“Semite” was never a race. It was simply a family of languages that included Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. It was nineteenth-century European scholars who twisted that linguistic grouping into a racial fiction. Ernest Renan even placed Yiddish-speaking Jews closer to Aryans. The category was never coherent, only useful. Initially, this pseudoscience lumped Hebrew-speaking Jews and Arabs together, contrasting them against the “Aryan” ideal.

But in 1879, Wilhelm Marr coined antisemitism to name his anti-Jewish political movement. The word borrowed the “Semitic” label but applied it only to Jews. Arabs were excluded from the start. The horrors of the twentieth century welded the word to anti-Jewish hatred so completely that there is no returning to any older meaning. The etymology is broken, but history has cemented the break.

This leaves a question: What word applies to the hatred directed at the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East?

Calling it “racism” was inconvenient for Europe. Racism is a structural indictment; it implies a crime, a victim, and a perpetrator. It requires admitting that the hostility is based on hierarchy and domination. Europe preferred a clinical alternative, something that sounded like a condition rather than a sin.

They chose Islamophobia.

The word surfaced in French colonial administrative writing in the early 1900s. To the colonial gaze, the distinction between an Arab, a Bedouin, or an Amazigh was irrelevant detail; “Muslim” was the catch-all racial marker for the ruled. The term described the administrator’s anxiety about this collective mass, not the lived experience of the people being dominated.

By framing it as a “phobia,” the language turns the bigot into a patient. A phobia is a medical problem, an involuntary nervous reaction to be treated or pitied. It frames domination as fear.

The result is a double standard regarding history. Jews received a word that implies a political crime (antisemitism), while Arabs and Muslims received a word that implies a psychological feeling (Islamophobia). One holds the aggressor accountable; the other gives the aggressor an alibi.

And here is the bitter part. Before Marr, Europe called it Judeophobia, a word that kept hatred in the realm of feelings, something irrational, almost pitiable. The phobia-framing did not protect Jews. It merely kept the danger vague until Marr arrived to give it a name, a program, and a direction. From Judeophobia to antisemitism to the camps: a trajectory.

The lesson was not learned. A century later, Europe handed that same early-stage word to us.

We are in the middle of a sequence that has already played out once.