11. ANTI-SEMITISM. A term which has received a special signification of its own as the situation of the Jews in Germany, France, Russia and elsewhere, in recent decades, has become more or less acute, means opposition to the Jews and their religion for various rea sons. Such enmity, springing from many causes, has been a persistent factor in history from the era of the Pharaohs. Its manifestations assume different forms according to local or national conditions —from the crassest prejudice due to ignorance to more intense odium due to envy and often arousing long-continued persecutions or popular outbreaks. While it is unjust to call every criticism of the Jews and Judaism anti Semitic — radical and religious peculiarities af ford a fair field for the critic or investigator, who is not always to be termed an enemy because he discerns flaws or weaknesses Anti-Semitism is wholly unfriendly, usually unjust, exaggerates minor defects into funda mental vices, employs faulty generalizations, and is careless how it arouses to strife and bloodshed, so keen and ruthless is pursuit of its quarry. History and literature abound in antipathies to nation and sect, from which, in Europe, Roman Catholic and Protestant, Metho dist and Quaker alike have suffered, and which have crystallized themselves in words like barbarian and heathen, mummery and jesuitical. Anti-Semitism, however, in its intense and most characteristic form, is more than an antipathy — it is a relentless hunt to the death, which de nying social and political equality to the Jew would brand him as outcast and alien, strip Judaism of every distinguishing excellence, re vive for the Jew an exclusive Ghetto or banish him from civilized climes. And this is done in the name of society, religion and the state. What strength there must be in Judaism to awaken such antagonism! And how super ficial the culture that countenances such enmity! Origin and History.—The word Anti Semitism owes its origin and present meaning to the ethnical differentiation of the Jews as Semites from the Aryan or Indo-European. Ethnology is made to prove that the racial traits of the Jews as Semites render them in ferior and that they are legitimate objects of aversion. The theory as well as the present
unfriendly signification of the term are of re cent date, appearing in Germany about 1880, when the movement against the Jew and Juda ism began to gain headway and spread else where, as the era of persecution assumed a deadly phase in Russia. Decades earlier the word Semitism had been employed in a purely academic sense by philologists, but soon the theory of Semitic inferiority was to be as serted first by Lassen (1800-76), who ascribed to the Semite rather unflattering traits, such as intellectual sharpness, exclusiveness and selfish ness in marked contrast to "the harmony of psychicil forces which distinguishes the Aryan.' It was reserved for Ernest Renan (1823-92) to emphasize still more strongly Semitic inferior ity: he went so far as to assert that "science and philosophy were foreign" to the Semites. But if this opinion was not sufficient, he added in his 'Studies of Religious History' various other generalizations—a line in which he was quite proficient — to the effect that the Semites did not comprehend civilization in the modern sense; they were intolerant as the logical result of being monotheists, bequeathing their bigotry to the Aryans, who were naturally broader, while the Jews can attribute the hatred which has been extended to them for so many centu ries to their glowing anticipation of future triumph. There can be little doubt that Renan's views had marked influence upon the growth of a hostile anti-Semitic spirit, although be urged his readers to be careful in their in terpretation of his opinions. He stated ex pressly that Jews to-day were not Semites, but moderns, and he denied in his 'Judaism as Race and Religion' that there was such a thing as a Jewish race. The extensive literature of anti-Semitism shows throughout Renan's un conscious coloring. It was but a short path from him to von Hellwald, who called the Jew a "cancer,* to Goldwin Smith, who termed him a "parasite," and to Stewart Chamberlain. During the progress of the European War of 1914-18 some anti-Semitic feeling arose in Eng land, chiefly in connection with army enlist ments.