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Semitic   Listen
adjective
Semitic  adj.  (Written also Shemitic)  Of or pertaining to Shem or his descendants; belonging to that division of the Caucasian race which includes the Arabs, Jews, and related races.
Semitic language, a name used to designate a group of Asiatic and African languages, some living and some dead, namely: Hebrew and Phoenician, Aramaic, Assyrian, Arabic, Ethiopic (Geez and Ampharic).






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Semitic" Quotes from Famous Books



... advancing into the land of Ham—in Bashan—where all the chief towns fell. This serves to make clear the treachery of Aziru's letters which follow. The Amorite advance on the Phoenician coast was contemporary, and extended to Tyre. It appears, however, that the Amorites were a Semitic people, while the names of the Hittites ...
— Egyptian Literature

... the hall and passed into a long room, in which were some fifteen or twenty people. Most of them were sitting round a chemin de fer table; a few were standing at the sideboard eating sandwiches. A dark-haired, dark-eyed, sallow-faced man, a trifle corpulent, undeniably Semitic, who seemed to be in charge of the place, came up and shook ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... in cordial terms. I cannot possibly have the police ascertain to what party the senders belong. Nor am I so diffident in my views that I should wish to catechize the senders as to their political affiliations. If anybody takes pleasure in making me appear to be a member of anti-semitic societies, let him do so. I have kept away from all undesirable movements, as my position demands, and I could wish that also you gentlemen would refrain more than heretofore from inciting the classes against each other, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... Whittier always calls to mind the prophet-bards of the olden time. There is much of the old Semitic fire about him, and ethical and religious subjects seem to occupy his entire mind. Like his own ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... dear and kind to-night," she had answered, "how could I have helped being happy? And He"—she meant the Semitic actor-manager, whom she romantically adored; whose thick, flabby features and pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eyebrowed with brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... peculiarity; they had no unsocial prejudices and they mingled with the people of other countries without the least scruple or repugnance. As their native country was small and quite barren, they early learned to rely upon commerce as the best source of riches and power. Like the other Semitic tribes, the Phoenicians were noted for their energy and acumen, and while they were not a literary people in the strict sense of the word, ancient civilization received probably a more powerful impetus through their commercial supremacy than ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee

... valley of the Nile. By this route they may have entered Egypt, bringing with them a civilization, which, like that of the other Semites, had been profoundly influenced and modified by that of the Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia. This Semitic-Sumerian culture, mingling with that of the Nilotes themselves, produced the civilization of Ancient Egypt as ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall

... the blacks and whites, and that their origins lie farther back. Our acquaintance with the ancestors of the Negro is meager. We do not even know how many of the numerous African tribes are represented in our midst. A good deal of Semitic blood had already been infused into the more northern tribes. What influence did this have and how many descendants of these tribes are there in America? Tribal distinctions have been hopelessly lost in this country, and ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey

... ages of the world, when the relations of the Creator with the created were more intimate than in these days, when angels visited the earth, and God himself even spoke with man. The Jews represent the Semitic principle; all that is spiritual in our nature. They are the trustees of tradition and the conservators of the religious element. They are a living and the most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli

... about the same time I had a vision in which I saw Sergius for the first time distinctly. He is the principal control dominating the writing of this book. He appeared very patriarchal with a long beard. His features were decidedly semitic. His countenance was most spiritual ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... as in I. E. languages, occupy a subordinate position, having about the same scope as in Latin and Greek. Words apparently related to these are rare in N. A. languages, but frequent in S. A., African, Malay Polynesian and Turanian languages. The Semitic aba, etc., is perhaps related. The base ana, nana (Dak. ina), though not very much used in I E languages appears to be more widely distributed than any of ...
— The Dakotan Languages, and Their Relations to Other Languages • Andrew Woods Williamson

... professions. As a matter of fact, a considerable proportion of the most capable barristers, physicians, bankers, &c., in Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities are Jews by race and religion, and I have never heard of any of them being persecuted. Anti-Semitic feeling, so far as it exists, has nothing to do with religious beliefs. It is confined to such people as the trader who suffers from the competition of Jewish rivals, or the peasant who finds that the money-lender, from whom he has borrowed ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... from the shires nudged each other in their bucolic way and asked what was the matter, learning with puzzled amusement that there were some who did not think it quite right for the gentlemen of England to be led by a Semitic adventurer. But the Semitic adventurer had the gifts of his race. He was primed to the throat with contempt and scorn, too cold and measured withal for the slightest show of insolence. As each hurly-burly ended and the dust settled, he was found sitting ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... about Sawkin they are an important clan. They number few in the Sinaitic Peninsula and in Midian, but they occupy the very heart of the Arabian Peninsula. Those settled on Jebel Libn, we have seen, claim as their kinsman the legendary Antar, who was probably a negro of the noble Semitic stock. A few are camped about El-Wijh; and they become more important down coast. In the eastern regions bordering upon Midian, they form large and powerful bodies, such as the Nawmisah and the Sharrt, whose numbers and bravery ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton

