[Marxism] The last of the Semites — War in Context

[Louis Proyect]

Al Jazeera has removed this article from its website. Al Abunimah 
reports: “Massad told The Electronic Intifada that he had ‘received 
confirmation’ from his editor at Al Jazeera English that ‘management 
pulled the article.’

The last of the Semites
by News Sources on May 19, 2013

By Joseph Massad

Jewish opponents of Zionism understood the movement since its early age 
as one that shared the precepts of anti-Semitism in its diagnosis of 
what gentile Europeans called the “Jewish Question”. What galled 
anti-Zionist Jews the most, however, was that Zionism also shared the 
“solution” to the Jewish Question that anti-Semites had always 
advocated, namely the expulsion of Jews from Europe.

It was the Protestant Reformation with its revival of the Hebrew Bible 
that would link the modern Jews of Europe to the ancient Hebrews of 
Palestine, a link that the philologists of the 18th century would 
solidify through their discovery of the family of “Semitic” languages, 
including Hebrew and Arabic. Whereas Millenarian Protestants insisted 
that contemporary Jews, as descendants of the ancient Hebrews, must 
leave Europe to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ, 
philological discoveries led to the labelling of contemporary Jews as 
“Semites”. The leap that the biological sciences of race and heredity 
would make in the 19th century of considering contemporary European Jews 
racial descendants of the ancient Hebrews would, as a result, not be a 
giant one.

full: http://warincontext.org/2013/05/19/the-last-of-the-semites/