It may strike many as odd that the person who coined the term 'anti-Semite' proudly confessed to being an anti-semite himself. The person who first referred to 'genocide' included within this term actions that did not necessarily involve physical violence.

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COMING TO TERMS : ‘ANTI-SEMITISM’ AND ‘GENOCIDE’
By Julian D. Scutts (copyrightJulianScutts20202020)
When do new words and terms suddenly arise? That is a question of historical
linguistics. How do we come to terms with what the words in the title imply and
signify. That is a broader question. This document comprises two essays on
each of the terms in its title and a short poem by Heinrich Heine.
.
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM “ANTI-SEMITE” AND ITS RELEVANCE TO THE
PRESENT DAY
With the word anti-Semitism so very much in the air just now, it is timely to
take a look at the origin of the term. It was formulated by a German political
activist by the name of Wilhelm Marr in 1879, the year in which he published a
pamphlet entitled.. Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das
Judenthum (The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism ); it was also in
this year that he founded the Anti-Semite League, marking what has been
widely seen as the juncture at which traditional anti-Semitism based on
religious animosity gave way to modern anti-Semitism rooted in socio-economic
issues and racial hostility. Strangely enough in view of current usage that
decries anti-Semitism as a perversion one sees in others, the inventor of the
term Anti-Semitism declared himself to be an anti-Semite. To understand why
he did so we should consult his pamphlet. According to Marr’s line of
argument the Jews suffered the outrage of being uprooted from their native soil
in Palestine to become a captive people within the Roman Empire and ever
since had been striving to conquer the gentile world from within. Marr did not
ascribe this alleged strategy of the Jews to an evil force or to gratuitous malice
but to a natural impulse of selfassertion in the face of military oppression. It is
almost as if Marr paraphrased Shylock's oft-quoted soliloquy in The Merchant
of Venice (Act 3, scene 1, 58-68, “Hath not a Jew eyes”). In short, Marr
provided what he termed “facts“ proving that Jews had won - or were about to
win - the war they waged with the gentile world and, most poignantly, in
Germany, the Germans proving to have been the most supine victims of Jewish
world conquest. Marr in his epilogue went so far as to concede defeat to the
Jews and almost congratulate them on their victory, exhibiting no obvious
tone of irony. His apparent acquiescence does not seem to accord with the fact

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that in 1879 he played a leading role in establishing the League of Antisemites
(AntisemitenLiga), an organization following the aim of denying Jews the right
to participate in German society. Surely the most insidious aspect of Marr’s
thesis lies in his postulating that the Jew-Gentile conflict could not be
resolved - as many Jews themselves supposed - by compromises, conversion,
conformity to the prevailing culture or changes of behaviour and attitude, as
Jewishness lay in the sphere of ontology, not action.
Marr did not hint at any final solution in terms of what we have come to
understand by the term after the Holocaust. In any case, Marr argued,
Jewishness transcended individual lives and was therefore indestructible and,
as history had repeatedly shown, all attempts to suppress Jews by force had
only added strength to Jewishness in the abstract. Eventually, towards the
end of his life, Marr renounced his anti-Semitic view but in terms of historical
causality he could not erase his part in promoting anti-Semitic developments
throughout Germany and beyond. I conclude by making the following
observation, some of which could have a familiar ring to us in 2018. As
developments within the League of Anti-Semites would show soon after its
foundation, it would not be possible to maintain a nice distinction between
anti-Jewish hostility carried over from the Middle Ages and modern anti-
Semitism, for which Marr believed there was a nonreligious and “rational”
foundation. Marr considered the press, like the banks and public institutions,
to be subject to Jewish control and were therefore deceptive and untruthful. In
our parlance they farmed out “fake news.”
Marr also lamented that the establishment and the prevailing political climate
muzzled all voices that were critical of Jews and their role in society and
politics. Of course, the attempts of the powerful to suppress moral opposition
go a long way back. Did not King Ahab accuse the prophet Elijah of “troubling
Israel”?
QUESTIONAND ANSWERSESSIONONTHE ORIGINOF THETERM ‘GENOCIDE’ AS A
MATTER OF GREAT RELEVANCE TO THE PRESENT

