To put an end to anti-Semitism, we should start by eliminating the word. This is not a Jewish joke. It’s not the painful version of the egg that makes the chicken. If we think, like me, that words have a certain importance, that they play a significant role in the structure of thought, a beneficial role most of the time, but in the case of this anti-Semitic word and its derivative anti-Semitism, it plays an evil role. It is also used today as an insult, indiscriminately, which is logical since it is a twisted, wrong and perverse word. A sort of handleless knife made by the Austrian intellectual Moritz Steinschneider in 1860 who wanted with this word “anti-Semitic” denounce the theses of the French intellectual Ernest Renan who, in his General history of Semitic languages, published in 1855, crudely attacked the alleged defects of Semitic-speaking peoples, with the very paradoxical exception of Hebrew and the Jews who speak it for whom he had the greatest admiration; “the Semitic spirit is especially represented by Islam,” he wrote. Come on.
The word “anti-Semitic” does not interest many people, as long as it does not concern Jews. Until a small French journalist, Edouard Drumont, looking for a scandal that would make him famous, seized on the word , translated it into French – “anti-Semite” – and succeeded in making it, in 1886, the synonym of anti-Jews. It is no longer a semantic shift, it is a collapse. Drumont viscerally hates the Jews. bestseller, Jewish Francepublished that year, bears witness to this. The question is: why did Drumont go for this misinterpretation to express his hatred of the Jews?
No doubt because in France at the time, colonial as hell, the word Jew was not as contemptible as Semite, which no longer concealed an idea of language, religion, region or people, but of race. And generally, when we talk about race, it is to classify them, the inferior races, the superior races. The Semites of Drumont are the inferior race, that of the Jews. The word is out there, its effect is magical: ignorance leads to fear which breeds hatred. Fortunately, the anti-Semites are there to defend us against the planned invasion of this race, and to resist the great replacement of the French Aryans by this dirty race of Semites.
A word that poisons language
The simplicity of the operation would be laughable if the word anti-Semitic was not adopted, as if inadvertently, by those who are not anti-Jewish and do not want to be and, more disastrously, by the Jews themselves. By protesting against anti-Semitism, everyone endorses the term intended to designate them as a race. To top it all off, non-Jews who deny being anti-Jewish are labeled philosemites.
This dirty word has not finished poisoning language, and always for the greater benefit of the anti-Jews who at the same time get rid of the term Judeophobes which they reject. With The Testament of an Anti-Semite And The Jews against France, Drumont completes the establishment of the term anti-Semitism in everyday language as a fight against an inferior, degenerate and dangerous race.
Deleting this anti-Semitic word would not prevent Putin from calling Zelensky an anti-Semite, would not prevent Netanyahu from believing that by murdering thousands of children in Gaza he is eliminating anti-Semites, removing this word would not resolve the “Jewish question “, that would put it back at the heart of the matter: it would finally be a question of relations between Jews and non-Jews. So Amos Gitaï could continue to direct plays and films in which he asks Palestinians and Israelis “whose house is this?” without fear of being censored or threatened. And Piero Usberti could continue filming his Trip to Gaza which comes out in two weeks and which we must see whatever the cost of sorrow.
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