Semitic peoples

“ All early Semitic peoples worshipped the sun-god, Shamsh, and all were moon, planet, and star-worshippers to a very large extent; but, as the race became divided into Northern and Southern Semites, a distinct difference gradually arose between the religious cults of the two branches. The Southern, or Arab, tribes, on account of their more isolated situation, retained the original Semitic mythology, worshipping the sun as their chief god, Shamsh, the moon as his consort, and the stars and planets as inferior gods and goddesses, the Pleiades being objects of special homage. ”

“ Robertson Smith in his valuable work, The Religion of the Semites, mentions that in his view Semitic religion does not differ so fundamentally from the other types of world religion as many writers on the subject appear to think. But the longer one considers it the greater do the barriers between Semitic and other religions appear and the more clearly marked their lines of demarcation. The prolonged isolation to which the Semitic peoples seem to have been subjected appears to have greatly affected their manner of religious thought. ”

“ The separation of men from women, which has prevented all refined development among the Semitic peoples, was no doubt then, as in our days, much less rigorous in the rural districts and villages than in the large towns. ”

“ While the Semitic Phœnician peoples were spreading themselves upon the seas, another kindred Semitic people, the Arameans, whose occupation of Damascus we have already noted, were developing the caravan routes of the Arabian and Persian deserts, and becoming the chief trading people of Western Asia. The{v1-219} Semitic peoples, earlier civilized than the Aryan, have always shown, and still show to-day, a far greater sense of quality and quantity in marketable goods than the latter ”

“ The tribes which grouped themselves to form a state never failed to light a sacred fire, and to set up a common religion." But the family and tribal rites continued to exist as sacra privata, just as the central government dominated but did not destroy the family and tribal governments. [88]
It may be objected that these customs are proved only for the Aryan races, and that, though proved for them, they form no valid analogy for Semitic peoples. ”

“ Thus the Semitic character has always shown itself as the unifier and mediator of Aryan peoples, first through an external tie of trade, which was the work of Phœnicia, and, secondly, through the far deeper spiritual tie of religion, which was the later work of Judea. The Semitic mind has always been necessary to the inherently centrifugal Aryan soul in order to bring it back to itself from its wanderings, inner and outer, and to reconcile itself with itself and with the Divine Order. ”

“ What distinguishes them is their spiritual bent and especially their language, sometimes also their religion. Scholars by common consent call those peoples Aryan who speak an Aryan language: in Asia, the Hindoos and Persians; in Europe, the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs (Russians, Poles, Serfs) , and Celts. [5]
Similarly, we call Semites those peoples who speak a Semitic language: Arabs, Jews and Syrians. But a people may speak an Aryan or a Semitic language and yet not be of Aryan or Semitic race; a negro may speak English without being of English stock. ”

“ Here, if anywhere, we can find a clear idea of common Semitic custom, so often appealed to to account for the similarities between Jewish law and the Hammurabi Code. But other scholars look on these narratives of the patriarchal life with deep suspicion as being a late attempt to sketch, in the light of a writer’s knowledge of what the nomads of his day were like, an instructive and edifying ancestral background for a set of very dissimilar tribes or clans, whom some political necessity led to amalgamate into the Hebrew people. ”

“ SEMITIC DEVELOPMENT IN CANAAN—SACRIFICE OF THE FIRST-BORN PERSISTS—ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF SACRIFICE—THE CUSTOM WORLD-WIDE AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES—ASSOCIATED WITH CANNIBALISM—THE FOUNDATION SACRIFICE—DISCOVERIES IN PALESTINE.
IN treating of the Semitic race—a race that gave to humanity the Bible and the Koran, a race that founded Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism—its attitude will be better understood if we approach it through the tribes whose religions and humanitarian ideas were eventually to become the religions and humanitarian ideas of the civilized world. ”

“ In spite of their love of travel and commerce, in spite of their dispersion over the earth, this group has retained a striking individuality. Many ethnographers charge it against the Jews that the presence of blondes among them, and of brachycephalic heads, proves a crossing of the blood. This is not the case. The Semitic stock is a markedly white type of the race, and in all ages fair complexion, light eyes and hair, have been admired as especially beautiful. ”

“ They are now the growing people. Statistics show that in Europe, while the Aryac population doubles in number in thirty-four years, the Semites double in twenty-five years, having more children to a marriage and less infantile mortality.209 When bigotry ceases on both sides, and free inter-marriage restores the Aryo-Semitic stock to its original unity, we may look for a race of nobler capacities than any now existing. ”

“ There were many points of kinship between Jews and Arabians. The Bible hints this in making Abraham the father of both peoples through Isaac and Ishmael (Gen. xvii, 18-20) . This tradition the Arabs accepted from their Jewish neighbors. They certainly both belonged to the same race—the Semitic. The Semites included Assyrians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs and Ethiopians. In spite of the religious divergence, the Jews adapted themselves—externally at least—to the Arabian mode of life. ”

“ We can only speculate on the numberless wars and marriages, on the extensive slave trade and commercial intercourse which throughout this period have blended the races into so many intermediate types that it becomes impossible in many cases to say with which a given tribe should be classified. To add to the confusion, a large Semitic element was added at two epochs, one when the Abyssinian branch of the Semites moved across from Arabia to occupy Abyssinia, the other when, under the impulsion of the fanaticism of Islam, the Arabs followed up the Nile in their proselyting campaigns. ”

“ We owe to the Semitic race neither political life, art, poetry, philosophy, nor science. We owe to them religion. The whole world--we except India, China, Japan, and tribes altogether savage--has adopted the Semitic religions. ”

