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Semitic   /səmˈɪtɪk/   Listen
Semitic

adjective
(Written also Shemitic)
1.
Of or relating to the group of Semitic languages.
2.
Of or relating to or characteristic of Semites.  Synonym: Semite.



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"Semitic" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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] ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... Festival Embassies to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why, in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something at which the prince had hinted away off in another aeon, in another world, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... of an historic religious experience—that of Israel which led up to the consciousness of God in Jesus and His followers. The investigation of the sources of Hebrew religion has shown that many of its beliefs came from the common heritage of the Semitic peoples; and there are numerous points of similarity between Israel's faith and that of other races. This ought not to surprise us, since its God is the God of all men. But the more resemblances we detect, the greater the difference appears. The same ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... sure of its safety. His fingers were so employed when he chanced to espy a certain article exposed for sale in an adjacent shop window; whereupon, envelope in hand, he incontinent entered and addressed the plump Semitic merchant in his ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol

... is now the river or burn of Saint Isidore; the Iardanus is at the foot of Mount Kaiapha. Keladon has obviously the same sense as the Gaelic Altgarbh, "the rough and brawling stream." Iardanus is also a stream in Crete, and Mr. Leaf thinks it Semitic—"Yarden, from yarad to flow"; but the Semites did not give the Yar to the Yarrow nor to the Australian ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... well set up, with well-formed limbs covered with an almost white skin, the texture of which would excite envy in the heart of many a European beauty. The features had nothing in common with the coarse negro type which prevailed in the forest and over the grass-lands, but rather inclined towards a Semitic type. Thick lips were the exception, not the rule, and a broad flat nose was also a rarity. The only sign of barbarity was in the hair which, when the head was not clean shaven, was allowed to grow straight out in every direction, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... of Semitics and 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 Hellenistic ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... give Miriam a significant glance, as if to say, "Is he not all I promised?" For he had had word of my coming from Sulpicius Quirinius, the legate of Syria. As well had Pilate and I been known to each other before ever he journeyed out to be procurator over the Semitic ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... describes 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 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... Semitic trial of this issue, Job takes refuge in silence and submission; the Indian and the Greek, less wise perhaps, attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable and plead for the defendant. To this end, the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... jealousies of Europe condemn, 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 Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... Maenads and Bacchantes, forbids our elegant, 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 the ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)

... 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

... narrative an account of the Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of the Deluge. It thus exhibits a close resemblance in structure to the corresponding Hebrew traditions, a resemblance that is not shared by the Semitic-Babylonian Versions at present known. But in matter the Sumerian tradition is more primitive than any of the Semitic versions. In spite of the fact that the text appears to have reached us in a magical setting, ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... something. 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 tip ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... Abyssinians, Gallas, Somals, and Kafirs. The first-named people derive their descent from Menelek, son of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba: it is evident from their features and figures,—too well known to require description,—that they are descended from Semitic as well as Hamitic progenitors. [1] About the origin of the Gallas there is a diversity of opinion. [2] Some declare them to be Meccan Arabs, who settled on the western coast of the Red Sea at a remote epoch: according to the Abyssinians, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... interested in the literature of the Sumerians, i.e., the non-Semitic people who occupied Lower Babylonia about B.C. 3500 and later. He and his scribes made bilingual lists of signs and words and objects of all classes and kinds, all of which are of priceless value to the modern student of the Sumerian and Assyrian languages. Annexed is an extract from a List ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge

