Episode 7: Semite, Hebrew, Israelite, Jew

Why we use these four particular English words to refer to Jewish people today.

TL;DR

• The word semitic was coined by 18th century German linguists to refer to a hypothesized language family that included Hebrew. The sem in semitic refers to Shem, the son of Noah from whom all Jews are supposedly descended.

• Abraham was described as “Ha-Ivri” (the Hebrew)— the one who crosses over — because he was born in Mesopotamia and crossed over the Eurphrates River to travel to Canaan. The Torah refers to people as Hebrews, but does not refer to the Hebrew language. That usage didn’t emerge until the 2nd century BCE.

• The name Israel was given to Jacob after his battle with some sort of divine or angelic being. The Torah often refers to people as B’nai Yisrael — the children of Israel. The name Israel for the sovereign nation wasn’t selected until 48 hours before independence was declared in May 1948.

• The precursors of the word Jew initially referred to members of the tribe of Judah or people from the Kingdom of Judea, but eventually became a religious or cultural term used to refer to people with Jewish beliefs and practices.

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Introduction

Happy new year, and I hope you had a joyful Hanukkah.

For this first Recognizably Jewish podcast (and post) of 2025, we’re going to talk about four words that everyone understands refer to Jewish people — Semite, Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew. The words, and derivations of the words, are used all the time. For many, the words are themselves part of one’s identity in the world. But have you ever stopped to think about where the words came from, and how they came to have the meanings they have today?

Some Preliminaries

Language is inherently messy. The same word can mean different things to different people at different times and in different contexts. Of course, words evolve over time, both within a given language and when they are adopted and adapted by new languages. One issue that’s particularly salient for this episode/post is anachronism. It’s inevitable that I’ll refer to groups using words that those groups wouldn’t have used for themselves. So I’ll just acknowledge upfront that some of what I say may be imprecise in that anachronistic way.

The second thing I want to say at the start is that today’s episode leans pretty heavily on narratives from the Torah — particularly the Book of Genesis. The historicity of those narratives is obviously a subject of great debate. My own perspective on ancient history is neither well-founded nor relevant for today’s episode/post. Suffice it to say that I’m not endorsing any particular side or position; rather, I’m just referring to the narratives and their timelines because they are essential aspects of how these four particular words came to have the meanings they have today.

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Semite

The 18th and 19th centuries saw the development of the field of comparative philology, or comparative linguistics — coalescing a concerted effort by European scholars to establish the historic relatedness of various languages and construct so-called language families. Some of those scholars focused intently on the languages of what they called the Orient — what today we might call the Near East or the Middle East.

One of those scholars, August Ludwig von Schlözer, was an influential German historian. His primary focus was on Russia and Russian, but in an essay published in 1781, he wrote of a “Semitic . . . family of languages.” According to Schlozer:

“From the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates and from Mesopotamia down to Arabia, only one language reigned. The Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews and Arabs were one people. Even the Phoenicians spoke this language, which I might call Semitic.”

That sentence is the first recorded use of the word semitic, the moment the term was coined. Shlozer was positing the existence of a single proto-Semitic language that subsequently evolved into a Semitic language family consisting of Hebrew, Arabic, and various other Middle Eastern languages. The term Semitic to describe the language family was then popularized within academic circles by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn in his Introduction to the Study of the Old Testament.

From its origins as an academic linguistic term, the word became used as a term to refer not only to a language family, but to peoples or groups that spoke the languages within that family. And over time, the word Semite evolved to more or less exclusively refer to Jewish people.

But why the word Semitic? Well, in the book of Genesis, Noach, or Noah, had three sons who survived the great flood. Their names were Shem, Cham, and Yafeth. In the context of biblical genealogy, all humans are necessarily descendants of those three brothers. And Jewish tradition is that Jews trace their lineage back to Shem. More on that lineage in a moment. Greek doesn’t have the S-H sound shhh, so Shem was rendered as Sem in Greek translations. Schlozer’s coinage of the term Semitic relied on this biblical notion of descent to name a language family centered on Hebrew after the supposed ancestor of the Hebrew-speaking people — the Jews.

Today the word Semitic arises most frequently in the phrase anti-semitism. That subject is well beyond the scope of today’s episode/post, but I’ll briefly mention that the coinage of the phrase is often attributed to Moritz Steinschneider, an Austrian Jewish scholar who, in 1860, used it for the first time in the phrase “anti-Semitic prejudices.” But the popularization of the term is attributed to the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, whose unfortunately popular 1879 pamphlet, “The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism,” used the term anti-semitism extensively. That same year, Marr founded what he called the German League of Antisemites.

