Semitic people

[6][7][8] First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis,[9] together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetites.

[11] The terms "anti-Semite" or "antisemitism" came by a circuitous route to refer more narrowly to anyone who was hostile or discriminatory towards Jews in particular.

[12] Anthropologists of the 19th century such as Ernest Renan readily aligned linguistic groupings with ethnicity and culture, appealing to anecdote, science and folklore in their efforts to define racial character.

but called the Semitic races inferior to the Aryan for their monotheism, which he held to arise from their supposed lustful, violent, unscrupulous and selfish racial instincts.

Steinthal summed up these predispositions as "Semitism", and so Steinschneider characterised Renan's ideas as "anti-Semitic prejudice".

The first depiction of historical ethnology of the world separated into the biblical sons of Noah : Semites, Hamites and Japhetites . Gatterer 's Einleitung in die Synchronistische Universalhistorie (1771) explains his view that modern history has shown the truth of the biblical prediction of Japhetite supremacy ( Genesis 9:25–27 ). [ 1 ] Click the image for a transcription of the text.
This T and O map , 1472, from the first printed version of Isidore of Seville 's Etymologiae , identifies the three known continents as populated by descendants of Sem ( Shem ), Iafeth ( Japheth ) and Cham ( Ham ).
1879 statute of the Antisemitic League, the organization which first popularized the term