Semite Ancestors

Canaan was a Semitic-speaking civilization and region of the Southern Levant in the Ancient Near East (today’s Middle East) during the late 2nd millennium BC.

The demonym "Canaanites" serves as an ethnic catch-all term covering various indigenous populations—both settled and nomadic-pastoral groups—throughout the land of Canaan. It is by far the most frequently used ethnic term in the Bible.

The land of Canaan is today largely recognized as Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, parts of Syria and Turkey.

Semitic-speakers formed a sub-group of the 'Afro-Asiatic language family', which, includes ‘Arabic’; ‘Amharic’ (spoken in Ethiopia); ‘Tigrinya’ (spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea); ‘Hebrew’; ‘Tigre’ (spoken in Sudan); ‘Aramaic’ (spoken in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Iraq and Iran); and ‘Maltese’, to name a few...

Research contend that the evidence that the Semitic and Indo-European families are related. Albeit, there may have been loan words between the two proto-languages, but that's the closest to a relationship that researchers think exists.

Nowadays, Semitic people or “Semites” is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics.

The term Semites in a racial sense was first coined by members of the ‘G?ttingen School of History’ in the early 1770s., this biblical terminology for race was derived from ‘Shem’ (Hebrew: ????), one of the three sons of ‘Noah’ in the Book of Genesis 10 (Generations of Noah, or the “Table of Nations”), along the terms “Hamites” derived from ‘Ham’ (Hebrew: ???), and “Japhethites” derived from ‘Japheth’ (Hebrew: ?????).

Other members of the School later coined the separate more inclusive term “Caucasian” (Hebrew: ??? ???) in the 1780s.

These terms were used and developed by numerous other scholars over the next century.

In the early 20th century, the pseudo-scientific classifications of ‘Carleton Stevens Coon’ (1904–1981), an American anthropologist, included the Semitic distinction in the Caucasian race, as similar in appearance to the Indo-European; Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian-speaking peoples.

Due to the interweaving of language studies and cultural studies, the term also came to be applied to the religions (ancient Semitic and Abrahamic) ethnicities of various cultures associated by geographic and linguistic distribution.

In archaeology, the term is sometimes is used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.

The terms "anti-Semite" or "anti-Semitism" came by a circuitous route in the ‘Era of Nationalism’ (1800–1918) in Europe to refer more narrowly to anyone who was hostile or discriminatory towards ‘Jews’ in particular.

Anti‐Semitism became a staple of hostility towards, and discrimination against Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (despite Arabs being the predominant Semites).

As modern scholars contend, racism against/by Arabs; Jews, and/or others need not be described as 'anti-Semitic' in order to be condemned... for resentment if any among/of them did not arise because they were classified as such, but largely due to inherent episodes in history…

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Food for thought!