A recently uncovered letter explains why ‘anti-Semitism’ wasn’t in the first Oxford English Dictionary
On July 5, 1900, James Murray, founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, penned a letter to Claude Montefiore explaining a conspicuous absence in an upcoming volume compiled some years before: An entry for the word “anti-Semitism.” The oldest hatred did appear in the first edition, but only within a list of “anti” combinations.
In the letter, Murray explained that, in hindsight, “anti-Semitism” and its derivatives deserved their own entries as, unfortunately, they had only grown more relevant with time.
“Anti-semite and its family were then probably very new in English use, and not thought likely to be more than passing nonce-words [i.e. a word coined for a single occasion], & hence they did not receive treatment in a separate article,” Murray wrote to Montefiore, the founder of the Anglo-Liberal Judaism movement. “Probably if we had to do that post now, we should have to make Anti-semite [sic] a main word, and add ‘hence Anti-semitic, Anti-semitism.’”
The National Library of Israel recently uncovered Murray’s letter, which went on to elaborate that there was such a glut of “anti” words, that “much violence had to be employed” to fit them all in. Many, including the then-more ubiquitous word “anti-slavery” did not receive their own entries, Murray noted.
“Would that Anti-semitism had had no more than a fleeting interest!” Murray wrote. “The closing years of the 19th c. have shown, alas! that much of Christianity is only a temporary whitewash over brutal savagery.”
Murray, a liberal like Montefiore, went on to lament the dashed hopes of the 1848 revolutions and the decade of the 1850s, when it appeared “that we had left ignorance, superstition and brute force behind us.” He’d hoped that the new century would “usher in the reign of righteousness. How the devil must have chuckled at our fond & foolish dream!”
The National Library, working with the Oxford University Press, was unable to recover Montefiore’s side of the correspondence, but Murray’s response shows how language evolves, noting that at the time of the “anti” volume’s completion “The man in the street would have said Anti-Jewish.”
Murray was recently the subject of a 2019 biopic, “The Professor and the Madman,” in which he was portrayed by Mel Gibson.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at Grisar@Forward.com.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO