How “Anti-Semitism” Replaced “Jew-Hatred” and Why It Shouldn’t Have

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A recently discovered letter in the archives of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem sheds light on why the entry “antisemitism” did not appear in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, whose initial “A” and “B” volume was published in 1888. The OED ignored the word even though the German term Antisemitismus had been introduced into European discourse nearly ten years earlier, in 1879, by the political activist and publicist Wilhelm Marr in his pamphlet Der Weg zum Siege des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (“The Way to the Victory of Judaism over Germanism”) and had already been picked up by other languages, English included.

The discovered letter was an answer sent in 1900 by James Murray, the OED’s editor-in-chief, to the Anglo-Jewish leader Claude Montefiore, who had inquired why “antisemitism” was missing from the dictionary. Murray’s answer was admirable. Marr’s coinage, he wrote, was but one of many “anti-” words that had not made it into the OED because there was a plethora of these and he had not thought that it or the phenomenon it referred to would last. “Would that [the word] antisemitism had had no more than a fleeting interest!” he now wrote to Montefiore, admitting his error. In actuality, he stated, “the closing years of the 19th century have shown, alas!, that much of Christianity is only a temporary whitewash over brutal savagery.”