... 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

... incessant jargon of bargaining, pierced with shrill screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild, slim, young London policemen sauntered, apparently unseeing, unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic crowd, in which the Oriental types were by no means so marked as in New York, though there was a greater number of red Jews than I had noted before. The most monumental features of the scene were the gorgeous scales of wrought brass, standing at intervals along the street, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... Dennys, in his "Folk-Lore of China, and its Affinities with that of the Aryan and Semitic Races," p. 134, cites a legend of the cave Kwang-sio-foo in Kiang-si, which reflects part of the tale of Ali Baba: There was in the neighbourhood a poor herdsman named Chang, his sole surviving relative being a grandmother with whom he lived. One ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... many years past the immanent God has been more real to me than the transcendent God, and the religion of Jacob has been more alien to me than that of Kant, or even Spinoza. The whole Semitic dramaturgy has come to seem to me a work of the imagination. The apostolic documents have changed in value and meaning to my eyes. Belief and truth have become distinct to me with a growing distinctness. Religious psychology has become a simple phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and absolute value. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... in favour of a common origin for all barbaric culture, such as it is. The notion of a single primitive language, standing in the same relation to all existing dialects as the relation of old Aryan to Latin and English, or that of old Semitic to Hebrew and Arabic, was a notion suited only to the infancy of linguistic science. As the case now stands, it is certain that all the languages actually existing cannot be referred to a common ancestor, and it is altogether probable ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... ruled without a rival the western waters of the Mediterranean. This great and powerful city was founded by the Phoenicians[26] of Tyre in B.C. 814, according to the common chronology. Its inhabitants were consequently a branch of the Semitic race, to which the Hebrews also belonged. Carthage rose to greatness by her commerce, and gradually extended her empire over the whole of the north of Africa, from the Straits of Hercules to the borders of Cyrene. Her Libyan subjects she treated with extreme harshness, and hence they were always ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence

... with theology. In the poem entitled 'A Litany' the Lord God discourses with Biblical sternness to His people, who tremble before Him, and threatens them with 'the inevitable Hell,' while the people implore mercy—a strange excursion into the Semitic desert out of the flowery field of paganism. And another poem is a pathetic rendering of the story of St. Dorothy, a Christian martyr. It is true that he looks back with aesthetic regret to the triumph of Christianity over the picturesque polytheism, and that perhaps ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... had been largely engaged in the study of other parts of Semitic antiquity, has not yet given to the world his promised second volume. But the first volume was a complete book in itself; the plan was to reserve the whole narrative of the history of Israel for vol.ii., so that vol.i. was entirely occupied in laying the critical foundations on which alone a real ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... 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 ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... rival development very different in its nature, but bound to come into conflict with the Roman because it also was extending. This was the commercial development of Carthage. Carthage, a Phoenician, that is, a Levantine and Semitic, colony, had its city life like all the rest. It had shown neither the aptitude nor the desire that Rome had shown for conquest, for alliances, and in general for a spread of its spirit and for the domination of its laws and modes of thought. The business of Carthage was to enrich ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc

... Germany on the Jews. It is these "diabolical Jews," they say, who prevent the conclusion of peace and insist on the continuation of the war, because they desire to ruin Russia. Proclamations in this sense have been found, together with a voluminous anti-Semitic literature, in the offices of the party of Lenine Bolsheviki (Maximalists), and particularly at the headquarters of the extreme revolutionaries, ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... 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.

... six. It is natural that they should employ in preference the words of a language in which they have been taught the series of units and tens. Since learned Europeans have not disdained to study the structure of the idioms of America with the same care as they study those of the Semitic languages, and of the Greek and Latin, they no longer attribute to the imperfection of a language, what belongs to the rudeness of the nation. It is acknowledged, that almost everywhere the Indian idioms display greater richness, and more delicate gradations, than ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt

... the remote beginning, there once upon a time was a fight in front of the public school in Henry Street over on the East Side, in which encounter one Pasquale Gallino licked the Semitic stuffings out of a fellow-pupil of his—by name Hyman Ginsburg. To be explicit about it, he made the Ginsburg boy's somewhat prominent nose to bleed extensively and swelled up Hyman's ear until for days thereafter Hyman's ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... who, with big turbans and enormous 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

... 9-v. 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

... group took no heed of the real character of their message. It artfully put prominent their nationality. These early anti-Semitic agitators knew the value of a good solid prejudice, and of a nickname. 'Jews'—that was enough. The rioters were 'Romans'—of a sort, no doubt, but it was poor pride for a Macedonian to plume himself on having lost his nationality. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... so disastrously, to subject the Latin and mixed-Gothic races of Europe to the domination of the Semitic blood, as represented in the merchant-city of Carthage, has been successfully accomplished in these latter days by the cousins of the Phœnicians, the Israelites. The nomadic children of Abraham have ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly

