Antisemitism and Islamophobia are Different: Some Semantic Observations and Questions

Antisemitism and Islamophobia threaten cosmopolitan, multiethnic, multicultural society. I live in one and so do you. Although the antisemite and Islamophobe hate, their hatred has a difference. I have been trying to make sense of the meanings and feelings, individually and culturally evoked, by the words antisemitism and Islamophobia. My informal inquiry calls for an experiment I have not performed, a proper version of Charles Osgood’s semantic differential.  Here is an impression, grounds for my hypothesis, of what I suspect are the “underlying…affective or connotative aspects of language…” that these words bring to mind (Osgood, 1964). 

Something lurks in the difference between anti and phobia: the difference of opposition and fear. Hostility directed at people that deserve harm.  Versus fear, something to sequester or flee. The shared implication is that Jews and Muslims are a problem. But the problems are different. The Jew is despised. Islam is something some are afraid of. 

Implicit in the name of the problems are different solutions, some therapeutic, some militant, some final. A phobia is a mental condition deserving treatment and compassion. Something to cure. A phobia is an over-felt, unrealistic sense of peril. Fear of Islam is a problem to get over. Antisemitism is different: persecution of the Jew justified in ancient blood-libels, enforced by inquisitions, ‘the blood and soil’ of the Holocaust. 

The etymology and modern history of the words are different. Antisemitism was coined in Germany and Austria in the mid nineteenth century.  Islamophobia’s linguistic origins are unclear to me, but was reintroduced in 1976 in The News International, a Pakistani paper. Place matters. Antisemitism as the term of use became relevant in places where restrictive laws and mass murder was sanctioned. In contrast, Islamophobia identifies a mental problem of those outside Islamic society. 

Coupled with anti and phobia is Semite and Islam. Semite = Jew as the despised other, a race apart. The Jewish is in the blood. Islam as an optional creed and culture; merely but profoundly the religion of those called Muslims. 

The Washington Post on 12/9/23, ran a headline with a story that caught my attention. The headline read "What the federal probe into antisemitism, Islamophobia at schools is about". Beneath the headline the content shifts to "The probe is a part of the Biden administration’s effort to crack down on the “alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and other forms of discrimination and harassment” on school campuses across the country…". The federal department’s language, vetted and deliberate in attempts at a level playing field, employs anti across terms; but the Post’s headline, the attention grabber, uses anti and phobia. It is this less considered expression, the ordinary language of the headline, that shouts semantic differential and points to the feeling. 

Here’s Osgood’s 1964 introduction to the Semantic Differential:

“MOST comparisons across cultures are extremely difficult when they concern nonmaterial traits. In part, this is an obvious consequence of the subjective nature of comparisons; in part also, however, this difficulty is attributable to the fact that nonmaterial traits must often be assessed through the medium of language. Indeed, if the Sapir-Whorf psycholinguistic relativity hypothesis were taken literally and considered completely general to all aspects of human cognition, such comparisons would be impossible. The essential point is this: to note differences within any phenomenal domain and order them in any rigorous fashion, one must have certain similarities underlying the phenomena as a frame of reference against which to compare them. Only to the extent that physical objects share such attributes as length, weight, and volume, and to the extent that these attributes can be abstracted and quantified, can comparison be made on anything other than an intuitive basis. 

The denotative or referential uses of terms-the way the lexicon carves up the world appear largely arbitrary and unique to particular languages until the ethnolinguist discovers a framework of semantic components that can be imposed comparably on these phenomena, in closely analogous fashion, our own research over the past few years provide evidence for a universal frame- work underlying certain affective or connotative aspects of language. These findings enliven the possibility of constructing instruments for measuring these aspects of "subjective culture" comparably in diverse societies in effect, circumventing the language barrier.' Since the affective reactions people make to symbols and events are important determiners of their overt behaviors with respect to these symbols and events, having comparable means of measuring affective meanings assumes some importance in a world that is rapidly shrinking psychologically, socially, and politically.”   Osgood, C. E. (1964). Semantic Differential Technique in the Comparative Study of Cultures. American Anthropologist, 66(3), 171–200.