LOGICIAN MONDAY: What is a Semite?
Taxonomy: "Semite, name given in the 19th century to a member of any people who speak one of the Semitic languages, a family of languages spoken primarily in parts of western Asia and Africa"
Semite, name given in the 19th century to a member of any people who speak one of the Semitic languages, a family of languages spoken primarily in parts of western Asia and Africa. The term therefore came to include Arabs, Akkadians, Canaanites, Hebrews, some Ethiopians (including the Amhara and the Tigrayans), and Aramaean tribes. Although Mesopotamia, the western coast of the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa have all been proposed as possible sites for the prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking populations, there remains no archaeological or scientific evidence of a common Semitic people. Because Semitic-speaking peoples do not share any traits aside from language, use of the term “Semite” to refer to the broad range of Semitic-speaking peoples has fallen out of favour. For this reason, some critics even encourage the removal of the hyphen in the term anti-Semitism to help dispel any pseudoscientific notions of a "Semitic race." They advocate instead for the use of antisemitism to describe the hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group.
In fact, by 2500 BCE Semitic-speaking peoples had already become widely dispersed throughout western Asia. In Phoenicia they became seafarers. In Mesopotamia they blended with the civilization of Sumer. The Hebrews settled with other Semitic-speaking peoples in Palestine.
Spookipedia:
“obsolete term”
Ethnicity and race
The term Semitic in a racial sense was coined by members of the Göttingen school of history in the early 1770s. Other members of the Göttingen school of history coined the separate term Caucasian in the 1780s. These terms were used and developed by numerous other scholars over the next century. In the early 20th century, the pseudo-scientific classifications of Carleton S. Coon included the Semitic peoples in the Caucasian race, as similar in appearance to the Indo-European, Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian-speaking peoples.[10] Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies, the term also came to be applied to the religions (ancient Semitic and Abrahamic) and ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution.[11
This should be totally fine comment section!
The origin of the term is "Shem", son of Noah and reputed ancestor of Abraham et al. According to the geneology in Genesis, all the Fertile Crescent nations derived from Shem, which is probably what we call "Sumeria".
The improbably long lifespans attributed to these characters-centuries-indicate that they are not individuals who begat other individuals, but rather, a meticulous reckoning of the lineage of Mesopotamian dynasties named after a founder. This bears out in the flight of Avram-not yet "Abraham"-from the city of Ur where the Epic of Gilgamesh derived.
The Phoenician people-Canaanites-developed a prosperous role in trade between the Empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Each used hieroglyphic writing, but the Phoenicians, acting as brokers of Bronze age commerce, developed the alphabet as a medium of exchange, allowing transactions to be negotiated at a distance and facilitating maritime trade.
So, the people of Iraq are modern-day Semites, and invading their country was an act of anti-semitism.
So semites would be in many if not most cases, antisemitic.
The real question might be what is a marmite, and are Americans largely antimarmitic?
And is there any overlap with being antianglophonic?
Not in my case at least, though tinned corned beef seems better.
Due to an inconvenient caving incident I do tend antistalagmitic