostic” should be defined. There are websites out there exclusively devoted to debating various definitions. Even the sciences can fall victim to silly word debates; a notable example is the ongoing debate over how to define a “planet” and whether or not “Pluto” qualifies. For me, I use words like “Jew”, “Jewish”, “Semite”, and “Antisemite” with scare quotes around them because of their vagueness. The solution is to recognize that people are not labels.
The fact theat there is not general agreement is precisely the reason we have to have precision to agree on meaning; withoug differentiations, we’re burned.
But how do you get people who disagree on what words mean to agree to a meaning? As Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti always said, “The word is not the thing”.
Only through rhetorical persuasion. Usually doesn’t work. Ain’t it a shame?
I recall one thinker tying this to the Declaration of Independence: if our founding document declares that all men are created equal, how do you justify some men being slaves? The only way to resolve the contradiction is to claim that not all “men” are fully human.
What’s especially interesting is that Brazil, for example, had no such egalitarian claim in its founding documents, yet had far more slaves than the United States.. and didn’t develop the same kind of racial discrimination after abolition that we saw in the US.
Why did they use the word “Semitic,” as there are Semitic people who are not Jews and the word is used as in “Semitic languages”?
Yes, originally it was a linguistic term for a group of languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, etc). But when it was first used as a reference to *people* in 1879, it was not in reference to anyone who spoke those languages but to a specific “race” — Jews. For the first users, opposition to Jews — “antisemitism” — was a good thing, since it meant opposing an inferior race in the attempt to improve the human condition.
Anti-Judaism is simply the ancient form of anti-Semitism, as defined by the anti defamation league.
The Spanish Inquisition was anti-Semitic. Jews were not even safe if they converted.
However, I agree with you, being against the current Israeli governmental polices is not being anti-Semitic. The governmental officials calling their critics anti-Semitic are grandstanding and purposely misusing the term.
I very much think that 19th century race theories created a different beast with different outcomes.
I agree with you. Ancient and medieval prejudices were supercharged in the 19th and 20th centuries with the rise of eugenics.
Thank you for the post.
In the Gosplels,Jesus is portrayed as crossing the boundary between Jews and Samaritans. Similarly, Paul’s statement in Galatians 3:28 that there is “neither Jew nor Greek” seems to challenge ethnic divisions within the community of believers. Yet in the US during the 1960s, some white evangelicals, particularly in the South, appealed to the Bible to oppose the racial integration.
This raises a question about interpretation. No body of law can explicitly anticipate every circumstance, so individual provisions are sometimes interpreted in light of the purpose and spirit of the law as a whole. Is there an analogous tradition in biblical interpretation—one that seeks to understand individual passages in light of scripture’s broader ethical vision?
The difficulty, of course, is that the Bible comprises many texts whose perspectives do not always agree. Readers can therefore privilege passages that support their existing prejudices while disregarding those that challenge them. To my mind, this risks reducing scripture to a collection of convenient justifications. There is a troubling irony here: those who claim to uphold the Bible’s authority may, through such selective reading, undermine the integrity of the very text they profess to revere.
Yes, I’d say traditional Christian theology does precisely that — making one author/book/passage/verse mean what is brought into him/it from other passages of Scripture. And most readers do that as well. Not jsut about ethics but about beliefs, practices, etc.
To me anti-Semitism is prejudice against Jews. I think that this has existed as long as Jews have. If it was expressed at different times entirely in religious terminology or in the terminology of inherited characteristics it is still, under that definition, the same thing. The question in evaluating (say) Juvenal’s negative view of Jewish treatment of others in obedience to Moses’ supposedly misanthropic ‘secret book’ and the question of evaluating negative attitudes to Israel these days is the same, really. Do these attitudes, whether or not religion comes into it, all express at least a degree of prejudice, therefore are anti-Semitic, or whether they aren’t anti-Semitic because they express no prejudice but reason only?
I’m trying to argue that there are different grounds for people hating and persecuting Jews, and it is important to recognize their differences . Otherwise, for example, we lose sight of the particuar horrors associated with each, e.g., the Holocaust. The rationale for the camps was very different from the rationale for the pogroms. And if you want to oppose hateful acts of persecution, torture, and slaughter, you have to understand what is driving them, individually
Thanks for stimulating a rational discussion about the historical baggage carried by Judaism in the modern world. Clearly, the term Anti-Semitism has indeed been inflated beyond precise meaning. By the same token, the word genocide has also been hyperbolized into a dilute version of it’s former meaning as well, destroying any hope of revealing a reasonable perspective on the current situation in Gaza.
Anti-Semitism is certainly a thing, yet people have struggled to define it. I’m not sure Ehrman’s definition limiting it to modern racist versions will work. In fact, it makes me a little nervous. I find the following books to be insightful:
David Nirenburg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition
James Carrol, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews — a History
David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
I think it should make someone nervous only if they are thinking that it will minimize the opposition to anti-Judaism in our world; for me it heightens the opposition by recognizing their are different ways/excuses for hating and persecuting Jews, and that they each have to be fought on their own terms.
Good. You correctly read my concern, and I find your comment to be perceptive