Luther
...know. So I knew I had to dig deeper. So I started to look for references to Nazi’s and Hitler as well as Martin Luther. I began to even look for sites of the Ku Klux Klan in efforts to find some background on the term that brings so much angst into the mind as this. Although I admit, I did find a wonderful article in an unexpected location, unexpected only because I had already consulted so many encyclopedias and found nothing. Yet Funk and Wagner told me this: “ANTI-SEMITISM, political, social, and economic agitation and activities directed against Jews. The term is now used to denote anti-Judaic acts or sentiments based on any grounds, including religious ones. The adjective Semitic originally was applied to all descendants of Shem, the eldest son of the biblical patriarch Noah; in later usage, it refers to a group of peoples of southwestern Asia, including both Jews and Arabs. The word anti-Semitism was coined about 1879 to denote hostility only toward Jews. This hostility is supposedly justified by a theory, first developed in Germany in the middle of the 19th century, that peoples of so-called Aryan stock are superior in physique and character to those of Semitic stock.” www.funkandwagnalls.com/ I was surprised to learn that it had to do with more then just the Jews, but Arabs as well. Else where, I found a little more to back this up; “Anti-Semitism, from a strict adherence to the compound structure and meaning of the word itself, can be defined simply as being against (antagonistic toward, opposed to) the Semitic people. In a grammatical and etymological sense (as pertaining to race), such a definition would include all the descendants of Shem (e.g., the Arabic nations as well as the nation of Israel). The word "anti-Semitism" though is not really used in a broad sense pertaining to the entire Semitic line. Rather, the word is invariably used in a much more restrictive sense, referring to opposition exhibited toward only one branch of the Semitic line -- opposition exhibited towar...