Yiddish Phrase

It’s time for our Yiddish phrase:

Er zogt ivre vi a hak shvimt.

Keep reading to learn what it means.

Hebrew

According to Genesis, Shem’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson was Abraham. Abraham is known as the first monotheist and so is regarded as the biblical father of both Judaism and Islam. But the Torah doesn’t refer to Abraham as Jewish, or as a Jew.

In Genesis chapter 14, Abraham is referred to as Avram Ha-Ivri, or Abraham the Hebrew as we would say in modern English. The Hebrew verb Abar, the root of the noun Ivri, means to transit, or to cross a border. Genesis chapter 12 says that Abraham crossed over into the Canaanite city of Shechem. Abraham came from the Sumerian city of Ur, in modern-day Southern Iraq. To get to Canaan, he would have crossed the Euphrates River from North to South and made his way south into what eventually became the Kingdom of Israel. Hence he earned the moniker Ha-Ivri, the Hebrew, one who crossed a border.

The term Ivri, or Hebrew, as used in the Torah, refers to a people — descendants of Abraham the Hebrew. Moses is referred to as a Hebrew. The biblical people we might casually refer to today as Jews are often identified in the Torah as Hebrews. The word Hebrew is never used in the Bible to refer to the language Hebrew.

It’s generally impossible to pinpoint a moment when a particular language becomes independent of whatever preceded it. But scholars generally agree that the tribes that settled in Canaan from the 14th to 13th centuries B.C.E. used Hebrew as a spoken and literary language. But as far as I’ve been able to tell, the earliest extant written reference to the language’s name as “Ivrit” or Hebrew is found in the prologue to the Book of Sirach from the 2nd century BCE. In other words, it’s not clear that the ancient Hebrew speakers in Canaan would have referred to their own language as Ivrit, or Hebrew.

As for how the Hebrew word Ivrit ended up as the English word Hebrew, it’s a pretty typical story of the sound changes that naturally occur when a word is adopted from one language into another. The Hebrew word Ivrit became the Aramaic word Ibray, with the V sound becoming a B sound. That, in turn, entered Greek as Hebrai, with the H sound at the front. That became Hebraeum in Latin, which then became Ebreu in Old French, and developed into Hebrew in English.

Israelite

To explain Israelite, we have to wade, yet again, into our biblical genealogy. Abraham had a son named Yitzhak, or Isaac. Isaac, in turn, had a son named Yakov, or Jacob. Genesis chapter 32 recounts Jacob’s night-long physical struggle with some sort of divine or angelic being. The angel asks Jacob his name and, after Jacob responds, the angel says “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with divine and human beings and you have prevailed.” Israel, or Yisrael in Hebrew, means one who struggles with god.

Following Genesis 32, the Torah frequently refers to the Jewish people as B’nai Yisrael — the children of Israel. In other words, Israelites.

But how did the word Israel end up as the name of the modern state that declared independence in 1948? Or to ask a slightly different question, how did the word Israelis come to refer to the inhabitants of that sovereign nation–whether those Israelis are Jewish or not? As with many things you’ve heard in the initial episodes of this podcast, it happened later than you might think.

As preparations were being made for independence in 1948, there was discussion among the cadre of senior Yishuv leaders of what the new country’s name should be. Some suggested Tzion, or Zion. That was rejected because the actual geographic location of Mount Zion, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, was not actually going to be within the borders outlined by the UN for the proposed Jewish state. Perhaps the most popular or widely anticipated possibility was Judea, but there were problems with that too. The land that made up the historical Kingdom of Judea was also not going to be part of the proposed country. Moreover, if the country was called Judea, or Yehudah in Hebrew, its inhabitants would be called Yehudim, which can be translated as Jews. That would have created the dissonant situation of referring to hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens of the new country as Jews.

As with so many other things in 1948, ultimately the choice was made by David Ben-Gurion. He suggested the name Israel just 48 hours before the declaration of independence. Though the reception wasn’t enthusiastic, time had run out and there was other pressing business to attend to. So on May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion read aloud:

We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Yisrael, to be known as the State of Israel.” In Hebrew: m’dinat Yisrael.

