Though this is welcome news, I still wonder why "semite" has come to be an exclusively Jewish term, disregarding all other peoples who speak semitic languages.
Seems like a sham to me. Hebrew is only one of the semitic languages.
We didn't "monopolize" it. Like the word "Jew," it was imposed upon us by gentiles. It originated with the popularization of pseudo-scientific racial supremacist ideologies in the 19th century ("Jews aren't Aryan, they are inferior Semites"). That is why, to this day, the descriptive definition of "anti-Semitic" means "anti-Jewish."
supernice wrote
Though this is welcome news, I still wonder why "semite" has come to be an exclusively Jewish term, disregarding all other peoples who speak semitic languages.
Seems like a sham to me. Hebrew is only one of the semitic languages.