Judeophobia

Why a physician chose the clinical word Judeophobia

Leon Pinsker was an early Zionist pioneer and a professional physician, and he disliked the word antisemitism, which he regarded as a misnomer. The term he preferred, Judeophobia, appeared in his pamphlet Auto-Emancipation, published anonymously in German in September 1882, where he defined it as an irrational fear or hatred of Jews.

Every other coinage in this family reaches for the suffix and then declines the medical claim. Homophobia's own literature says it is not a phobia. Transphobia's article says so in its second paragraph. Pinsker's usage is the opposite: he was a doctor, he chose the clinical register on purpose, and he pressed the diagnosis as far as it would go.

What Pinsker meant by calling Judeophobia incurable

Pinsker called Judeophobia a form of demonopathy, distinguished from others by the fact that the Jewish ghost has become known to the whole race of mankind rather than to certain races only. He then wrote the sentence the entry turns on:

Judeophobia is a psychic disorder. As a psychic disorder, it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.

The conclusion follows from the premise and he states it plainly. Having analysed Judeophobia as a hereditary form of demonopathy peculiar to the human race, and represented Jew-hatred as an inherited aberration of the human mind, he writes, the important conclusion is that contending against these hostile impulses must be given up, as contending against any other inherited predisposition is given up.

That is an argument for emigration, and Auto-Emancipation is one of the founding texts of political Zionism. The medical vocabulary is not decoration on it. If the hatred is a heritable disease, persuasion is a category error and only separation remains, and the word carries the whole of that reasoning inside it.

Why the word antisemitism is a misnomer

Antisemitism was in circulation because Wilhelm Marr had founded the Antisemiten-Liga in 1879, and identification as an antisemite was politically useful in late nineteenth-century Europe. Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna, built a career partly on it, and in 1895 A. C. Cuza organised an antisemitic league in Bucharest. Before the Second World War a person, an organisation or a party might describe itself as antisemitic without embarrassment.

Pinsker's objection to the word was the one still made. Semitic designates a language group rather than a people: speakers of Semitic languages include Arabs, Ethiopians and Assyrians, who are not the objects of the prejudice, while many Jews speak no Semitic language at all. Bernard Lewis argued in 1973 that reading anything into the root beyond hatred of Jews is an etymological fallacy, and pointed out that the Nazis, as the most authoritative exponents of the thing, found no difficulty in hating Jews and courting Arabs at the same time.

The dispute continues over a hyphen, and the record of it is a short sequence of revisions:

1. Shmuel Almog argued in 1989 that writing anti-Semitism implies that Semitism is a real thing.
2. Emil Fackenheim supported the unhyphenated form in 2003, to dispel the notion that there is an entity called Semitism which antisemitism opposes.
3. The Associated Press adopted the unhyphenated spelling in 2021, and the major newspaper style guides followed.

Why nobody calls themselves an antisemite any more

The self-description ended. Yehuda Bauer wrote in 1984 that there are no antisemites in the world, that nobody says they are antisemitic, that it is not possible after Hitler and the word has gone out of fashion. A term that had been a political asset in 1895 was unusable ninety years later, and the reversal is the clearest evidence available that these words describe a position rather than a condition. Nobody stops having arachnophobia because it became embarrassing.

Whether hatred of Jews is eternal or contextual

Modern scholarship divides over the question his pamphlet answers. The eternalist view treats hatred of Jews as separate from other prejudice, an exceptional and transhistorical force. Hannah Arendt objected that this provokes the question why the Jews of all people, and answers it with eternal hostility, which is no answer. The contextual view treats it as a form of racism and looks at the conditions in which it arises; the historian David Engel has gone further and challenged the project of defining it at all, arguing that the term implies links between anti-Jewish prejudices in different periods without evidence that the links exist.

Pinsker is on the eternalist side and got there through a medical claim. Two thousand years of transmission, an inherited aberration, incurable. Whether the diagnosis was right is a question for historians. What the catalogue can record is that it is the only word in this family whose author intended the pathology literally, and that he used it to conclude that argument was pointless.