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Q: When did the word genocide first appear on the world stage and who coined
it?
A: In 1943 Raphael Lemkin, a Polish jurist who had escaped to the United
States via Sweden from war-torn Poland, produced a lengthy report with the
title Axis Rule in Occupied Europe on the repressive and measures German
occupation forces employed to subjugate countries that had been overrun.
1This contained a definition of ‘genocide’ and a chapter devoted to the subject.
Q: What lies behind these plain facts?
A: Lemkin had researched the material presented in the book during his stay
in Sweden and in the United States, where he joined the law faculty at Duke
University in North Carolina in 1941, lectured at the School of Military
Government at the University of Virginia in the following year. He gained a
considerable reputation as an expert in international law as indicated by his
being appointed consultant to the U.S. Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign
Economic Administration later becoming a special adviser on foreign affairs at
the War Department.
Q: What relevance has his legal expertise to the term ‘genocide’?
A: In the first instance the need to coin the word ‘genocide’ was rooted in a
problematic and urgent legal question that had presented itself even before the
Second World War when in 1933 the Legal Council of the League of Nations
held a conference in Madrid addressed to issues arising from the horrific
sufferings of the Armenian population in the Ottoman empire during the First
World War and from more recent atrocities in the Middle East. Lemkin was
already in the vanguard of international action against cruelty on a massive
scale as indicated by the essay he contributed to the conference at Madrid that
referred to the Crime of Barbarity, showing that he was already searching for
an adequate term with which to define crimes of unusual magnitude. He was
soon to learn the hard lesson that his entry into his newly chosen field of
activity involved him in sensitive political controversies, for the Polish
government withdrew him from participation in further conferences organized
1
The full documentisavailable atthiswebsite:
https://archive.org/stream/AxisRuleInOccupiedEuropeRaphaelLemkin/Axis_rule_in_occupied_E
urope_Raphael_Lemkin_djvu.txt

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by the League of Nations. The need to find a new word to fit the enormity of the
crimes he was reporting in 1943 had a legal justification. Some authority
would be needed to prosecute those guilty of acts of extreme barbarity of the
kind he enumerated. The German legal itself was totally subservient to the Nazi
regime, allowing any perpetrator of a war crime to plead “I was only obeying
orders.” So a supranational court alone would be in a position to fill the role of
dealing with crimes of an unprecedented order in modern European history
and these crimes had to have a name, which Lemkin found in ‘genocide.’
Q: How was this term defined in the Axis book?
A: To quote from the opening passage of Chapter IX entitled “Genocide”
Genocide —A New Term and New Conception for Destruction of Nations New
conceptions require new terms. By ‘‘genocide” we mean the de¬ struction of a
nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an
old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word
genos (race, tribe) and the Latin tide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation
to such words as tyrannicide, homocide, infan¬ ticide, etc. 1 Generally speaking,
genocide does not necessarily mean the im¬ mediate destruction of a nation,
except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is
intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the
destruction of essential foundationsof the life of national groups, with the aim of
annihilating the groups them¬ selves. The objectives of such a plan would be
disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language,
national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the
destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of
the individuals be¬ longing to such groups. Genocide is directed against the
national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against
individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national
group.
Q: With hindsight we today might be surprised by a statement in the quoted
passage. “Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the
immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings
of all members of a nation.’ Today ‘genocide’ invariable denotes acts of mass
killing, and if the word denotes the use of any means of debasing a group’s
sense of identity short of extermination, could the word not be referred to
apartheid and neocolonial measures of any kind? How come this discrepancy?
A: The fact that Lemkin defined ‘genocide’ so widely as to claim that genocide
did not necessarily involve more than the intention to commit crimes aimed at

