Semitic
This term refers to a language family which includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian, and many others. Interestingly, however, in the form anti-Semitic, it almost always is synonymous with the term Jewish; i.e. anti-Semitic only means anti-Jewish, not anti-Arabic or anti-Assyrian.
Semitic is derived from Semite, a word introduced into English in the mid-1800’s and referred to anyone who came from a culture where a Semitic language was spoken. Semite came from Sem, the Latin form of Shem, the name of one of the three sons of Noah. In the 19th century, a great deal of anthropological ink was spilled trying to get historical and linguistic data to line up with the account of the Old Testament; and it was commonly supposed that Noah’s three sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth were the ancestors of three great branches of humanity — the Semites (as described above), the Hamites (sometimes considered to be Egyptians and Canaanites, other times considered to be Africans), and the Japhethians (everyone else).
This threefold division has been long since discredited, both in linguistics and in anthropology. In linguistics, there are many, many recognized language families. Some families are huge, like Indo European (which includes everything from English to Welsh to Italian to Russian to Greek to Hindi), Afro-Asiatic (Hebrew, Arabic, Berber…), Altaic (Korean, Japanese (?), Turkish…), Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese…). Some families are quite small — Basque, for example, is in a family by itself, as far as anyone knows.
The name Shem is a hard-working one: it indicates a path of difficulty along which directed, connective energy flows, leading to manifestation. Sem is similar, but the path is not indicated to be difficult.
