Standing Bear wrote:
Lets get one thing straight here. Ethnologically and biologically, the Semite people are ALL the people of the fertile crescent and their descendants. That means not only Israeliis, but Arabs, Chaldeans, Medes, many Egyptians, Yemenis, Adenites, Djiboutians, and many, many others. To say anti-semitism only refers to a minority of these peoples like the people of the book is wrong. The Jewish people cannot claim ownership of all things Semitic. Jordanians get Kaposi's Sarcoma and other typical 'Semitic' diseases as well.
Well, if you want to be picky about it, most Jewish people on the east coast of the United States have more Russian and Slavic blood in their backgrounds than "Semitic" blood. Early in the diaspora the Jews made a significant number of converts in the Slavic countries (sorry I cannot provide details or references for this assertion). And of course what we call "Jewish" names are, for the most part, perfectly ordinary German names; the Germans segregated their namespace at some point which is why "Rosenbaum" sounds Jewish while "Schmidt" doesn't.
The "myth" of a Jewish race is, for the most part, just that -- a myth, founded on the false assumption that the Jews have never made any converts.
But none the less, bias against this group of people who are linked far more by religion and culture than by ties of blood is commonly referred to in English as "anti-Semitism" rather than "anti-Judaism".
Standing Bear