... disheartened and short of money, as the Maticza Society, which had given up all hope of driving me away from the estate, would not furnish them with more funds. Now they had reunited to a last desperate method, and their candidate was about to unfold the anti-Semitic flag, in this way driving all intelligent, Liberal voters—or those at least who assumed the name, and all the Jews with their money, influence, and keenness—straight into our arms, so that our success was undoubted. In order to silence ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai

... world possesses in its Bible a record of Semitic piety whose genuine utterances will never be surpassed; but when the Vulgate of the Aryan races shall be published, these confessions of a noble soul will claim a prominent place ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... are numbers of persons who know nothing at all about the Jews; while, on the other hand, there are those who can, or think they can, detect the Israelitish blood in many of their acquaintances who believe themselves of the purest Japhetic origin, and are full of prejudices about the Semitic race. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... lighten up a long vista, through the thousands of years through which the human species has evolved from its earliest appearance on earth, gradually working up through the different evolutionary processes to what is to-day supposed to be the acme of perfection as seen in the Indo-European and Semitic races of man. Anatomy points to the rudiment—still lingering, now and then still appearing in some one man and without a trace in the next—of that climbing muscle which shows man in the past either nervously ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... of his derived erudition. To insist further on this point is, however, scarcely to our purpose. The Kabbalah does not possess that integral connection with Masonry which is argued by Mgr. Meurin, and if it did, does not bear the interpretation which he assigns it, while his anti-Semitic thesis is demolished with the other hypothesis. But these things are largely outside the question which concerns us most directly. Over and above these points, does the witness whom we are examining contribute ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... various tablets served to show that the find consisted of part of the Egyptian state archives in the times of the two kings Amenophis III. and IV. Thus the first of the many startling discoveries that were to follow in such rapid succession was made in the recognition that about 1400 B.C. the Semitic speech of Babylon served as the language of ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr

... nations—one Caucasian, young, warlike above all its contemporaries, with a record behind it of steady aggrandizement and almost unbroken victory, a nation every citizen of which was a soldier. On the other side, a race of merchants Semitic in blood, a city whose citizens had long since ceased to go to war, preferring that their gold should fight for them by the hands of mercenaries of every race and clime—hirelings whose ungoverned ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... instances—the lecturer named Byron—as high as 150. The number in the chart for the Aryans—Sanskrit-speaking Indians, the Greeks and Romans, the Goths, Kelts, Slavs, and their progeny—was 92, and for the Semitic peoples 88. The Aryans were credited with a due balance between the dynamical and statical energy of their intellect, to which they owed nearly all the great inventions and discoveries, and with all ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... "Semitic, as you see, and positively appalling. He is entirely mother's choice. He arrived ten minutes after the evening papers were out, but somehow or other I don't fancy that we shall make anything of him. It's ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... close of the South African War and the accession of President Roosevelt. Professor Charles C. Torrey, Ph.D., of Yale University, has placed in my hands notes of his own on Oriental History, a portion of history with which, as well as with the Semitic languages, he is conversant. It will not be for lack of painstaking if any part of the new edition fails, within the limits of its plan, to correspond to the present state ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... elements of active life with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected society and morals, and we learn from their literature and works of art the elements of science, the laws of art, and the principles of philosophy. In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and Mongolian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization, commerce, and religion.' We may add, that though by nature tough and enduring, they have not ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions (Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic). Did the guest comply with ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... himself as a young innocent creature. Not very old, we will believe: but as to innocence!—For certain, he is named Abraham Hirsch, or Hirschel: a Berlin Jew of the Period; whom one inclines to figure as a florid oily man, of Semitic features, in the prime of life; who deals much in jewels, moneys, loans, exchanges, all kinds of Jew barter; whether absolutely in old clothes, we do not know—certainly not unless there is a penny to be turned. The man is of oily Semitic type, not old in years,—there is a fraternal ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... AMMONITES, a Semitic race living E. of the Jordan; at continual feud with the Jews, and a continual trouble to them, till subdued by ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Fortunately he had plenty of money, for he was a cousin of Raphael Leon on the mother's side, and the remotest twigs of the Leon genealogical tree bear apples of gold. His real name was Abrahams, which is a shade too Semitic. Sidney was the black sheep of the family; good-natured to the core and artistic to the finger-tips, he was an avowed infidel in a world where avowal is the unpardonable sin. He did not even pretend to ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... white memorial is sculptured in bas-relief the profile of the head of a Semitic Sphinx, round whose mute lips flickers in a faint sardonic smile the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... stage after two performances, material traces remained for years in the settings of other spectacular operas. The scenes were all reproductions of the Paris models and exquisitely painted; the costumes were gorgeous to a degree. Mlle. Brval's beauty (Semitic, as became the character) shone radiant in the part of the heroine, and she sang and acted with an intensity that in its supreme moments was positively uplifting. Flaubert's brilliant novel supplied the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... Exceptions to this law (like that of Buddhism, for example) are only apparent. The rule is invariable. Christianity alone is a cosmic or universal religion. It only has passed the boundaries of race, so inflexible to all other religions. Born a Semitic religion, it soon took possession of the Indo-European races, converting Romans, Greeks, Teutons, Kelts, and Sclaves. It finds the African mind docile to its influence. Its missionaries have made believers from among the races of America, India, China, and the Pacific Islands. It is ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... and reviving when needed. Criticism on this subject is made reluctantly, as it would be highly interesting to determine that sign language on this continent came from a particular stock, and to ascertain that stock. Such research would be similar to that into the Aryan and Semitic sources to which many modern languages have been traced backwards from existing varieties, and if there appear to be existing varieties in signs their roots may still be found to be sui generis. The possibility that the discrepancy ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... countries," said Cyrus himself—so runs the tale—"gave birth to small men. No region produced at once delightful fruits and men of a war-like spirit." Letters were to them, probably, then unknown. They borrowed them in after years, as they borrowed their art, from Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they conquered. From the age of five to that of twenty, their lads were instructed but in two things—to speak the truth and to shoot with the bow. To ride was the third necessary art, introduced, according to Xenophon, after they had descended ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... lurked at the windows and death in the garden, and the little dark man who stood by the door, peering through his glass at the approaching column, was the minister of death, the dangerous Cronje. In consultation with him was one who was to prove even more formidable, and for a longer time. Semitic in face, high-nosed, bushy-bearded, and eagle-eyed, with skin burned brown by a life of the veld—it was De la Rey, one of the trio of fighting chiefs whose name will always be associated with the gallant resistance of the Boers. He ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... sensory basis that is mainly tactile, although an olfactory element may sometimes coexist. The kiss thus understood is not very widely spread and is not usually found among rude and uncultured peoples. We can trace it in Aryan and Semitic antiquity, but in no very pronounced form; Homer scarcely knew it, and the Greek poets seldom mention it. Today it may be said to be known all over Europe except in Lapland. Even in Europe it is probably a comparatively modern discovery; ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... elithiou apellagmenon mallon. As to the date here suggested for the definite dawn of Hellenism Mr. Edwyn Bevan writes to me: 'I have often wondered what the reason is that about that time a new age began all over the world that we know. In Nearer Asia the old Semitic monarchies gave place to the Zoroastrian Aryans; in India it was the time of Buddha, in China of Confucius.' Euethie ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... Semitic races the religious spirit rose above nature-worship in the effort to separate God from nature, and to elevate him above nature as Lord, Baal (plural Baalim, either from the different places where he was worshiped, or the various names under which he was worshiped), Bel, El, Adon (Adonis). ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten

