Why Anti-Semitism Doesn't Exist

Using the term cedes an argument no Christian should want to lose.

A number of things can have you instantly ‘canceled’ into today’s political (or religious) climate. Being unkind to animals. Hurting a child. Not returning the shopping cart to the cart corral, stuff like that. But one, perhaps more than any other, is sure to be your undoing. And that’s to be labeled an anti-semite.

But, as with so many things, the devil is in the details. And that’s especially true with language. Little ‘jots’ and tittles,’ as the Bible calls them, make all the difference in the world. In order to make an argument, one has to organize their thoughts into words. In fact, thoughts are fairly useless without words, which is why memories don’t begin to be stored in the human brain until they are old enough to develop speech. In some weird neurological way, knowing words helps a person think and then store those thoughts so they can be recalled. Words are the Dewey Decimal System, or the Card Catalogue (everyone over 40 gets that reference) of the brain.

Because of this, when the devil seeks to take captive humans and commandeer their brain, he will most often capture their speech. By controlling words, he can control thoughts. This is why censorship is so devilish; it’s not about controlling speech, it’s about controlling thoughts.

I’ll give you just one example of this precept, before moving on to the point. More than a decade ago I repeated so frequently I felt like a broken record, that Christians were doing themselves an incredible disservice by using the word ‘transgender’ without scare quotes. Even and especially those Christians who denied that transgenderism was Biblical or scientific, erred tragically on this point. The term, ‘transgender,’ presupposes that transgenderism exists. Using the term presupposes that it’s possible that someone transition their gender.

But the Christian argument, which happens to be the scientific argument as well, is that no one in the history of mankind has ever transitioned their gender. The devil took this word, gender, hostage in the 1990s. Until this era, gender and sex were used interchangeably. It was President Bill Clinton who first had this word altered on American passport documentation, and it was done intentionally to differentiate between the two ideas, when the English language had never made such a distinction before. Gender is sex. Sex is gender. These are not things that can be transitioned. The scientist says this is because gender is molecular. The Christian says this is because it is “God who created them, both male and female, and both male and female, God created them” (twice the Scripture repeats this, in both the Old Testament and the New.

Likewise, by using the term “anti-semitism,” Christians are capitulating on a very important Biblical doctrine. And that Biblical doctrine, love itself, is the very bulwark the world needs to prevent the unjust hatred of anyone because of their ancestry, genetic markers, or nationality.

The Biblical doctrine of God’s omnibenevolent love is found in Romans 2:11.

For there is no respect of persons with God

And that’s the verse we need to extrapolate and understand. When we do, we’ll never use the term ‘anti-semitism’ again.

THE HISTORY OF ANTI-SEMITISM

The term "anti-semitism" was first used by the German journalist Willhelm Marr in the late 19th century. Specifically, Marr coined the term in 1879 with his pamphlet titled "The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism,” where he used “Antisemitismus” to describe prejudice against Jews. However, Marr's use of the term was not meant to describe opposition to all Semitic peoples, but was specifically targeted at Jews, reflecting a racial and cultural bias.

Semitic peoples refer to a group of ethnic groups originating from the Middle East and North Africa, speaking Semitic languages, which are a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. The term "Semitic" comes from the biblical figure Shem, one of Noah's sons, and was later used by scholars to classify a group of related languages and the peoples who spoke them.

Key Semitic peoples include:

• Arabs, who speak Arabic, the most widely spoken Semitic language today.

• Jews, historically speaking Hebrew, though Hebrew died out completely by the 20th Century, and had to be re-learned, and there’s no good way to determine if it’s being spoken or used correctly today. Jews might speak this new form of Hebrew, Yiddish, or other languages depending on their cultural and historical context.

• Assyrians, who speak Neo-Aramaic languages

There are also many others. The first time I realized that these groups were all Semitic was when I developed a friendship with the President of the Assyrian Democratic Movement while in Iraq, Yonadam Kanna, in 2004. He served until 2023. In an interview with Kanna, which he asked me to join him on Kurdish television, he spoke passionately about anti-semitism, but was applying it to himself, who was not a Jew.

He later explained that he did this for propagandic purposes. He was aware that the term was invented to refer exclusively to the Jewish people, but believe the Assyrians could benefit from American resistance to anti-semitism by taking the label for himself, considering he was technically semitic.

The term "Semitic" in a linguistic and cultural context does not imply a single, unified ethnic or racial group but rather a shared language family and cultural heritage.

ANTI-SEMITISM, A TERM OF ZIONIST INVENTION

If you’re a regular reader of Insight to Incite, you’re aware that I use the term “Zionist” academically and with its dictionary definition. It simply refers to the belief, whether held by Jew or Gentile, that supports the creation of a Jewish political state in Palestine (or elsewhere in the world).