... birth was Jewish, he encountered little prejudice against his race. Napoleon had changed the old anti-Semitic feeling of fifty years before to a liberalism that was just beginning to be strongly felt in Germany, as it had already been in France. This was true in general, but especially true of Lassalle, whose features were not of a Semitic type, who made friends with every one, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... 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 thought, no public man, no legislative ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... 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, and was shaped ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... English, gave us over in her charge, with some broken word of his hopes for us that his swelling heart could no longer contain. I venture to say that Miss Nixon was struck by something uncommon in the group we made, something outside of Semitic features and the abashed manner of the alien. My little sister was as pretty as a doll, with her clear pink-and-white face, short golden curls, and eyes like blue violets when you caught them looking up. My brother might have been a girl, too, with ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... one people with the Chaldeans and were therefore a branch of the great Semitic family. It is not until the ninth century B.C. that the great period of Assyrian history begins. Then for two and a half centuries Assyria was the great conquering power of the world. Near the end of the seventh ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... Semitic family of languages we have the radicals raa (saw, foresaw, counselled); radha (helped, ruled); rathad (arranged); rato (directed, instructed); and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various

... didactic purpose; they are simply scholastic manuals. We find in them, in truth, a little of everything, from the description of the vocal apparatus and of the artificial machines (phonographs) which can imitate it, to summaries of the most important results obtained by Indo-European, Semitic, Coptic, Chinese, or other philologies; from philosophic generalizations on the origin or nature of language, to advice on calligraphy, and the arrangement of schedules for philological spoils. But this mass of notions, which is ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... the War. 'It was a struggle for existence, for supremacy or destruction. It was to decide whether the Graeco-Roman civilisation of the West or the Semitic (Carthaginian) civilisation of the East was to be established in Europe, and to determine its history for all ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... recovered from his despair, and now looked almost defiantly cheerful. Small in body, with a narrow chest and shoulders, and a weakly growing beard, he was nevertheless remarkable, even striking in appearance. His large nose suggested Semitic blood, but also power, which was shown, too, in his immense forehead and strong, energetic head. He had a habit of blinking his eyes. But they were fine eyes, full of feeling, imagination, and emotion, but also at moments full ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... old Mesopotamian sphere of influence. These were the Medic and the Persian. A little earlier, a period of unrest in the Syrian and Arabian deserts, marked by intermittent intrusions of nomads into the western fringe-lands, had ended in the formation of new Semitic states in all parts of Syria from Shamal in the extreme north-west (perhaps even from Cilicia beyond Amanus) to Hamath, Damascus and Palestine. Finally there is this justification for not trying to push the history of the Asiatic East much behind 1000 B.C.—that nothing like a sure chronological ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth

... of the Delta (always the weakest) was protected by a line of forts constructed after the Canaanite model. The Egyptians, moreover, not content with appropriating the thing, appropriated also the name, and called these frontier towers by the Semitic name of Magdilu or Migdols. For these purposes, or at all events for cities which were exposed to the incursions of the Asiatic tribes, brick was not deemed to be sufficiently strong; hence the walls of Heliopolis, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero

... 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 ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... all. "I will clean your foul thoroughfares, and make your Devil's-cloaca of a world into a garden of Heaven," jabbers this Phantasm, itself a phosphorescence and unclean! The worst, it is written, comes from corruption of the best:—Semitic forms now lying putrescent, dead and still unburied, this phosphorescence rises. I say sometimes, such a blockhead Idol, and miserable White Mumbo-jumbo, fashioned out of deciduous sticks and cast clothes, out of extinct cants and modern sentimentalisms, as that which ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle

... really forgotten, or whether he had chosen the most effective moment will never be known; certain it is that the Semitic instinct for drama was gratified within him as he drew a little folded white paper out of his waistcoat pocket, amid the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... 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 ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... faultless lines to his verni boots. Judged by his profile, he was not ill looking. His features were regular, the mouth and chin strong, the forehead slightly rounded, and the nose gave the merest hint of Semitic origin. Taken altogether, he had the style of a polished man of the world, and Spencer smiled at the sudden fancy that ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy

