I read and appreciated the long statements by Richards, Szajnberg, and Lotto. I shall be brief in my response.
Semitism is a philological category. Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic are semitic languages. Many years ago, I had a letter published in the New York Times saying: how could Arafat be anti-Semitic since he was a Semite himself? David Lotto has it right: it is anti-Judaism that we are discussing; but since the word anti-Semitism is the accepted usage, we should keep in mind that stands for anti-Judaism.
The first persecutors of the Jews and their religious beliefs and ethical values, in Europe, were the Romans. But there was one big fact to consider: the Jews fought the Romans in a series of uprisings whereupon Rome waged punishing wars and Titus burned down the Second Temple in Jerusalem and started the Jewish Diaspora.
The original wave of migration split into two branches: the Sephardim, from Sepharad, or Spain, who knew Hebrew and spoke medieval Spanish or Ladino; and the Ashkenazim, from Ashkenaz, or Germany, who knew Hebrew and spoke Alemanish, or medieval German. The Ashkenazim later spread from Germany to the east, to Poland and Russia, the most populous Jewish settlements in Europe. Arnie and Nate and myself are Ashkenazi, but I only imagine that he is either of Spanish or Italian ancestry.
While Judaism is a synonym for Jewish religion, the name Jew came also to mean a Jewish race, marked by certain physical traits, such as the shape of the nose, the taint of the skin, the color of hair. Alternately, race also came to mean a social group, a nation. When I lived in Russia and Poland until the age of 15 I was seen as a race. Later I became a Jewish citizen of Israel. In 1963 I came to America and became a religion.
The word Jew is derived from Juda, or Yehuda, in Latin Judas, also the name of the apostle who betrayed Jesus to the Romans. However, the
ancient Yehuda was one of the Hebrew tribes, and Hebrew is derived from the Hebrew word IVRI, and thus the Hebrew language is called IVRIT. In Russian, the genteel name of the Jew is IEVEI, from Ivri, and the vulgar name of the Jew is жид/Zhyd. In Polish the official name is Żyd, Zhyd. In Poland I was accused as a Christ murderer, to which I replied, I did not murder anybody. During a Schreber conference in Normandy in 1993 I told a group of Belgian Catholics that Jesus was convicted and executed by Pontius Pilatus. So instead of accusing the Jews, they should be given the Nobel prize for fulfilling the prophecy of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Only one woman in the group understood what I meant.
Christianity, created by two Jews, Jesus, the prophet, and Paul, the proselytizer, first persecuted by the Romans and then inherited Rome as a worldly power and the Western Church led by Roman Popes. In the East the Constantinople the Christian were led by a patriarch, while in Russia it morphed into the Russian Orthodox Church and Patriarchate.
As the Church triumphed over the Synagogue, two types of church fathers emerged: the tolerant Augustine and the virulently anti-Semitic John Chrysostom. During the Middle Ages the Crusaders staged the first violent and genocidal massacres of on Jewish communities in many cities in France and Germany, fueled by anti-Semitic ideology and inflammatory narratives, e.g., 1230 Jews accused of circumcising a five year-old boy. A major goal of the violent pogroms was to grab Jewish properties and assets.
Virulent and violent was also the Inquisition, with its autos-da-fé, the torture and burning of Jews as infidels. After the Reformation, the greatest anti-Semite was Martin Luther himself. With the waning of the Middle Ages the economic importance of Jews declined as Christian capitalism flourished. Simultaneously, the Jews were vilified in art as the Judensau, the repulsive Jew-swine, and would also be adopted by the Nazis. Moreover, there were mass expulsions of Jews from many European cities.
The history of continuing anti-Semitism in the 17th and 18th centuries culminate in opposing trends in the 19th. With the emancipation of
Jews in Europe and their rise in their contributions to science, law, medicine, and psychiatry spurred a competitive backlash from the gentiles in the same professions. Coupled with the Darwin-inspired and weaponized Social Darwinism, fueling the resentment on the Jewish expansion. Social Darwinism would be adopted by the Nazis, e.g., Nazi doctrine of securing a “Lebensraum,” ensuring an existential space, for Hitler's Third Reich (third empire).
However, in the 19th took place the notorious Dreyfus trial in which anti-Semitic defamation of Captain Dreyfus clashed with the impassioned defense be Emile Zola's “J'accuse.” The history of German eliminationist anti-Semitism was documented in Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which was unfortunately panned by Jewish intellectuals.
Here is where Freud comes in. As a preeminent contributor to psychiatry with his creation of psychoanalysis, Freud and his family lived in Vienna during the times of the infamous anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger. However, the proud Jew that he was, Freud remained silent about anti-Semitism until his emigration to London, it is only there where he dared to discuss anti-Semitism, citing the philosemitic Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi's book, Anti-Semitism Throughout the Ages. As a proud Jew, Freud was critical of Alfred Adler's conversion to a Christian but was blind to C.G. Jung's hidden anti-Semitic attitudes. It was the ostracized and banished Wilhelm Reich who in 1933, in Mass Psychology of Fascism, Cassandra-like warned the Jews about the Nazi danger. Many Jews in Austria and German failed to heed this warning. Thanks to Princess Marie Bonaparte, Freud and his daughter were spared the fate of Freud's three elderly sisters, murdered in the death camp Treblinka.