... aptness for bargaining and commerce. This is illustrated in the instincts of the Jews, a people of extraordinary brain and wonderful tenacity of purpose. Five thousand years since, a small fragment of the Semitic race, residing in Mesopotamia between the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris, consisting of two families, came into the land of Canaan, in Asia Minor; from them have descended the people known as Jews. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... Oriental Languages, held since 1914 by Leroy Waterman, Hillsdale, '98, was first established in 1893 when James A. Craig, McGill, '80, came as Professor of Oriental Languages, a title which was changed to Semitic Languages and Literatures and ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... an interruption. A stooping figure in a shabby, black frock-coat, the figure of a man who wore a dilapidated bowler pressed down upon his ears, who had a greasy, Semitic countenance, with a scrubby, curling, sandy colored beard, sparse as the vegetation of a desert, appeared ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... imagination delights; but it is immediately followed by the fall of the rhythmus, re-establishing its languid repose. The frequent use of half notes induces a predominance of the minor key, and this, with the constant recurrence of the rhythmical fall, imparts to Semitic and Hindoo music that melancholy, lethargic uniformity which expresses in a striking manner the benumbed energies and undeveloped spirit of the people among whom it is found. When a race has substituted habit and custom for national feeling, its music is necessarily monotonous and characterless, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... native of Citium in Cyprus. The city was Greek, but with a large Phoenician admixture. And it is curious that in this last and sternest phase of Greek thought, not the founder only, but a large proportion of the successive leaders of the school, came from this and other places having Semitic elements in them. Among these places notable as nurseries of Stoicism was Tarsus in Cilicia, the birthplace of St. Paul. The times of preparation were drawing to a close; and through these men, with their Eastern intensity and capacities of self-searching and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... Three young girls, evidently of the lower middle class of coloured society, for they were cheaply dressed, had all the little airs and graces and mannerisms of the typical American girl. In one corner a sleek mulatto with a Semitic profile sat in the recognized attitude of the banker in church; filling his corner comfortably and setting a worthy example to the less ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... race—notwithstanding all anti-semitic calumnies the race of transcendental idealism—played in the struggle of the Old and the New will probably never be appreciated with complete impartiality and clarity. Only now are we beginning to perceive ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... limited infiltration; whilst in Asia Minor they issued forth from their hills as the formidable Hittites, the people, by the way, to whom the Jews are said to owe their characteristic, yet non-Semitic, noses. But are these round-heads all of one race? Professor Ridgeway has put forward a rather paradoxical theory to the effect that, just as the long-faced Boer horse soon evolved in the mountains of Basutoland into a round-headed pony, so it is in a few generations with human mountaineers, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... been reached without the magic touch of the Greek poet and artist, or the arrival of Greek deities and their images in Latium. Professor Sayce, in his Gifford lectures on the religion of Babylonia, has shown how the non-Semitic Sumerians knew only of spirits and demons until the Semite arrived in the Persian Gulf with his personal gods of both sexes;[315] and I gather that he does not suppose that without such immigration the Sumerian ideas of divinity could have become personalised. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... in Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob—the contrast of the wild and vagabond hunter and the "plain man, dwelling in tents." These types as they appear in the Bible have in them a characteristically Semitic element, but they have still more of our common humanity. We observe the two types among our own children, and it is a contrast that interests us all. Our affections perhaps go out to the romantic Esau rather than to his business-like brother; while ...
— George Borrow - A Sermon Preached in Norwich Cathedral on July 6, 1913 • Henry Charles Beeching

