Anat

Hebrew is the name of a language. At some point Canaanite speakers split into a group which eventually spoke Hebrew and a group which spoke Phoenician. (Of course languages split in a gradual process, so it's not like one day next door neighbors start speaking different languages and no longer understand each other.) The word 'Hebrews' as a name of an ethnicity is used in the Hebrew Bible as a name the Israelites were called by outsiders. The archaeologists in the article I linked (well, three of them) think that the people that eventually lived in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah split off from the general Canaanite population and went off to settle small farming communities in the hilly areas of what is now the West bank and nearby areas, the hills of Samaria and Judea. Initially their material culture was very similar to that of the Canaanites (we don't know about other aspects of their culture because those farmers weren't very literate) but their settlement pattern took them away from the influence of the Canaanite cities. At this stage Dever refers to them as proto-Israelites. Over time they become a more distinct entity. With the invasion of the Sea Peoples (some of whom became known as the Philistines) and the end of Egyptian influence in the Levant there emerged a political picture with Israelites in the northern hill country, Judahites in thesouthern hill country, Philistines along the southern coast and Phoenicians along the northern coast.

As far as we can tell, 8th century Israelites and Judahites spoke the same language. After the fall of Samaria in the late 8th century many refugees from there moved south to Judah, multiplying its population. In the 6th century the elite of Judah and the population in the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem was exiled to Babylon, but the majority remained in the land. Under the persians they with some who returned from exile formed the province of Yehud. IOW there is ethnic continuity from Israel and Judah to the later settlement. From there through the Hasmonean kingdom and the Roman province of Judea there is linguistic, cultural and religious continuity. Continuity from Roman times to Jewish communities in the diaspora is cultural religious and genetic.

ynquirer

Semitism and Antisemitism are language-related terms. Nineteenth-century German philologists discovered that most European as well as many Asiatic languages stemmed from a common trunk, Sanskrit being a common ancestor for all of them. They called this trunk ‘Indo-Germanic’ because there seemed to be two great families within it, Avestic/Hindi being the paradigm for one and German for the other. Indo-Germanic was opposed to other such trunks, like the Semitic – to which together Hebrew and Arabic belonged – and Ugrofin – with Magyar as a major representative.

They further discovered that all European languages but Magyar, Basque and Laponese belonged in Indo-Germanic – this being the reason why is has later been renamed ‘Indo-European’. There was another noteworthy exception, namely, Yiddish, a lingua franca spoken by Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. The base of Yiddish was German, of course, but it included many Hebrew words and was written in Hebrew script. Knowing that Hebrew was a Semitic language and provided that there were no Arabs in Europe at the moment, the German public, who then began to learn of the progress in philology, matched those people that spoke Yiddish in Europe with a people of Semitic stock coming from Canaan and expanded such identification to all those that either bore the same family names even though they did not speak Yiddish. Thus, a purely linguistic issue was used to infer ill-founded conclusions as regard race.

Antisemitism emerged specifically as hatred for all those Yiddisk-speaking people in Germany and Eastern Europe. The Nazis made such hatred their own and expanded it to encompass all those that had at least one ancestor that bore a ‘Semitic’ family name. The Nazis in their hatred also include the Sephardis – who they met in the Balkans and thought of to stem from the same Semitic stock as the Yiddish-speaking Azkenazis.

As Azkenazis and Sephardis account for a great majority of the world Jewish population – the Ethiopian Falashas and other small minorities accounting for the rest, – Antisemitism may be said to be correct usage if in reference to any dismissive proposition as said of Jews in general.

premjan

Semites include Arabs, Jews and Ethiopians (and some other smaller populations - e.g. speaking Aramaic).

Anat

premjan, when the Germans came up with antisemitism they were looking for an acceptable way to say 'hatred of Jews'. They did not care about Arabs or any other group speaking Semitic languages because such groups did not live in Germany at the time. Saying that Arabs are also semitic is besides the point, as the term antisemitism was never intended to mean 'being against all those of semitic origin'. It was supposed to convey the idea of hatred of Jews without even mentioning them by name, and it was supposed to describe hatred of people of Jewish origin regardless of their religion, so as to prevent the infiltration of German society by converted and assimilated Jews.

premjan

Well, as we are saying, nowadays people tend to be more focused - anti-Israelism might be more accurate than anti-semitism as most people are not bothered about Jews per se (and only about 40% live in Israel).

Then again - leaving out nutters like Mel Gibson and co.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic...er_of_speakers

Apparently Kahlil Gibran is claimed as an Assyrian. Also Andre Agassi by some, and (amazing!) an Indian cricketer called Tinu Yohannan.

J-D

Medieval Christian hostility to Jews, in theory and to a large extent in practice, was based on religious motives and was not supposed to apply to Jews who converted to Christianity. Another reason for coining the term 'anti-Semitism', originally, was to give a distinctive name to the more modern phenomenon of hostility which, in theory and to a large extent in practice, was based on non-religious motives derived from pseudo-scientific theories about 'race' and was supposed to apply to people on the basis of their ancestry independently of their religious views.

The value of the term for making this distinction has largely been lost because it is now frequently applied to all forms of hostility to Jews, including the religious ones (not only Christian but also Muslim).

greyline

Are Jews still God's "chosen people" today? If so, do converted Jews suddenly become part of the "chosen"? Does God favor them above others? Jews don't evangelise - why not, if it would spread the opportunity to be chosen/favored by God?

I'm interested in what today's Jews think about these questions.

J-D

Since there is no God, they never were.

Jewish doctrine on this point has not been repealed, if that's what you mean.There is no God.

But for the purposes of Jewish law, converts to Judaism are Jews, without qualification.The standard rabbinical line is that God expects more of Jews than of anybody else, and hence potential converts should be discouraged in their own interests.

It is possible that Judaism may have been more welcoming to converts a long time ago than it is now. The obvious secular explanation for reluctance to proselytise is that evangelism would have become extremely dangerous to Jews following the rise of Christianity and Islam.

Anat

Being chosen does not equal being favored. It means having more responsibilities and obligations. This can bring more potential for reward, but also more potential for punishment.
I've heard that Jews consider themselves "chosen." What does that mean?

greyline

I guess I used the word favored in the sense that God seemed to favor the Jews in the Old Testament - he talked to them, was concerned for their welfare, led them in battle, promised them the land of milk & honey etc. Meanwhile... what did he do for non-Jews? Other than smite them with his Hebrew armies.