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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Antisemitism is a young term originally naming a political attack on Jewish rights.

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tagsja-picks, xref, define, contrarian_or_surprising, primary_study, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@hussain_framing_2017, loc. 712

3 min read

Antisemitism is a young term originally naming a political attack on Jewish rights.

Evidence

The term ‘antisemitism’ was first popularized in Germany in the late 1870s and 1880s. Here selfproclaimed antisemites argued that equal rights for Jews – which had been decisively achieved only in 1871 – had been a grave mistake and that the state should take urgent action to protect Germans and Germanness from Jews and Jewish influence. It was only at this point that the word was taken up by Jews and their allies, and by commentators, and was disseminated rapidly across languages as they fought to sustain and vindicate equal rights for the Jewish minority. It meant something very specific: the attack on the Jews’ legal and political rights. As one German-Jewish Zionist put it in 1913, ‘the antisemitic movement grew up on German soil; it is almost as old as the enfranchisement of the Jews’ (Feldman 2017). Two points follow from this. First, although we have become accustomed to thinking of antisemitism as ‘the longest hatred’, synonymous with all forms of anti-Jewish prejudice over millennia, the term both is quite young and originally had a very narrow and precise meaning. Second, we can see how the charge of antisemitism was closely connected to a programme of claiming rights for Jews: in this case, equal civil and political rights in Germany. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 712

Categorization

  • XREF: Directly parallels the definitional politics of ‘Islamophobia’ — the terminological genealogy here mirrors how the Runnymede/Bleich/Halliday debate treats the origin and scope of ‘Islamophobia’ as a rights-claiming political term. — connects to: Antisemitism was first deployed as a deliberate instrument of foreign policy disruption; Antisemitism’s political aim was liquidating the nation-state, not just the Jews; Antisemitism has been framed as a rights violation across successive eras. — A. Hussain, N. Meer, Framing Muslim Integration, 713 (+1 more)
  • DEFINE: Establishes the narrow original meaning of ‘antisemitism’ (attack on legal-political rights) as distinct from the later umbrella sense.

Broader Connections

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