... even an anti-semitic party, small though it be, in the Reichstag, while the party of the Centre, of the Conservatives and the Agrarians, is frankly anti-semitic as well. No Jew can become an officer in the army, no Jew is admitted to one of the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... the god of Nippur, had a similar career; originally local, he became supreme. A peculiar feature of his history is the fact that the title Bel, 'lord' (which is the Semitic equivalent of the non-Semitic Enlil), clung to him in a peculiar way and practically ousted the original name. This title was assigned to various gods (so in Canaan the title Baal), and its special appropriation by the god of Nippur must be referred ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... cowed and gradually subsided into silence. Mr. Payne took the matter more coolly than Burton, but he, too, struck out when occasion required. For example, among the enemy was a certain reverend Professor of Semitic languages, who held advanced opinions on religious matters. He had fought a good fight, had suffered persecution on that account, and is honoured accordingly. "It is usual," observed Burton, "with the weak, after being persecuted to become ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... than Ossian's. But meanwhile, the pregnant and striking ideas of the ethnologists about the true natural grouping of the human race, the doctrine of a great Indo-European unity, comprising Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Latins, Celts, Teutons, Slavonians, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of a Semitic unity and of a Mongolian unity, separated by profound distinguishing marks from the Indo-European unity and from one another, was slowly acquiring consistency and popularising itself. So strong and real could the sense of sympathy or antipathy, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... their own lives had set in the clouds of the evening. These men were the true ancestors of our race, and the Veda is the oldest book we have in which to study the first beginnings of our language, and of all that is embodied in language. We are by nature Aryan, Indo-European, not Semitic: our spiritual kith and kin are to be found in India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany: not ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... of the reigning monarch, had deposed the legitimate royal family, and usurped the sceptre of the Pharaohs. He descended from a Semitic race who had remained in Egypt at the time of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... his painted cheeks, his dyed moustache, and his youthful wig, would otherwise have excited. While he himself has no drop of Jewish blood in his veins, both his daughter, Madame Kotze, and her brother possess the facial features of the Semitic race in a most marked degree, and despite their protestations to the contrary, have undoubtedly Hebrew ancestors, if not on the father's side, at any rate on that of the mother. Old General Treskow was very rich indeed, his country seat at Friedrichsfeld being one of the most magnificent ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... to determine the lot of two cities or two empires; but it was a strife on the event of which depended the fate of two races of mankind, whether the dominion of the world should belong to the Indo-Germanic or to the Semitic family of nations. Bear in mind, that the first of these comprises, besides the Indians and the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans. In the other are ranked the Jews and the Arabs, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... there had occurred a shocking massacre of Jews at Kishineff. This culmination of a prolonged anti-Semitic agitation was quickly followed by an imperial edict, promising, among other reforms, religious liberty for all. With M. de Witte, the leader of the progressive party, to administer this new policy, a better day seemed to be dawning. But under the benumbing pressure of autocratic influences, and with ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... were of the Semitic race; in other words, they were descended from Shem, the son of Noah; but Babylonia in the past and present is a land of many races and languages, and the readers of the inscriptions have been bothered by the variety ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic

