By Bert Hetebry
Where did the term ‘Semitic’ come from and what did it mean?
Look closely and see how mythology defines people in a very real way, marking their difference, no matter how small, as different, a means of judging, marginalising or inclusion, allowing for life or death over a definition of unprovable origin.
The Biblical story of Noah’s Flood is one of the destruction and rebuilding of the descendants of Adam and Eve, the first humans, created in God’s image.
Just a brief overview. the descendants of Adam and Eve proliferated, and the man ones saw that the woman ones were beautiful. So they married them, that is, engaged in sexual pleasure seeking with them, because no man can resist a beautiful woman, oh that women were born ugly so not able to tempt weak willed men!
And the Nephilim saw all the fun that was being had and joined in… and who were the Nephilim? Ah mythology is so much fun, it seems that the Nephilim were evil people, fallen people, perhaps even fallen angels jealous of God’s newest creation, humans. They do appear time and again in the Old Testament as the source of sin and alienation from God, a testament to the people of God to remain faithful or death and destruction is bound to follow.
Anyway, let’s continue with Noah, the flood and its aftermath. That mythology is a bit easier to follow.
So God was displeased with what he saw was happening, people were having way too much fun and too busy to recognise all the good things He had done for them, so he decided that everyone had to go, kill them all, drown them and everything else He had earlier said was so good. But He changed His mind because there was one family that was still faithful to Him and they would be saved, start over, a small family and a breeding pair of all the animals would rebuild that which God was about to destroy.
Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, warned of the coming deluge dutifully built an ark, herded the animals on board and together with their wives survived the forty days and nights of the worst rain storm imaginable, even worse than the flooding due to climate change we are witnessing today, such a deluge that it took a hundred days for the waters to receded and a new land to emerge from the waters.
As it is when we put men and women together, or even males and females of any species, somehow, they breed and the descendants of Noah and his sons and their wives did just that so prolifically that they formed the foundation of three distinct ‘nation’ groups, Semites, Hamites and Japhetites which spread out across what we now call the Middle East. I know, the world is a little larger than the Middle East, but mythology is not always (or is that ever) logical.
Anyway, lots of different family group grew side by side over time and did not always get along too well with each other and through the various groupings we end up with Abraham who was originally called Abram leave the Mesopotamian city of Ur with his wife and a few servants on camels which were not known to be used for domesticated for another 600 or so years, to wend his way to what today is known as Israel, or Palestine. The people of Mesopotamia were descendants of Shem, and that language group became known as Semites. The people who Abraham, yes he was Abraham by that time, he had had a bit of a fight with God, finished off with a limp an new expanded version of his name and a newfound virility in his old age, to finally sire two sons, one with his wife and the other with his wife’s maid servant, were also descendants of Shem, also Semites, but from various of Shem’s sons, and so were a kind of substrata of Semites.
Phew.
We need to move on a bit through both history and unfolding mythologies to finally get to where this confusion over the meaning of Semite and Antisemite comes from.
Abraham’s children were pretty prolific breeders, eventually giving birth the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, each of which grew into numerous sects and divisions, causing more than enough conflict of who or what God is and what that all means, but a telling moment in time was around 90CE.
The Roman Empire ruled over a vast area, from present day England to Egypt and into the Mediterranean Basin, into the Byzantine and well into the Arabian Peninsula. They ruled through governors and the presence of the largest military force yet known in history. And in about 90CE a group of religious leaders and intellectuals kicked up a bit of a fuss in the remote city of Jerusalem. They had their own, different religion and did not think it right to bow down to the invaders and make sacrifices in the form of taxes to their supreme leader, the Ceasar, their God. They would only bow down to their own God the creator God. So, there was a bit of a kerfuffle, their temple was sacked, destroyed and a few people had their noses put out of joint, were expelled from the city, oh more than that, expelled from the Empire.
That was the beginning of the Jewish Diaspora.
It needs to be noted and probably underlined, highlighted with bright fluorescent hi light markers that it was the Jewish religious leaders who were expelled. Not the every day, hardworking Jewish carpenter, fisherman, farmer and so forth. They were needed to provide food and labour for the Roman overlords. Listening to the tales of the Diaspora one would easily believe that all Jewish people left, but as the Israel historian Shlomo Sand points out in his book The Invention of the Jewish People, it, throughout history has been that only the leaders, the thinkers, the religious leaders posed a danger to the authority of an invading Imperial force, the invaded people were invariably farmers, fishermen, graziers, food producers and the invaders needed food to feed their armies.
A modern-day example was the invasion of the Netherlands by Germany in 1940. The Netherlands were one of the invaded breadbaskets to feel the Nazi war machine.
And so the rabbis and priests left, travelled north and into Eastern Europe, taking with them their religion, proselytising, converting ‘heathens’ to the promise of salvation from their sins, spreading Judaism into the region, and conflicting with the various political and religious changes which occurred through the following two thousand or so years, constantly living on the edge of the mainstream wherever they went.
The original rabbis and priests would have been defined as Semite. They were, according to the mythology referred to, descendants of Shem. The new converts not so much. The biblical lineage or mythology does not seem to consider their origins, but they were not Semitic peoples, the ones remaining, farming the land and two thousand years later looking through the fence surrounding Gaza, enclosing them from their traditional lands, the Palestinians may actually have a stronger claim to the term Semite than the new settlers who have come from Europe to claim the Zionist Homeland.
So it is interesting to have the term Antisemitic being used when it is seen actually misused, a complete inversion of the original meaning of the term.
It was in my mind to use the word ‘sorry’ in concluding because I have played loosely with a mythology, even dared to call mythology what is foundational to what many believe to be the foundational stories of their faith/s, but no, I am not sorry at all when I see those faith/s being used as an excuse for genocide, as an excuse to assert some kind of exceptionalism that leads to acts of terror against those who do not share a particular interpretation of that mythology, that devalues lives which are contrary to the lives the religious fundamentalists insist on to the point that they can be sent off to their final judgement, to face the eternal punishments for non-adherence to mythological beliefs.
And to so misuse the term Semite to render it an obtuse meaning, complete reversal of what it is just another obscenity on the bizarre nature of conflict over unprovable claims of righteous superiority which allows so much suffering for others.
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