Semitic race

The Philistines who entered Palestine from the Mediterranean about the same time as the Hebrews from the desert, were a cultured, non-semitic race, familiar with iron. They wisely retained the monopoly of working the metal, refusing to teach the Hebrews lest they should equip their armies with iron swords (1 Sam. xiii. 19-22). In consequence the Hebrews had no smiths of their own and only Saul and Jonathan possessed iron swords. The petty skirmishes between the Hebrews and the Philistines are easily understood when one has visited the country and traversed the bleak and barren heights occupied by the Hebrews and compared them with the fertile maritime plains below owned by the Philistines. It was the have-nots versus the haves. 

We are not the same race. Not according to anthropologists, or whoever measures these things. There s Caucasian, Semitic—there are about five different groups. Don t look at me like that. ... 

The division of the white race into North European and West Asiatic is at the very crux of becoming Caucasian for, say, the Semite or the Armenian, just as the strained categorization of the American Indian as representing the Yellow Race conveys the urgency by which Benedict has organized the exhibit around humanity s three great divisions. ... 

When his son asks him about anti-Semitism and Jewishness ( What are Jews anyhow ), race is not in the lexicon with which Green is prepared to deal with the question. Jewishness is a religion, period Oh, they talk about the Jewish race, but never about the Catholic race or the Protestant race. 79... 

This passage is a compelling study of the hatred that can attach to race—virtually no piece of evidence is enough to reverse its course. What follows is a stunning treatment of the complex processes of projection, ascription, and reification, as the anti-Semite contemplates one whom he supposes to be the Jew and slowly recognizes the desire he feels for her. 

An enraged Syrian community next appealed the decision (1914), protesting not so much the denial of the right to citizenship as the denial of a position in the white race, and its attendant implication of inferiority to American blacks. Did not the case of Semitic Jews settle the matter in their favor This 1915 appeal did yield a more liberal interpretation of... 

According to the Renaissance witch-hunter Guaccius, the witch s mark, imposed by the Devil, is designed to mock circumcision, the bodily mark which identifies the Satanic race of Jews. (Leschnitzer, The Magic Background of Modern Anti-Semitism, p. 223.)... 

Commerce drove this seemingly odd cultural combination of Indo-Iranian Hurrians and Semitic Israelites. As explained in Chapter 5, the Anatolian Commagene was the central interface where hrdo-Hittites and Afro-Asiatic Semites were geographically compressed. The races had apparently learned to live together in relative harmony. 

In 1920 the Horthy regime introduced a numerus clausus law restricting university admission which required that the comparative numbers of the entrants correspond as nearly as possible to the relative population of the various races or nationalities. The law, which would limit Jewish admissions to 5 percent, a drastic reduction, was deliberately anti-Semitic. Though he was admitted to the University of Budapest and might have stayed, von Neumann chose instead to leave Hungary at seventeen, in 1921, for Berlin, where he came under the influence of Fritz Haber and studied first for a chemical engineering degree, awarded at the Technical Institute of Zurich in 1925. A year later he picked up a Ph.D. summa cum laude in mathematics at Budapest in 1927 he became a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in 1929, at twenty-five, he was invited to lecture at Princeton. He was professor of mathematics at Princeton by 1931 and accepted lifetime appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1933. 

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