Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: Israel Hate is Anti-Semitism [View all]Mosby
(16,516 posts)Should Anti-Semitism Be Hyphenated?
http://forward.com/articles/166092/should-anti-semitism-be-hyphenated/?p=all
John Marschall, a retired professor of history at the University of Nevada, writes:
Throughout my book Jews in Nevada: A History, and in other articles on Jewry and Judaism, I have chosen to use the spelling antisemitism rather than anti-Semitism. I agree with authors [of books on the subject], like James Parkes, A. Roy Eckardt, Leonard Dinnerstein and James Carroll, that the latter implies a hostility toward some imagined Semitism, whereas the former means hostility specifically toward Jews. Thus, it is possible for other Semitic groups, such as Arabs, to be antisemitic but not anti-Semitic. My Websters dictionary and Microsoft spell checker, however, reject my logic, and anti-Semitism continues to be the most common spelling in most publications. What is your take on this issue that piques my academic sensitivities?
I must say that this e-mail has compelled me to think about the question for the first time. I myself have always spelled the word anti-Semitism, and as Professor Marschall observes, if I try to write antisemitism, my computer corrects me automatically by inserting a hyphen and upper-casing the s. Indeed, this is obviously one reason that anti-Semitism has never caught on. Who wants to fight a computer all day long?
And yet as has been often pointed out, not only does anti-Semitism describe an unfortunate phenomenon, but it also is itself an unfortunate term. Coined in the 19th century, it has generally but mistakenly been attributed to German journalist Wilhelm Marr, who founded a Bund der Antisemiten, or Anti-Semitic [Antisemitic?] League, in 1881. In fact, however, the word was first used two decades earlier, in 1860, by German-Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider in an article about a book by French linguist and cultural historian Ernest Renan, Histoire Général et Système Comparé des Langues Sémitiques.
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I think he is right, it should be "antisemitism".