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destroying the basis of nationhood or the existence of targeted groups
threatened to deny to the term any legal cutting edge, so diffuse were its terms
of reference. When genocide eventually came to be defined in a binding legal
statute by the United Nation Conference on Genocide in 1948, only overt
actions constituted ‘genocide’ per se while all else that supported or preceded
such acts fell into separate categories in much the same way that ‘attempted
murder’ is distinguished in law from ‘murder.’ 2 The forum for approaching the
broader issues that surround genocide should be found in such areas as
journalism, criminology, education, politics and the arts.
Q: In the minds of many ‘genocide’ is virtually synonymous with the
Holocaust. Does an awareness of the unique industrial-scale destruction of
Jews for no other reason than that they were Jews become apparent in
Lemkin’s book?
A: Not explicitly in my view, though it does suggest that Jews suffered the most
of all under Axis occupation. Chapter (VIII) on Jewish deprivations directly
precedes the chapter on Genocide, doubtless a conscious and telling
juxtaposition. In this chapter the word ‘genocide’ is absent. Lemkin, himself a
Jew by birth who lost his parents and relatives in the Holocaust, would never
have intentionally downplayed the extent of Jewish suffering. He quotes
without further comment statistics provided by Jewish sources that assessed
the death toll as having already run up to over 1,700,000. The is no mention
of death camps or gas chambers, only to the fact that Jews were being taken
away to ‘unknown destinations.’ It seems that Lemkin revealed the extent of his
findings to the best of current knowledge. One can only surmise as to whether
the Roosevelt government at the time encouraged the boldest of statements on
the plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Q: Have the issues that Lemkin raised in 1943 been resolved in the meantime
by the international community?
2
The Genocide Convention adopted by the UN in Paris in 1948 defines genocide without the precursors
and persecution that Lemkin noted in his definitions. The Convention defines genocide as follows:
“Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:(a) Killing members of
the group;(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d)
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group.” “Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:(a) Genocide;(b) Conspiracy
to commit genocide;(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;(d) Attempt to commit
genocide;(e) Complicity in genocide.”

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A: By no means fully. Here are some of the issues that still await clarification
regarding genocide.
The ‘groups’ affected by genocide: Lemkin did not particularly emphasize the
racial aspect of Nazi victimization at the expense of nations or ‘groups’ as
defined by the perpetrators of genocide themselves, particularly with regard to
the liquidation of political opponents. A Soviet veto in the Security Council
excluded any reference to political victims of genocide, for whatever reason.
Sufferers under Nazi or Soviet oppression who cannot be placed within the
category of genocide have found a place under the classification of ‘democide.’
The question of the scale of destruction: Genocide usually connotes a large
number of victims which amounts to a major portion of the targeted group.
However, here the defining terms are somewhat imprecise, a point noted by
critics of earlier definitions of genocide. Lemkin conceded that the symbolic
signal effect of assassinations could equal the attention due to large numbers
of victims if these assassinations prepared the way for the dissolution of the
target group by lowering their morale. This viewpoint does not count greatly
today as any atrocity that involves a sensational number of victims can
automatically trigger accusations of ‘genocide,’ now a highly emotive term that
means different things to different people.
The legal framework for dealing with charges of genocide: Lemkin hoped the
League of Nations and later The United Nations would offer the necessary
platform for legal action against acts of genocide. This possibility was severely
limited by the fractious relations between the members of the Security Council.
According to the present state of affairs, cases of genocide and crimes against
humanity are brought before the judiciary of the countries to which plaintiffs
belong or, when, as often, this is not possible, to the International Court at the
Hague. The establishment of one overall court has not come to full fruition as
the Unites States insists that specific cases of alleged genocide should be
brought before ad hoc tribunals attuned to the specifics of a particular issue.
Genocide’s sole purpose is to destroy target groups: Apologists of various
interest groups have denied that the Armenian tragedy or the mass starvation
of Ukrainian landholders under Stalin’s regime constitutes genocide on the
grounds that the actions that led to death in these cases were motivated by
considerations of national defence or the economic best interests of the state,
making the massive death toll that ensued something along the lines of
collateral damage. With such an outcome producing ill effects comparable in
scale to incontrovertible cases of genocide is this manner of defence not to be

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taken as mere quibbling and hypocritical by any moral standard? There’s the
rub. The enormity of genocide cannot be contained within a neat and tidy legal
framework.
Perhaps we shall have to wait until the Day of Judgment before we find a court
inclusive and sagacious enough to deal with matters of the greatest complexity
on moral as well as purely legal matters. The line of plaintiffs may prove to be
very long, including as it might: Incas and Aztecs, Carthaginians and tribes
from every quarter of the globe.