... 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

... twilight gray, Shut from the sight of carping critic, His lonely thoughts would often stray From Vedic verse and tongues Semitic, Bidding the ghost of vanished hope Mock with its past the sad possessor Of the dead spray of heliotrope That once she ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... between England and Germany. The real hatred of Germany if it exists in England at all should be found among what it is becoming the fashion to call "the intelligentsia." Such a purely intellectual hatred of the sentimental melodrama of Faust and of the semitic luxuriance of Wagner and Reinhardt is not likely to become a democratic motive in England. Here brains are always unpopular, and Park Lane will never be stormed by the mob until it is inhabited by the Bernard Shaws, the Lowes Dickinsons and the Bertrand Russells, ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato

... nature of things, all fighters. Even when slavery for both the Aryan and Semitic races ended, two orders still faced each other: aristocracy on the one side, claiming the fruits of labor; the freeman on the other, rebelling against injustice, and forming secret unions for his own protection,—the beginning of the ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... ages, 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 ...
— 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

... unknown—it comes before us, even at the earliest period, as a faith already well-developed, and from that fact, as well as from the names of the numerous deities, it is clear that it began with the former race—the Sumero-Akkadians—who spoke a non-Semitic language largely affected by phonetic decay, and in which the grammatical forms had in certain cases become confused to such an extent that those who study it ask themselves whether the people who spoke it were able to understand each other without ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches

... a good-natured crowd," Rick commented. Many of the dark, Semitic faces greeted them with cordial smiles and a half-salute ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... to read for the Moral Science Tripos he had thought of going in for the Semitic Languages Tripos. With this object in view he {14} commenced the study of Syriac. Finding that the best Syriac grammar was written in German and had not been translated, he decided to learn German also. He was advised that Switzerland was a suitable place in which to study ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson

... teaching of Jesus Christ. It was probably a misfortune for the world that almost from the beginning that teaching passed into Caucasian guardianship. I see in the New Testament no indication on the part of Our Lord and the Apostles of wishing to separate themselves from Semitic co-operation. The former taught daily in the Temple; the latter, as they went about the world, made the synagogue the base of all their missions. The responsibility for the breach is not under discussion here. It is enough ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... quicksand and hence sundry secondary and metaphorical significations, under which, as in the "Semitic" (Arabic) tongues generally, the prosaical and material sense of the word is clearly evident. I noted this in Pilgrimage iii. 66 and was soundly abused for so saying by a host ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... 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 ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns

... thing money is really! How paltry it is, and yet how women love it! I am a Jewess, you know, to the marrow of my bones. I am passionately fond of Shmuls and Yankels, but how I loathe that passion for gain in our Semitic blood. They hoard and they don't know what they are hoarding for. One ought to live and enjoy oneself, but they're afraid of spending an extra farthing. In that way I am more like an hussar than a Shmul. I don't like money ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... idea of the movement, in the white the nationalistic idea, and in the swastika the fight for the victory of Aryan man and at the same time for the victory of the idea of creative work, which in itself always was and always will be anti-Semitic.[78] ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... Chons, with Neith; at Elephantine, Kneph, Anuka, Sati, and Hak. In most instances the names of the gods are Egyptian; thus, Ptah meant 'the opener'; Amen, 'the concealed'; Ra, 'the sun or day'; Athor, 'the house of Horus';' but some few, especially of later times, were introduced from Semitic sources, as Bal or Baal, Astaruta or Astarte, Khen or Kiun, Respu or Reseph. Besides the principal gods, several inferior or parhedral gods, sometimes personifications of the faculties, senses, and other objects, are introduced into the religious system, and genii, ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... 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 blending has gone on so continuously that perhaps ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey

... face, don't 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, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... two great types which the early Israelitish civilisation sets before us again and again 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 ...
— George Borrow - A Sermon Preached in Norwich Cathedral on July 6, 1913 • Henry Charles Beeching

... 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 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... of serious importance consisted of land and buildings. These were "real" estate. Beyond these things were live-stock, serfs, and the furnishings of real estate, the surface aspect of real estate, so to speak, personal property, ships, weapons, and the Semitic invention of money. All such property had to be actually "held" and administered by the owner, he was immediately in connection with it and responsible for it. He could leave it only precariously to a steward and manager, and to convey the revenue of it to him ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... tells us the word must be used. They are, the Slavs of eastern Europe, the Teutons of middle Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa and America, the Semitic people of Western Asia and Northern Africa, the Hindoos of Central Asia and the Mongolians of Eastern Asia. There are, of course, other minor race groups, as the American Indians, the Esquimaux and the South Sea Islanders; these larger races, too, are far from homogeneous; ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

