A SPELLING

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

Thank you so much for that explanation. Things are beginning to fall into place. I do have a question that I think I need answered before we proceed further. It might seem a bit strange. What is the correct way to spell anti-Semitism? I’ve seen and used it in so many different ways: as one word, either upper- or lower-case (Antisemitism, antisemitism), and also hyphenated, but in different ways (anti-Semitism, Anti-Semitism, anti-semitism, Anti-semitism). I notice that Professor Wilson goes with “Antisemitism” and that you use “antisemitism.” Is this just a question of style or, as is often the case, is there something embedded here that I am missing?

Thanks,

Abigail

Dear Abigail and Joe:

This is an excellent question, and not simply an arcane academic argument. Rarely has so much meaning been vested in a hyphen and an uppercase letter. It’s far more significant than the well-known medieval debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The etymology of this word is part of its ugly history and its contemporary reality.

Let’s first address the hyphen. In most cases the right side of a hyphenated word can stand alone as a word in its own right: for example, anti-immigration, anti-trade, or anti-taxes. A hyphen in anti-Semitism suggests that one opposes “Semitism.” In recent decades, as the Arab–Israeli crisis has intensified, some Arabs, upon being accused of engaging in antisemitic rhetoric, have posited that it’s impossible for them to be antisemites because they themselves are “Semites.” This argument is based on three faulty notions.

First, it assumes there is such a thing as a Semitic people, when in fact there is not. The word “Semitic” was coined in 1781 by a German historian to describe a group of languages that originated in the Middle East and that have some linguistic similarities; they include Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, ancient Akkadian, and Ugaritic. There’s nothing that binds the speakers of these different languages together as a people. (In the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan, a French linguist and cultural historian, compared and contrasted the cultural achievements of people who spoke Semitic languages with speakers of Indo-European languages—which is to say, Europeans.1 His comparisons were riddled with prejudice, but that’s another conversation.) Second, even if one were to posit that there is such a cultural or ethnic entity as Semites, this argument assumes that members of a group cannot be prejudiced against their own. In fact, one of prejudice’s most debilitating legacies is how the people targeted come to believe that the negative stereotypes thrown at them are true. There are racist African Americans, sexist women, and antisemitic Jews.

Finally, arguing that antisemitism means exhibiting hostility toward all “Semitic” peoples obscures the meaning that has been ascribed to it for virtually all its history. Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist who was a Jew-hater, popularized the term in the late nineteenth century. He contended that Jews, including those who had converted to Christianity, were incapable of assimilating. Once a Jew, always a Jew. According to Marr, Jews were dangerous because their goal was “to harm Germanic identity” and to destroy “the Germanic.” Nothing could alter their foreign-ness, including changing their religion. Consequently, Marr rejected the term Judenhass, Jew-hatred, because even Jews who now considered themselves Christians were still objects of his hatred. Seeking a word that had a racial and “scientific” connotation rather than a religious one, he chose Antisemitismus (capitalized because all nouns are capitalized in German). For him and the legions of people who adopted this word, it meant one thing and one thing only: hating members of the Jewish “race.” (In one of those bitter ironies, at the end of his life Marr recanted his antisemitic accusations and, in a final essay entitled “Testament of an Antisemite,” acknowledged that the faults he attributed to the Jews were, in fact, the result of the Industrial Revolution and the political debates of the times.2 His remorse notwithstanding, the damage had already been done.)

Now, about that hyphen: For some reason, when the word first appeared in English in 1893 it was given a hyphen—“anti-Semitism.” But in French and Spanish it has always appeared without a hyphen and all lowercased—antisémitisme, antisemitismo.3 In my own English-language usage I choose not to go with the hyphen because the word, both as its creator had intended and as it has been generally used for the past one hundred and fifty years, means, quite simply, the hatred of Jews. It does not mean hostility toward a nonexistent thing called “Semitism.” When Marr coined the word, he was most definitely not referring to people who spoke Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, Akkadian, or Ugaritic. That is why I find it particularly offensive when people who speak any of those languages claim that they cannot possibly hate Jews because the language that they speak is linguistically linked to Hebrew.

Finally, am I making any sort of statement by going with the lowercase “antisemite” as opposed to the uppercase “Antisemite”? Yes, I am. It’s my small way—and I am certainly not alone in this—of validating Sartre’s and Julius’s contention that antisemitism is an illogical, delusional passion full of self-contradictions and absurd contentions. It doesn’t deserve the dignity of capitalization, which in English is reserved for proper names. I am reminded of the joke purportedly told by Jews living in Germany in the 1930s.

Two Jews were sitting on one of the few park benches permitted to Jews. One was reading the Berliner Gemeindeblatt, a Jewish communal newspaper; the other, the virulently antisemitic Nazi publication Der Stürmer. “Why on earth are you reading that thing?” the Gemeindeblatt reader asked his friend. “When I read a Jewish publication,” his friend replied, “I hear of our woes and terrible fate. When I read Der Stürmer, I read how we control the banks, world media, international governments, and how powerful we are. I much prefer the latter.”

Something this absurd does not deserve a capital letter.

Yours,

DEL