“ The race from which the Bible came was despised in ancient times and it is despised to-day. How comes it then that a product of that race has been granted such boundless influence? How comes it that the barriers which have always separated Jew from Gentile, Semite from Aryan, have at one point been broken through, so that the current of Semitic life has been allowed to flow unchecked over the rich fields of our modern civilization? ”

“ To apply the term to a person who is merely antagonistic to that fraction of the Semitic race known as the Jews is therefore absurd, and leads to the ridiculous situation that one may be described as "anti-Semitic and pro-Arabian." ”

“ Among them there is a fraction, and that fraction again scattered over vast areas, in various states of civilization, and under diversified kinds of governments, enjoying liberty and rights of citizenship in the one, and groaning under relentless oppression in the other,—are they still none other than Semites? Are they so permeated with Semitic features that they can never amalgamate with their surroundings and become full-weighted citizens of the state where they pitch their tents,—offer them what inducements you may,—but must be kept at [50] arms length and treated as suspects? ”

“ Thus we find the impression of awe preponderating among the Semitic races generally; and as in their political relations, so in their religious conceptions, we find them prone to prostrate themselves before despotic power. ”

“ I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism become far more Anti-Semitic than I am or ever was. I have heard people talking with real injustice about the Jews, who once seemed to think it an injustice to talk about them at all. ”

“ Once more the Semitic scholars protested. There was no end to the extravagant fantasies of the Assyriologists! The learned world was comfortably convinced that none but a Semitic or Aryan people could have been the originators of civilization, and to assert that the Semites had borrowed their culture from a race which seemed to have affinities with Mongols or Tatars was an outrage upon established prejudices. The Semitic philologist was more certain [25] than ever that Assyrian decipherment was the folly of a few “untrained” amateurs, and could safely be disregarded. ”

“ Hardness easily becomes cruelty, and purely Semitic empires, such as Assyria, developed a barbarous cruelty, the story of which is told on their inscriptions and in the denunciations of the Hebrew Prophets. There is something in the Semitic character that is disliked by Western nations, and21 the Jews have been subjects of relentless persecution in mediæval times, and are still capable of arousing bitter hostility, as may be seen from those violent eruptions of anti-Semitism which occasionally burst through the cosmopolitanism of Western Europe. ”

“ The Jews contend that anti-Semitism is a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the middle ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who have given the movement its quasi-scientific name, declare that it is a racial struggle—an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia—and that the anti-Semites are engaged in an effort to prevent what is called the Aryan race from being subjugated by a Semitic immigration, and to save Aryan ideals from being modified by an alien and demoralizing oriental Anschauung. ”

“ The materials for the study of their institutions and population are abundant, but lend themselves to discussion rather than to a summary of admitted facts. In the early history of south-western Asia the Semites form the most important ethnic group, which is primarily linguistic but also shares other remarkable characteristics. Two of the greatest religions of the world, Christianity and Islam, are Semitic in origin, as well as Judaism. ”

“ How is the fact to be explained, he might ask, that the three great religions of the world in which the unity of the Deity forms the key-note, are of Semitic origin, and that the Aryan nations, wherever they have been brought to a worship of the One God, invoke Him with names borrowed from the Semitic languages?
But let us look more closely at the facts before we venture on theories. Mohammedanism, no doubt, is a Semitic religion, and its very core is monotheism. ”

“ Of late, however, not only have the limits of the Semitic family been considerably extended, so as to embrace several nations notorious for their idolatrous worship, but the history of the Jewish and Arab tribes has been explored so much more fully, that even there traces of a wide-spread tendency to polytheism have come to light. ”

“ No, you are not a vulgar, you are a very enlightened, critic of our Race. For there is an anti-Semitism, I hope and trust, which does the Jews more justice than any blind philo-Semitism, than does that merely sentimental “Let-them-all-come Liberalism” which in itself is nothing but the Semitic Ideology over again. ”

“ It appeals strongly to the English mind, because it is the holy language, bringing the Divine Word and coming from the sanctuary of that ancient covenant, whose faithful guardians are the people of Israel. The Semitic word has within historic times exercised on the civilisation of the whole human race an influence to which no parallel can be found, and which, if the future may be measured by the past, is destined triumphantly to extend, for the incalculable benefit of mankind, to the uttermost bounds of the earth. ”

“ The new and higher culture had thoroughly asserted itself as predominant in both its great provinces, and in nothing as much as in the national religion, which, coming in contact with the conceptions of the Semites, was affected by a certain nobler spiritual strain, a purer moral feeling, which seems to have been more peculiarly Semitic, though destined to be carried to its highest perfection only in the Hebrew branch of the race. ”

“ Moreover, as we approach the Near East, cradle of the masonic system, we find the Semitic influence not only of the Jews but of other Semite races directing the lodges. In Turkey, in Egypt, in Syria now, as a thousand years ago, the same secret societies which inspired the Templars have never ceased to exist, and in this mingling of the East and West it is possible that the Grand Orient may draw reinforcement from those sources whence it drew its system and its name. ”

“ Please do not think this is a joke; it only seems a joke, and behind it there lurks a gigantic truth, and it is this, that all latter-day ideas and movements have originally sprung from a Jewish source, for the simple reason, that the Semitic idea has finally conquered and entirely subdued this only apparently irreligious universe of ours.
. . . . There is no doubt that the Jews regularly go one better or worse than the Gentile in whatever they do, there is no further doubt that their influence today justifies a very careful scrutiny, and cannot possibly be viewed without serious alarm. ”

“ It was natural that under a dynasty of Semites, Semitic blood should flow freely into the lower region, Semitic usages and modes of thought become prevalent, and the spoken language of the country pass from a Turanian or Turano-Cushite to a Semitic type. ”