'Anti-Semitism' is a hostile image of Jews that is based on prejudice. “Semitic” is a term that refers to a language group. Arabic, Hebrew and Maltese are all Semitic languages.
If we look only at the literal meaning of the word, 'antisemitism' therefore means 'hostility towards Semitic languages'. But as often happens with language, words and concepts take on a different meaning than the literal one over the centuries. This also happened with the word 'anti-Semitism': in the course of the 19th century, it became the most common word for hatred of Jews. Before that time, it was usually called 'anti-Judaism', because hatred of Jews was still mainly religious in nature.
Are Jews and Arabs' Semites'?
Contrary to popular belief, the term 'Semitic' therefore only refers to a language group, and not to peoples or groups of a particular origin. Semitic languages are mainly spoken in the Middle East, by people of different religions and ethnicities. But Amharic and Tigrinya, two languages spoken in Ethiopia, also belong to the Semitic language group.
Language and origin are different things and are separate from each other. In principle, anyone can learn a Semitic language, without changing your origin. So there are no 'Semitic people'. Jews are not Semites, and neither are Arabs.
How did 'anti-Semitism' come to mean 'hatred of News'?
In the 19th century, racial theory emerged. At that time, it was believed that people could be divided into biologically demonstrable races. Jews were also said to be a separate race and therefore had innate physical and character traits. These traits were said to distinguish 'the Jew' from other human races.
Hatred of Jews existed in Europe long before the 19th century: our continent has a long history of hostility towards Jews and the Jewish religion. Nationalist politicians and writers wanted to justify this anti-Judaism in the spirit of the new age: the danger that they believed emanated from 'the Jewish race' could be explained by the influence of Semitic languages. Although European Jews had not spoken Semitic languages since antiquity, their character and way of thinking were still influenced by them, according to the theory, and that is why Jews were fundamentally different from speakers of 'Aryan languages'. Language and race thus became instruments for discrimination.
Just like the other '-isms' of that time (communism, capitalism, nationalism, etc.), anti-Semitism also became an ideology. The term was popularized in 1879 by a German publicist, Wilhelm Marr. He even founded the 'Antisemitic League'. People did not see anti-Semitism as a controversial taboo, but were actually proud of it.
Although the term 'Semite' could theoretically have referred to non-Jews, such as Arabs, in practice 'antisemitism' always referred to Jews. This is how the term 'anti-Semitism' eventually became commonplace. Incidentally, the positive undertone quickly disappeared: certainly since the Holocaust, it has absolutely no longer been socially acceptable to be an 'anti-Semite'.
From religious to racial anti-Semitism
As already mentioned, hatred of Jews, or anti-Judaism, as it was first called, was certainly not new in Europe or beyond. After all, Christianity stated that Jews were the murderers of Jesus Christ and that Judaism was an outdated and inferior religion. For a long time, hatred of Jews was therefore fuelled by the Christian church.
At that time, hatred of Jews was mainly focused on Judaism as a religion. It was not the ethnicity of Jews that was important, but their religion. Jews could therefore improve their living conditions by converting to Christianity — which was often attempted under duress.
Gradually, however, the idea emerged that ethnicity did matter, and that Jews — even if they had converted to Christianity — would always retain aberrant character traits that would pose a threat to humanity. Whether Jews were religious or not no longer mattered: Anti-semitism is hostility toward Jews simply because they are Jewish.