According to your link, Ashkenazi Jews are descended mostly from Europeans on the maternal line but from Near-Eastern, “Semitic” people on the paternal line. The term “Semitic” comes from the biblical Shem, the son of Noah. So if Semitic ancestry were a real thing, then it would refer to the male line, and Ashkenazi Jews would have it.
Past research found that 50 percent to 80 percent of DNA from the Ashkenazi Y chromosome, which is used to trace the male lineage, originated in the Near East, Richards said. […] Richards and his colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is contained in the cytoplasm of the egg and passed down only from the mother […] All told, more than 80 percent of the maternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews could be traced to Europe, with only a few lineages originating in the Near East. […] “The simplest explanation was that it was mainly women who converted and they married with men who’d come from the Near East,” Richards told LiveScience.
But of course, Shem wasn’t a real person and there is no such thing as “Semitic” ancestry. The term antisemitic is a fossil left by 19th-century European racial pseudoscience weaponized against Jews living in European countries. There’s no reason to apply it to a different group of people unless you actually believe that certain races were descended from the biblical Shem.
The same is true of the Semitic language family. The Afro-Asiatic language family used to be called “Hamito-Semitic” from the belief that Africans descended from the biblical Ham and Asians from Shem. Linguists have updated that name, but for now no term has dislodged “Semitic” as the name of a language family.
If you want to claim that the term “antisemitic” refers to the Semitic language family, then it’s a prejudice that doesn’t exist. There’s no one on Earth who hates Arabs and Jews because they speak Semitic languages but is fine with Iranians and Turks. Hatred of both Arabs and Jews is almost always based on race, religion, and politics, not technical classifications of language families. Yes, Elon Musk called Arabic “the language of the enemy,” but there’s no doubt that he’d say the same thing about Farsi, or any other language spoken by non-white Muslims.
And finally, while Jews in the diaspora stopped speaking Hebrew and Aramaic as vernacular languages, they have always prayed in Hebrew and taken Hebrew religious names. European Jewish vernacular languages like Yiddish and Ladino carry Hebrew and Aramaic influences. And of course, many Jews historically spoke Judeo-Arabic, which is obviously a Semitic language.
Zionists and Elon Musk are racist, Islamophobic imperialists. There are plenty of terms to criticize them that aren’t confusing and pseudoscientific.
According to your link, Ashkenazi Jews are descended mostly from Europeans on the maternal line but from Near-Eastern, “Semitic” people on the paternal line. The term “Semitic” comes from the biblical Shem, the son of Noah. So if Semitic ancestry were a real thing, then it would refer to the male line, and Ashkenazi Jews would have it.
But of course, Shem wasn’t a real person and there is no such thing as “Semitic” ancestry. The term antisemitic is a fossil left by 19th-century European racial pseudoscience weaponized against Jews living in European countries. There’s no reason to apply it to a different group of people unless you actually believe that certain races were descended from the biblical Shem.
The same is true of the Semitic language family. The Afro-Asiatic language family used to be called “Hamito-Semitic” from the belief that Africans descended from the biblical Ham and Asians from Shem. Linguists have updated that name, but for now no term has dislodged “Semitic” as the name of a language family.
If you want to claim that the term “antisemitic” refers to the Semitic language family, then it’s a prejudice that doesn’t exist. There’s no one on Earth who hates Arabs and Jews because they speak Semitic languages but is fine with Iranians and Turks. Hatred of both Arabs and Jews is almost always based on race, religion, and politics, not technical classifications of language families. Yes, Elon Musk called Arabic “the language of the enemy,” but there’s no doubt that he’d say the same thing about Farsi, or any other language spoken by non-white Muslims.
And finally, while Jews in the diaspora stopped speaking Hebrew and Aramaic as vernacular languages, they have always prayed in Hebrew and taken Hebrew religious names. European Jewish vernacular languages like Yiddish and Ladino carry Hebrew and Aramaic influences. And of course, many Jews historically spoke Judeo-Arabic, which is obviously a Semitic language.
Zionists and Elon Musk are racist, Islamophobic imperialists. There are plenty of terms to criticize them that aren’t confusing and pseudoscientific.