I was under the impression “Semitic peoples” broadly meant “from the Eastern Mediterranean coastal area.” While there’s obviously been a lot of migration to and from the area, is it really as pseudoscientific as making up things about the spread of a random tribe that migrated to India?
There are two definitions of Semitic peoples, one of which is accurate and still in use and another of which is obsolete race science.
Ancient Semitic peoples were a real and well-attested ethnolinguistic group of speakers of proto-Semitic, a branch of the Afroasiatic language family that evolved into Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and other languages. The emergence, distribution and development of these languages in the 3rd millennium BC is of great historical importance as Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon, accounts for some of our earliest examples of written language in ancient Mesopotamia.
The obsolete definition was constructed by German pseudo-historians in the 1700s and 1800s as a way to distinguish Jews, Arabs, and other peoples from “Aryan” whites, which of course influenced the development of Nazi ideology and antisemitism in the sense of discrimination against Jews.
So there’s a real and important definition here if we’re talking about the languages and cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, and a modern definition that was invented by German racists to justify their purported superiority over other “races.”
I was under the impression “Semitic peoples” broadly meant “from the Eastern Mediterranean coastal area.” While there’s obviously been a lot of migration to and from the area, is it really as pseudoscientific as making up things about the spread of a random tribe that migrated to India?
There are two definitions of Semitic peoples, one of which is accurate and still in use and another of which is obsolete race science.
Ancient Semitic peoples were a real and well-attested ethnolinguistic group of speakers of proto-Semitic, a branch of the Afroasiatic language family that evolved into Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and other languages. The emergence, distribution and development of these languages in the 3rd millennium BC is of great historical importance as Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon, accounts for some of our earliest examples of written language in ancient Mesopotamia.
The obsolete definition was constructed by German pseudo-historians in the 1700s and 1800s as a way to distinguish Jews, Arabs, and other peoples from “Aryan” whites, which of course influenced the development of Nazi ideology and antisemitism in the sense of discrimination against Jews.
So there’s a real and important definition here if we’re talking about the languages and cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, and a modern definition that was invented by German racists to justify their purported superiority over other “races.”