Zionism has some meager roots in the 1700s, but it didn’t reach any significance until the last decade of the 19th Century, and didn’t become widely supported until after the First World War. It was during this era that the British, eager to colonize Palestine as an important military and trade outpost in route to India, that they began to support sending European Jews to either colonize the area, or to establish a puppet state under British control. And as I explained in my three-part series on Scofield, the growth of Darby’s Dispensationalism and its popularization through the Oxford Study Bible (on which they attached Scofield’s name) was instrumental in convincing Americans that it was the Christian duty to serve the cause of the Jews.

As you’ll find in the posts, hyperlinked above, the desire to establish a Jewish state served two primary goals. The first of which was to benefit Great Britain’s empire. The second of which was to rid Europe of Jews, who had been consistently exiled from nation after nation, due to a combination of tragic prejudice but also - and in large part - due to well-established, historically documented misdeeds related to financial crimes and political influence.

With Jews having run out of countries in Europe to live peaceably, thanks to this long and complicated cultural history, the idea first originated that perhaps they could claim land somewhere in the world and make a country all their own. Their original idea was not Palestine, because it’s not like they believed Dispensational Christian theories about End Times prophecy (because it hadn’t been invented yet, and because they weren’t Christians). Their original plan was Argentina, where land was abundant and there was already a European and Jewish presence.

To make this case, that Europe should foot the bill for a large migration of Jews out of Europe, Jews began to argue that prejudice toward Jews was not just any kind of prejudice, and hatred toward Jews was not just any kind of hatred, but that it was worse because Jews were, in fact, better than other people.

Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term “anti-semitic” suggested that the Jewish population should emigrate from Europe to Palestine. He saw this as beneficial for both Jews, whom he believed would be better off in their own homeland, and for antisemites, who would see their "Jewish problem" solved by the departure of Jews from Europe. His support was not rooted in a belief in Jewish self-determination or national rights but rather in a desire to see fewer Jews in Germany and Europe.

And the Jews did not oppose this.

Theodor Herzyl, who is widely recognized as the founder of Zionism, began his activities in the late 19th century. Marr's comments should be understood in the context of early discussions about Jewish settlement in Palestine, which were more about solving what was called the "Jewish Question" from various European perspectives rather than about supporting Jewish national rights or a Jewish state.

This was a weird marriage of terms. Marr wanted the Jews gone because they were a nuisance everywhere they went. He did not support Zionism for the same reasons as early Zionists like Herzl, who saw it as a solution to antisemitism by providing Jews with a state where they would have self-determination and security. But once Marr used the term, anti-semitism, Herzl and the Jewish Zionist Movement grabbed on to it, and insisted that the reason the term existed at all, was because the Jews were a special people, and that’s why they were especially hated.

Despite the two reasons the term grew in popularity were in stark contrast (one believing that Jews were exceptionally bad, and the other believing that Jews were exceptionally special), they both had the same goal; claiming Palestine for Europeans calling themselves Jews.

THE SPECIALNESS OF THE JEWS

Early Zionists, as explained above, came from two camps. But both camps saw the Jews as especially something, good or evil.

When you survey the political or religious landscape today, especially in the Christian West, you’ll see that this remains today. Some are convinced that Jews are uniquely wicked. Which, of course, Jews are uniquely wicked. But they’re uniquely wicked only because they’re unique, and happen to be wicked. I would argue that every group on Earth is uniquely wicked. Different people, from different places, who hold to different beliefs, and practice different religions, are often different in many ways. If I was going to be trite, and irreverent, and a tad funny, I’d say this is true because Caucasians are uniquely wicked when it comes to conquering civilizations, and black folk are uniquely wicked for answering their cellular phones in movie theaters.

Joking, of course. But we should deny that merely because someone belongs to a particular ethnic, religious, or national group that has different but obvious besetting sins (such as Appalachians when it comes to opiate abuse or Hispanics when it comes to sneaking across borders) that it means every member of the group is guilty by association. We know this isn’t true, and as Christians we can confirm that our judgment day is a very personal affair. We are judged as individuals before the Great White Throne, and there’s no group discount.

And while we’re admitting that being uniquely wicked does not mean especially wicked, we can also agree that there’s also the matter of being uniquely good, in unique ways, that God has gifted to the nations as he sees fit.

But some Christians today, primarily those inundated with the novel doctrines of Dispensationalism that began with Darby in the 19th Century, will assert that hating Jews is an especially grievous sin because Jews are - in fact - a special people. But does the Bible teach this?

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