Can Arabs be antisemitic if they are Semites too?

“Arabs cannot be antisemitic, because they are Semites too.”

“Antisemitism” has meant one thing since the word was coined: hatred of Jews. It was popularised in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who founded the League of Antisemites for the express purpose of opposing Jews, not a vague family of “Semitic peoples.” No movement, history or definition of antisemitism was ever aimed at speakers of Semitic languages in general. The “Arabs are Semites too” line is a word game built on a false etymology, and being an Arab no more rules out antisemitism than being European rules out racism.

Where the term comes from

“Semite” entered scholarly use in 1781, coined by the German historian August Ludwig von Schlözer to classify a family of related languages, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, named for Shem, a son of Noah in Genesis. It described languages, not a people or a politics. Ninety-eight years later, in 1879, Marr borrowed the adjective for something else. He founded the League of Antisemites (Antisemiten-Liga) in Berlin that year, the first organization to put Jew-hatred under a scientific-sounding, secular label instead of the older religious term Judenhass. His pamphlet, “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom,” argued that Jews, as a race rather than a religion, were conquering German culture. The league’s constitution and Marr’s own writing named one target: Jews. Arabs, Assyrians and Amharic speakers, all Semitic-language peoples under Schlözer’s taxonomy, never appear in it. Marr wanted a word that sounded modern and racial, not one that limited itself by definition to the language family he happened to reuse.

The strongest version of the claim, and the record against it

Stated fairly, the argument is simple: the word’s root covers every Semitic-language speaker, so applying it only to prejudice against Jews is inconsistent. This is not a fringe position. Encyclopedia Britannica’s own online entry on antisemitism, as of a 2022 review, called the label “especially inappropriate” for the anti-Jewish prejudices of “Arabs or other Semites,” treating the etymology as decisive. Critics, including a February 2022 Jerusalem Post piece, called this out as an etymological fallacy: reading a word’s 18th-century linguistic root as if it overrides its settled, 19th-century political meaning. Every serious working definition built since Marr’s coinage, the IHRA definition foremost among them, defines antisemitism as hostility to Jews as Jews, regardless of the speaker’s own ethnicity or language family. Words settle by usage, not roots: “philanthropy” isn’t limited to love of everything, and “antibiotic” isn’t restricted by whatever language the prescribing doctor speaks. The same standard applies here.

Who pushes it today

Beyond Britannica’s since-criticized phrasing, the line circulates as a rhetorical shortcut whenever an Arab official, cleric or commentator is accused of Jew-hatred, a sheikh calling Jews “descendants of apes and pigs” on state television, a Palestinian Authority broadcast glorifying an attack on Jewish civilians. Rather than address the content, the reply becomes “he can’t be antisemitic, he’s a Semite too.” It functions as a conversation-stopper precisely because it sounds linguistically clever rather than because it engages what the charge actually covers: conspiracy theories, dehumanization, and double standards applied to Jews and to the Jewish state. The same sleight of hand shows up in the adjacent argument over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism: both try to place a category of Jew-hostility outside the word’s reach by redefinition instead of by evidence.

The record that settles it: Jew-hatred among Arabic speakers predates the word by 1,200 years

The documented record is plain: Semitic-speaking peoples have harbored hostility toward Jews for over a millennium before 1879 gave it a name. This is a related move to the separate claim that the Nazis invented antisemitism outright; both misdate or redefine a phenomenon that the documented record already settles. In 627 CE, the Banu Qurayza, one of Medina’s Jewish tribes, were besieged after breaking a treaty with Muhammad, and per the earliest Islamic biographical tradition, Ibn Ishaq’s life of Muhammad, between 600 and 900 of their men were beheaded following surrender. Islamic law subsequently classified Jews as dhimmi: “protected” but subordinate, barred from public office, riding horses, building synagogues taller than mosques, or testifying against Muslims in court. In the 9th century, Baghdad’s Caliph al-Mutawakkil required Jews to wear a distinguishing yellow badge, a policy Nazi Germany would reintroduce eleven centuries later. Massacres followed across the Arab and Islamic world: roughly 5,000 Jews killed in Granada in 1066, the community at Fez reduced to eleven survivors in 1465, hundreds killed in Libya in 1785, repeated pogroms in Algiers in 1805, 1815 and 1830, more than 300 murdered in Marrakesh between 1864 and 1880. The pattern culminated in the 1940s: riots across Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Yemen killed over 1,000 Jews and helped trigger the exodus of roughly 850,000 Jews from Arab lands within a generation. Baghdad’s Farhud alone killed at least 180 Jews over two days in June 1941. None of this required borrowing a German neologism first. The word “antisemitism” names a specific, documented pattern of Jew-hatred; it does not require the hater to be German, Christian or non-Semitic to apply, and it does not switch off because the hater happens to speak a Semitic language.

The word was never about language, and 1,200 years of history prove it

Arabs are of course a Semitic-language people, which is exactly why the line sounds clever. But the word never meant that; it was invented to name Jew-hatred specifically, and redefining it is a way to dodge the charge instead of answering it.