this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
546 points (95.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
8968 readers
1258 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
While yes, the specific term "anti-Semitism" was popularized by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr as an alternative to the (at the time) more common phrase Judenhaß (e.g. Jew-hatred).
Basically, he wanted a more scientific-sounding term that made it sound less like plain hatred of other people but made it seem like the supposed deficiencies of Jewish people was a byproduct of their race rather than belonging to Jewish individuals.
His use of semitism/semitic as only referring to Jewish people rather than the broader group of peoples the terms had, originally, been coined for was also in line with other Germans of both his era and the previous century (and certainly into the next century as the Nazis used these reasonings to back their more developed "race" science and world-view).
That targeting has often been retained by the word even as it's outgrown its original prejudiced purpose.
If true, this is ironic in that the Israeli government is the most similar to the Nazi government in our collective world history as far as genocide atrocities committed.