Jew

For Jew, my favorite of the four words in today’s episode, we go right back to our biblical genealogy. Jacob had twelve sons. Each became the head of a tribe. The fourth son was named Yehudah, or Judah in English. The biblical narrative is that, after the exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people returned to Canaan — to Eretz Yisrael — with their tribal affiliations intact. Each tribe settled in a different geographical location. The tribe of Judah settled in a region extending from just south of Jerusalem to the upper Negev.

The Book of Samuel recounts the unification of the tribal kingdoms under King Saul in what is sometimes called the United Monarchy or the United Kingdom. Historians and archaeologists debate the historicity of the united monarchy, but it would have existed around 1050 BCE. In any event, it included the reigns of Saul as well as King David and King Solomon.

Following Solomon’s reign, a civil war led to the division of the United Monarchy into two kingdoms. To the south was the Kingdom of Judah. And to the north was the Kingdom of Israel. The Kingdom of Judah was ruled by a succession of monarchs. The 12th king in the succession was Ahaz, short for Jehoahaz. I mention him because the first known written reference to a Judean is on an Assyrian tablet dated to 733 BCE that lists “Jehoahaz of the land Judah” among the lands conquered by neo-Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser III. The reference is what you might call ethno-geographic, referring to a person who lived in a certain region.

150 years later, in around 587 BCE, Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar invaded the Kingdom of Judah, destroying the Temple of Solomon and sending much of the Judahite population — that is, the people who lived in the Kingdom of Judah — into what became known as the Babylonian Captivity. When the Persian Empire defeated the Neo-Babylonian empire in 539 BCE, King Cyrus of Persia permitted the exiled Judahites to return to their ancestral homeland in Judah, which the Persians ran as a semi-autonomous province called Yahud.

For reasons that aren’t totally clear, around this time in history, there’s evidence that members of tribes other than the tribe of Judah, and Jews located outside of historical Judea, began referring to themselves as Judahites or Yehudi. This is a key moment. We don’t know exactly when it happened, or why. But this transition marks the shift from Judean or Judahite as a strictly ethno-geographic term to what you might call a religio-cultural term. In other words, people were defining themselves as Jews not based on where they lived or the tribe they were born into; they were defining themselves as Jews based on common beliefs and practices.

Maybe the best-known example is Mordechai from the Book of Esther, who lived in Persia and is identified in a genealogical passage as a member of the tribe of Benjamin, but called himself Ish Yehudi, a Jewish man. Historians generally agree that the Book of Esther, which takes place around 450 BCE, is more of a fictional novella than an accurate historical account. But that doesn’t diminish the import of a diaspora Jew referring to himself as Ish Yehudi — and thus implicitly referring to Jewishness as a religious and cultural identity.

In time the word Yehudim became the standard way to refer to Jewish people in other languages. The first known written use of the word in Greek appears on what’s called the Moschos inscription, a relic dated to 250 BCE unearthed not far from Athens. The inscription refers to the man Moschos as a “Ioudaios.” It’s a singular Greek noun meaning Judean or Jew. In the Greek New Testament, that word Ioudaios takes on great significance because it’s used to identify, among other people, Jesus.

Second Maccabees, which was composed in Greek sometime between 150 and 100 BCE, includes the Greek word Iudaismos, which one might translate as Judeanism or even Judaism — a concept the author contrasts with Hellenism, or the Greek way of life.

In Latin, the word was rendered as Iudaeus. That’s linguistically important because the Latin usage became the basis for later derivations in the Romance languages. Notice that the I sound was pronounced as a vowel because Latin did not have a a consonantal J sound.

In Old French, the I sound did eventually morph into the consonant sound, and the word for a Jewish person was giu. The Norman Conquest brought Norman French to England in 1066 and beyond. The first known Old English use of the word Jew, from 1275, was spelled gyv. By early Middle English, the word was being spelled in various ways, including iew, with the leading I pronounced as a J. The independent letter J was introduced into English in the 16th century and, with time, the word became standardized with its modern spelling, Jew.

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Conclusion

There you have it. Now you know why we use the words Semite, Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew to refer to Jewish people. Far from being boring ancient etymology, these explanations tell us a lot about history, identity, and recognizably Jewish culture.

Before we wrap up, let’s not forget today’s Yiddish phrase:

Er zogt ivre vi a hak shvimt.

It means: He reads Hebrew like an axe swims.

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