Words

The German historian August Ludwig von Schlözer coined “Semitic” in 1781 for a family of related languages that includes Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac and Ethiopic. The sources here agree it began as a term for languages, not for peoples.

In 1860 the scholar Moritz Steinschneider, criticising a book by Ernest Renan, accused Renan of antisemitische Vorurteile, “antisemitic prejudices”. It is the earliest use of the word recorded on this timeline.

In 1879 the noun Antisemitismus came into political use in Germany around Wilhelm Marr, who is widely credited with coining it to name campaigns against Jews. A Forward column says the credit is mistaken because the word was in use earlier. The sources here agree that it was only ever aimed at Jews.

The journalist Wilhelm Marr’s pamphlet Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum appeared in late March 1879 and went through 12 editions that year.

Marr founded an Antisemites’ League. The Encyclopaedia Judaica has him recruiting members for it in the last 1879 edition of his pamphlet; a Forward column dates its founding to 1881. The league brought the word “antisemite” into political use.

Bernard Lewis quotes a letter of 17 October 1942 from Walter Gross, director of the Nazi Party’s Race Policy Office, to the Iraqi politician Rashid Ali, who had asked whether “anti-Semitism” was also directed against Arabs. Gross wrote that it was aimed only at Jews and that the word was incorrect for that reason. Lewis writes that a committee then proposed saying “anti-Jewish” instead of “anti-Semitic” in Hitler’s speeches and Mein Kampf, and that Hitler refused.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Committee on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial took up the spelling in April 2015 and recommended the unhyphenated form, arguing that a hyphen suggests there is such a thing as “Semitism”.

Meeting in Bucharest on 26 May 2016, the IHRA plenary adopted a non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism.

Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, argued that the term should be retired and replaced with “Jew hatred”.

A group of scholars launched the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism on 25 March 2021 as an alternative to the IHRA definition, which it calls unclear and open to different interpretations.

The Associated Press changed its stylebook from “anti-Semitism” to “antisemitism”, with no hyphen and no capital S. Most of the news industry followed.

President Trump signed Executive Order 14188, Additional Measures To Combat Anti-Semitism, on 29 January 2025. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the hyphenated spelling as a break with the recent consensus.