raspberriesareyummy , 1 month ago

Do you mean you don’t find anti-Semitism a form of racism?

To be fair, that’s a difficult question because the forms of anti-semitism changed a lot over the course of recent and not-so-recent history.

By definition, semitic people are not just jewish people, and indeed, “semitic” describes an ethnicity, and by that, anti-semitism would also be racism.

However, many contemporary forms of anti-semitism are exclusively directed at jewish people, at which point they typically occur in people who are often also quite racist shitbags, but their anti-semitism in and of itself is not racist, because they direct their hatred at everything that is jewish, and for example the conspiracy theories surrounding jewish influence in the world have nothing to do with ethnicity, and all with religion.

As I learned it, one of the main historical factors contributing to this (and to anti-semitism) is that jewish people were not forbidden by religion from taking interest on money loans (from non-jews), whereas christians were. All the while in medieval times some other jobs were forbidden to them. So naturally there was an overrepresentation of jewish people in the emerging finance sector, and for the simple mind it is convenient to hate on people who you owe money to. And this form of anti-semitism I see as absolutely unrelated to racism.

PS: I intentionally write “jewish” and “christian” in lowercase because all religions suck donkey balls and while they can be tolerated, they deserve no special emphasis.