... you think?" he said, musingly. "Somewhat Semitic in physiognomy, you notice; that comes from the almond-shaped eyes and the abnormally high arch of the brows. Would you know her in the actual flesh—say, on Broadway? Brunette, of course, jet-black hair banded a la Merode over the ears, a little ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... it was recorded, The Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855). Its vivid descriptions, pungent style, and intensely personal "note" distinguish it from books of its class; its insight into Semitic modes of thought and its picture of Arab manners give it the value of an historical document; its grim humour, keen observation and reckless insobriety of opinion, expressed in peculiar, uncouth but vigorous language make ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... who have studied Plato and Kant—I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life only, but a transfigured ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller

... An anti-Semitic riot broke out in a southern town named Elisabethgrad in the early spring of 1881. Occurrences of this kind were, in those days, quite rare in Russia, and when they did happen they did not extend beyond the town of their origin. But the circumstances ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... emptiness, the shudder of joy, unexpectedness,—in short all the qualities peculiar to the Semitic race! I believe that the Jews approach Wagner's art with more understanding than the ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... like the glorious regions about Constantinople, to mere barbarism, is tenanted by three Moslem races. The Berbers, who call themselves Tamazight (plur. of Amazigh), are the Gaetulian indigenes speaking an Africo-Semitic tongue (see Essai de Grammaire Kabyle, etc., par A. Hanoteau, Paris, Benjamin Duprat). The Arabs, descended from the conquerors in our eighth century, are mostly nomads and camel-breeders. Third and last are the Moors proper, the race dwelling ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... Semitic arch of her eye-brows. Her face belonged to the type formed from all eternity for ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair

... as mistress of the sea was Phoenicia. The Phoenicians, oddly enough, were a Semitic people, a nomadic race with no traditions of the sea whatever. When, however, they migrated to the coast and settled, they found themselves in a narrow strip of coast between a range of mountains and the sea. The city of ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... which had come to be regarded as 'the right,' that two thousand years and more later it was made a text-book for study in the schools of Babylonia, being divided for that purpose into some twelve chapters, and entitled, after the Semitic custom, Ninu ilu sirum, from its opening words. In Assyria also, in the seventh century B.C., it was studied in a different edition, apparently under the name of 'The Judgments of Righteousness which Hammurabi, the great king, set up.' These facts point to it as certain to affect Jewish ...
— The Oldest Code of Laws in the World - The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon - B.C. 2285-2242 • Hammurabi, King of Babylon

... Grecian civilization had spread itself everywhere and had become immortal instead of lessening and disappearing without fruit as in the interior lands. Then Rome, terrestrial Rome, in order to hold its own against the superiority of the Semitic navigators of Carthage, had to teach the management of the oar and marine combat to the inhabitants of Latium, to their legionaries with faces hardened by the chin straps of their helmets, who did not know how to adjust their world-dominating ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... unmistakably a lady, she was dressed from head to foot in silver grey, and had a bonnet to match. In some vague way she reminded Beatrice of a hospital nurse, and then again of some grande dame in one of the old-fashioned country houses where the parvenue and the Russo-Semitic financier is ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... of their interests would push them on to develop languages such as we now know. The isolating, agglutinative, incorporative, and inflectional languages can be put in a series according to the convenience and correctness of the logical processes which they embody and teach. The Semitic languages evidently teach a logic different from that of the Indo-European. It is a different way of thinking which is inculcated in each great family of languages. They represent stages in the evolution of thought or ways of thinking. The instance is one of those ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... for the problem itself belongs to a later page; and the one thing to be said of it here is very simple. I never expected it, and even now I do not fully understand it. But it is the fact that the native Moslems are more Anti-Semitic than the native Christians. Both are more or less so; and have formed a sort of alliance out of the fact. The banner carried by the mob bore the Arabic inscription "Moslems and Christians are brothers." It is as if the little ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... to multiply instances of German penetration: I have but given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry. There is none round which it has not cast its feelers—no Semitic moneylender ever obtained a surer hold on his victim. In matters naval, military, educational, legal, industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle-hold. Turkey's life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... Renaissance opened to the whole reading public the treasure-houses of Greek and Latin literature. At the same time the Bible, in its original tongues, was rediscovered. Mines of oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship Litterae Humaniores ("the more human literature"), ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... of gynocracy are to be found in other parts of the world, and in their later development some of the Aryan races have been rather partial to women as monarchs, and striking instances of a like predilection are to be met with among the Semitic tribes,—Boadicea, Dido, Semiramis, Deborah are well-known cases in point, to say nothing of the Christian era and its more enlightened treatment ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... succeeding Cassy's visit to his slippery floor. The day was radiant, a day not of spring, or of summer, but of both. Above was a sky of silk wadded with films of white cotton. From below there ascended a metallic roar, an odour of gasoline—the litanies and incense of the temple, Semitic and Lampsacene, that New ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... has been considered by some to be the origin of the word Chaldee, as signifying moon worshippers." [135] With this Chaldaean deity may be connected "the Akkadian moon god, who corresponds with the Semitic Sin," and who "is Aku, 'the seated-father,' as chief supporter of kosmic order, styled 'the maker of brightness,' En-zuna, 'the lord of growth,' and Idu, 'the measuring lord,' the ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... impossible to fix with precision the history of his progress in the acquisition of the several languages. But it is well known, that at a very early period he was master of all the leading European languages, and of those Oriental tongues which are comprised in the Semitic family. Very early, therefore, in Mezzofanti's career, he was marked out among the entire body of the Bolognese clergy as in an especial manner the 'foreigners' confessor' (confessario dei forestieri). In him, visitors from every quarter of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various

