Semitic people

Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites.

In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples. Identification of pro-Caucasian racism has either partially or completely devalued the use of the term as a racial category, with the caveat that an inverse assessment would still be considered scientifically obsolete.

Categorization of racial groups by reference to skin color was common in classical antiquity. For example, it is found in e.g. Physiognomica, a Greek treatise dated to c. 300 BC.

The transmission of the "color terminology" for race from antiquity to early anthropology in 17th century Europe took place via rabbinical literature, where the term "Semite" in a racial sense was coined. Specifically, Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer (a medieval rabbinical text dated roughly to between the 7th to 12th centuries) contains the division of mankind into three groups based on the three sons of Noah, viz. Shem, Ham and Japheth:

Jews were identified as a belonging to a subrace of the Semite greater race in this division of mankind. In Rabbi Eliezer and other rabbinical texts was it then received by Georgius Hornius (1666). In Hornius' scheme, Semites are "brownish-yellow" (flavos), and almost all Jews being neither black nor white but "light brown" (buxus, the color of boxwood), following Mishnah Sanhedrin, they accordingly are classified as Semites.

The term "Semitic" in a racial sense was coined by members of the Göttingen school of history in the early 1770s. Other members of the Göttingen school of history coined the separate term Caucasian in the 1780s. These terms were used and developed by numerous other scholars over the next century. In the early 20th century, the pseudo-scientific classifications of Carleton S. Coon included the Semitic peoples in the Caucasian race, as similar in appearance to the Indo-European, Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian-speaking peoples. Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies, the term also came to be applied to the religions (ancient Semitic and Abrahamic) and ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution.

German historian Christoph Meiners, supporter of the polygenist theory of human origins, became favorite intellectual ancestor of the Nazis. In his "binary [greater] racial scheme" of superior Caucasians and inferior Mongoloids, Meiners did not include Jews as Caucasians and ascribed them a "permanently degenerate nature". Other members of the Göttingen school of history would make the addition of Negroids.

In part he resented the French Revolution for leading to French Jewish emancipation and threatening the Germans' supposed rightful place in a racial hierarchy in which they were assessed as superior in all domains due to inheriting naturally occurring higher purity of blood from their ancestors, yet already degenerating through indulgence in civilization's luxuries. Using a "bundle of notions" led to creations of purported subraces on a continental and state basis with implied decreased respective scientific weight. In 1772 he became extraordinary professor, and in 1775 full professor, of Weltweisheit, also at the University of Göttingen, when over the course of tenures he had the opportunity to join the Göttingen school of history of which he was a member.