... God, came into close contact with the Greek, who had developed an equally noble conception of man. Disraeli, in his usual sweeping manner, makes one of his characters in "Lothair" tell how the Aryan and Semitic races, after centuries of wandering upon opposite courses, met again and, represented by their two choicest families, the Hellenes and the Hebrews, brought together the treasures of their accumulated wisdom and secured the civilization ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... new-fangled conductors to cut the traces of their "culture." They are afraid such a thing might lead to a scandal a la Offenbach. Meyerbeer was a warning to them; the Parisian opera had tempted him into certain ambiguous Semitic accentuations in music, which fairly scared ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)

... magnificence of his apparel and the great gold chain set with rough diamonds which hung about his neck showing him to be a person of importance. His tawny complexion marked him of mixed race. This conclusion his features did not belie, for the brow, nose, and cheek-bones were Semitic in outline, while the full, prominent eyes, and thick, sensuous lips could with equal certainty be attributed to the Negroid stock. In fact, he was the son of a native African queen, or chieftainess, and a noble Phoenician, and his rank no less than that of absolute king ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard

... were the first people to call the letters of the alphabet by their sounds rather than by names, as was done in Greek and in the Semitic languages. Thus the Latin vowels were named by simply uttering their sounds; the mute consonants and h by uttering a vowel after them, and the so-called nasal and fricative consonants by uttering a vowel before them. This ...
— Latin Pronunciation - A Short Exposition of the Roman Method • Harry Thurston Peck

... ended by considering their little lawsuit as one of the historic state trials of the world. Henceforth, in every personal matter—and their art was intensely personal—they lost all sense of proportion, believing that there was a vast Semitic plot to stifle Manette Salomon and that the President had brought pressure on the censor to forbid an adaptation of one of their novels being put upon the boards. Monarchy, Empire, Republic, Right, Centre, Left—no shade of political ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... Types of Greek Pottery, &c. Greek Alphabets Asia Minor Pottery types Hittite Inscriptions, &c. Bilingual (Greek and Cypriote) Dedication to Demeter and Persephone from Curium Syrian Pottery. Syrian Weapons, &c. West Semitic Alphabets West Semitic Numerals Palestinian Pottery types Egyptian Pottery types Mesopotamian Pottery, Seals, &c. Cuneiform and ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various

... But what?—with what sentence of supreme significance should he begin? Moreover, what language should he use? for she, whose look and bearing were so alien to the land and age, might likewise be a stranger to modern dialects. But Aryan or Semitic was not precisely at the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... language, see Hamann, Werke, II, 135 ff., 509. Hehn, Kulturpflanzen und Hausthiere, finds it characteristic of the race, that wine, writing with letters, and money, all owe their origin to the monotheistic stem of the Semitic people. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... "ride jealous" in the hunting-field. Yet, the neophyte, if he strolls by chance into a sale-room, will be surprised at the spectacle. The chamber has the look of a rather seedy "hell." The crowd round the auctioneer's box contains many persons so dingy and Semitic, that at Monte Carlo they would be refused admittance; while, in Germany, they would be persecuted by Herr von Treitschke with Christian ardour. Bidding is languid, and valuable books are knocked down for trifling sums. Let the neophyte try his luck, however, and prices will rise wonderfully. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... Teuton-American-Semitic firm of "cloak and suit" manufacturers that gives its title to the play are extraordinarily alive. I am but imperfectly acquainted with this racial variety, but I can easily recognise that Messrs. AUGUSTUS YORKE and EGBERT LEONARD, who represent the two partners, are gifted with the most ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various

... accomplished antedates our records. The creature may first have come into possession of the Tartar tribes, but it quickly passed over Asia and Europe and shortly became the mainstay of the Aryan and Semitic folk. None other of our domesticated forms has been disseminated with like rapidity, or at the outset with as little change in its original features. From the first the horse seems to have been mainly ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... this mental growth, the nightmare of the diseased imagination or of the mind unable to draw the line between the real and the unreal, Chinese Asia differs notably from the Aryan world. With the mythical monsters of India and Iran we are acquainted, and with those of the Semitic and ancient European cycle of ideas which furnished us with our ancients and classics we are familiar. The lovely presences in human form, the semi-human and bestial creations, sphinxes, naiads, satyrs, fauns, harpies, griffins, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... than eighty-six variants, twelve in Germany, six in other Teutonic lands, thirteen in Romance countries, no less than thirty-seven in Slavonic dialects, seven in Finnish, Hungarian and Tartar, six in the Semitic tongues, and also five in India, though there the parallelism is only partial. But in the European variants the parallels are so close and the riddles answered by the Clever Lass are in so many cases identical, and the order of incidents is so uniform that none can doubt the practical identity of ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs

... 9 the case is different. This section is free from such notable Hebraisms as we have just dealt with, and no convincing grounds have been advanced to prove that it is a translation from a Semitic original. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... ought to employ, was almost always at work for Magus. The rest of the rooms on the ground floor were given up to Magus' daughter, the child of his old age, a Jewess as beautiful as a Jewess can be when the Semitic type reappears in its purity and nobility in a daughter of Israel. Noemi was guarded by two servants, fanatical Jewesses, to say nothing of an advanced-guard, a Polish Jew, Abramko by name, once involved in a fabulous manner in political troubles, from which Elie Magus saved him as a business ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... broad arrows, and called arrow-heads. The names are rather unfortunate, as both forms are wedge-like and both resemble arrow-heads. The script reads from left to right, like our own writing, and unlike that of the Semitic peoples and the primitive Greeks; and the rule for the placing of the characters is that all the 'wedges' point to the right or downwards and the arrow-head forms are open towards the right. But if you ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman

... the finding by the Mission Fathers of "another type of native, evidently an example of the convex-nosed Papuan," in the upper waters of the Alabula river. I gather from the habitat of these natives that they must have been either Ambo or Oru Lopiku. I should be surprised to hear the Semitic nose was common in ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... 'hundred-leaved' and RED ROSE (R. Gallica); nevertheless, after the Niebelungen the common dog rose played an important part among the ancient Germans. The DAMASCUS ROSE (R. Damascena), which blooms twice a year, as well as the MUSK ROSE (R. moschata), were cherished by the Semitic or Arabic stock; while the Turkish-Mongolian people planted by preference the YELLOW ROSE (R. lutea). Eastern Asia (China and Japan) is the fatherland of the INDIAN and ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... names, number, order, and forms of the primitive Greek alphabet attest its Semitic origin. Of the many inscriptions which remain, the earliest has been discovered, not in Greece, but upon the colossal portrait statues carved by Rameses the Great, in front of the stupendous cave temple at ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... aristocratic circles. My nephew, young Isaac Coblentz, has had to renounce a diplomatic career, after passing brilliantly his admission examination. The wives of several of my colleagues, when Madame Schmoll calls on them, display with intention, under her eyes, anti-Semitic newspapers. And would you believe that the Minister of Public Instruction has refused to give me the cross of the Legion of Honor for which I have applied? There's ingratitude! Anti-Semitism is death—it is death, do ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... enough to use them when requiring loans for their fierce forays, were equally ready to plunder and oppress on the slightest chance. Still England must have even then been a kind of sheltering haven, for in 1287, when a sudden anti-Semitic panic occurred to drive the Jews out of the kingdom, it was estimated that 15,660 had to cross the silver streak. Nominally, they were not allowed to return until Cromwell's time, 364 years after. It was in 1723 Jews were permitted to hold lands in this country, and thirty years after ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... a general way the same forces which were at play during the heyday of Persian literary production. We owe to the Hellenic spirit, which at various times has found its way into our midst, our love for the beautiful in art and in literature. We owe to the Semitic, which has been inbreathed into us by religious forms and beliefs, the tone of our better life, the moral level to which we aspire. The same two forces were at work in Persia. Even while that country was purely Iranian, it was always open to Semitic influences. ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... first literary contributions by which he became known. Although written sixty-five years ago his review has a freshness and a value which renders it well worth reading at the present day. The ninetieth birthday of the Nestor of Semitic literature was celebrated on March 30 of last year, and it afforded no little gratification to the writer that Dr. Steinschneider on that occasion accepted the dedication to him of this the latest contribution to the "Benjamin Literature." The savant passed away on ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela

... The colors are almost as brilliant as when laid down more than three thousand years ago. Among these frescoes are numerous representations of the race whose civilization they represent. It was a race neither Aryan nor Semitic, but African. The portraitures follow the Egyptian precedent and for the first time the mysterious Minoan and Mycenean people rise before us. The tint of the flesh is of a deep reddish brown and the limbs finely ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... obliged to admit that the London financier, who was a professed and professing Hebrew, was in appearance an English gentleman, whereas Konstantinos Logotheti, with a pedigree of Christian and not unpersecuted Fanariote ancestors, that went back to Byzantine times without the least suspicion of any Semitic marriage, might have been taken for a Jew in Lombard Street, and certainly would have been thought one in Berlin. A man whose eyes suggested dark almonds need not cover himself with jewellery and adorn himself ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned his ill-health by sly ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens

... overlooking the high road between Antioch and Alexandria, the two chief foci of Hellenism in the east which the Macedonians had founded, and which had grown to maturity under the aegis of Rome, there dwelt a little Semitic community which had defied all efforts of Greek or Roman to assimilate it, and had finally given birth to a world religion about the time that a Roman punitive expedition razed its holy city of Jerusalem to the ground.[1] Christianity was charged ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... become Lord Beaconsfield. It is impossible to discuss fully the causes of that bias in his nature which prejudiced him against supporting the Christians of Turkey. Those causes were due in part to the Semitic instincts of his Jewish ancestry,—the Jews having consistently received better treatment from the Turks than from the Russians,—and in part to his staunch Imperialism, which saw in Muscovite expansion ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... Language Viewed in the Light of Assyrian Research, p. 26). Sayce proposes another explanation, also from the cuneiform tablets: 'There was a word abrik in the Sumerian language, which signified a seer, and was borrowed by the Semitic Babylonians under the varying forms of abrikku and abarakku. It is abrikku which we have in Genesis, and the title applied by the people to the "seer" Joseph proves to be the one we should most naturally expect.' The Tel el-Amarna tablets show that the knowledge of cuneiform writing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... or the colour of the Germanic races; the Jews, scattered over the world in the most diverse climates, retain the same characteristic lineaments everywhere; the Egyptian sculptures and paintings show us that, for at least 4000 or 5000 years, the strongly contrasted features of the Negro and the Semitic races have remained altogether unchanged; while more recent discoveries prove, that the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley, and the dwellers on Brazilian mountains, had, even in the very infancy of the human race, some traces of the same peculiar and characteristic type ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... did not stay with him long; Semitic, Latin, or Teuton race was very much the same to him, and intellectual subtleties had not much attraction at any time for the most brilliant soldier in the French cavalry; he preferred the ring of the trumpets, the glitter of the sun's play along the line of steel ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... unclouded day. To Karshish, however, these very embarrassments—so unlike the knowing cleverness of the spiritual charlatan—make it credible that Lazarus is indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has verily seen God. But then came the terrible crux,—the pretension, intolerable to Semitic monotheism, that God had been embodied in a man. The words scorch the paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he will not repeat them. Yet he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... whiskers, were beating the saint. In the interior of the Mollete doorway was represented the horrible martyrdom of the Child de la Guardia; that legend born at the same time in so many Catholic towns during the heat of anti-Semitic hatred, the sacrifice of the Christian child, stolen from his home by Jews of grim countenance, who crucified him in order to tear out his heart and drink ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... character of the force now and then gives rise to, or affords opportunity for, queer happenings. Occasionally it enables one to meet emergencies in the best possible fashion. While I was Police Commissioner an anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came over to New York to preach a crusade against the Jews. Many of the New York Jews were much excited and asked me to prevent him from speaking and not to give him police protection. This, I told them, was impossible; and if possible would have been undesirable ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... first rejoiced in him and gloried in his power when he thundered and lightened on Sinai. Few stories in man's spiritual history are so interesting as the record of the way in which this mountain-god, for the first time, so far as we know, in Semitic history, left his settled shrine, traveled with his people in the holy Ark, became acclimated in Canaan, and, gradually absorbing the functions of the old baals of the land, extended his sovereignty over the ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... Wertheimer unmasked and exposed a face of decidedly English type, fair and well-modelled, betraying only the faintest traces of Semitic cast to account for his surname. And with this example, Popinot snatched off his own black visor—and glared at Lanyard: in his shabby dress, the incarnate essence of bourgeoisie outraged. But the third, he of the grey ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... the road come forward, give a military salute and shake hands, a custom peculiar to this part, for hitherto the women have not saluted and only the chiefs offered the hand. Many of the people have thin lips and Semitic noses and most are well made. As usual, if one meets a husband and wife, the former strolls ahead with a spear or stick, while the latter follows carrying a baby riding on one of her hips, tied on by her wrap of cloth, and with a heavy load ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... in the library of Ashurbanipal and in the archives of the Babylonian temples were a number of tablets and fragments of tablets which recorded the efforts made by Semitic scribes to render Sumerian words and phrases into Semitic. A large number of these are concerned with legal subjects. A fairly complete list of those now in the Kouyunjik Collections of the British Museum will be found in the fifth volume of Dr. Bezold's catalogue, page 2032. The greater part of ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... story originated in a stock of primitive myths common to the Semitic races, and passed through a long period of development before it was incorporated in the book of Genesis. If, then, it is the fact, as Christian scholars assert, that this story of the Creation originated in a pagan myth, ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown



Words linked to "Semitic" :   Afrasian language, Semitic-speaking, Hamito-Semitic, Canaanitic language, Ethiopian language, anti-semitic, Afroasiatic, Amharic, Aramaic, Canaanitic, Maltese language, Maltese, Semite, Afroasiatic language, Arabic, Afrasian, Afro-Asiatic, Arabic language, Akkadian, Malti, Semitic deity



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