... of Sir G. Cox. {28b} We also discourage them—severely. But we are warned that philology really has discovered 'some undeniably certain etymologies' of divine names. Well, I also say, 'Philology alone can tell whether Zeus Asterios, or Adonis, or Zeus Labrandeus is originally a Semitic or a Greek divine name; here she is the Pythoness we must all consult.' {29a} And is it my fault that, even in this matter, the Pythonesses utter such strangely discrepant oracles? Is Athene from a Zend root (Benfey), a Greek root (Curtius), or to be interpreted by Sanskrit Ahana (Max ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo- European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But nothing more strongly marks the essential unity ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... magnificent cities appear which flourished and fell before recorded human history, and of which even Herodotus never heard; Art and Science are unfolded, reaching far back into the past; the signs of luxury and splendor are uncovered from the ruin of ages: but, remote as is the date of these Turanian and Semitic empires, almost equalling that of the Flood in the ordinary system of chronology, they cannot be near the origin of things, and a long process of development must have passed ere they reached the maturity in which they are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... conclude," said Oxenden, calmly, ignoring Melick, "that the Kosekin are a Semitic people. Their complexion and their beards show them to be akin to the Caucasian race, and their language proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that they belong to the Semitic branch of that race. It is impossible for an autochthonous ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille

... universal peace. The near-Eastern question, which, then as now, continually threatened war and violence, irritated the Romans beyond measure, and they came to feel towards Jerusalem as their ancestors had felt two hundred years before towards Carthage, the great Semitic power of the West, delenda est Hierosolyma. As time went on they realized that this stubborn nation was resolved to dispute with them for the mastery, and every agitation was regarded as an outrage on the Roman power, which must be wiped out in blood. It was the inevitable conflict, ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... ultimately to produce a race ideally perfect. It is true that by careful selection and regulation of marriage certain variations, whether relating to coarse bodily form or to the less obvious changes denoted by function, can be perpetuated and strengthened. That the Semitic race excels in commerce is probably due to the fact that the variation of the brain which affected favorably the mental action conducive to this form of activity, was favorable for the race in the hostile ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... Countess of ROCHEVIEILLE. The Earl is a scrubby little fellow of about sixty, who looks more like an old-clothes-man than anything else. Norman noses—at least their descendants in this generation—are curiously like the Semitic variety sometimes. The name is pronounced "Rovail," and both the Earl and Countess get blue with rage if anybody makes a mistake about it, as nearly all the delegates did. They stood on a raised dais, and received ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various

... intended this to be the cradle of a new race, a race born of the diverse entities now fusing in its crucible. Most of these people in time will intermarry,—Germans and Latins, Celts and Slavs, and with these the Semitic peoples, in varying proportions and combinations. Physically, what will be the result? Mentally and morally, what type will prevail? Drawn by the lure of the wheat, all pour themselves into the melting-pot. What of the new Canadian who ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... artistic genius, and that is European and not Oriental. As illustrating their lack of intuitive decorative art, one need only refer to the architecture of the first, second, and third Temple buildings, which apparently reflected Babylonian and Semitic influences on an early Chaldean type. The embroideries mentioned by different writers, from Moses to Josephus, appear to have had always a Babylonian, or ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... two hours of fierce and troubled thought, however, that Durkin left the Bartholdi, and taking a hansom, drove down that man-crowded crevasse where lower Broadway flaunted its Semitic signboards to the world, directly to the Criminal Courts building in ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... and topple over. Sometimes, as the trap opened, a bird would stand dazed. Then a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey breast feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places quite thickly, like a carpet. As for the crowd at the tables inside the Casino, it was largely Semitic. On the road between Monte Carlo and Monaco, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... 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 ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten

... and Egyptians formed a common stock somewhere near the mouth of the Euphrates. Perhaps the Bible is right in saying that the first seat of civilized man was in Eden, and that the Euphrates was the chief river of Paradise. Or was it from Arabia, the immemorial home of the Semitic tribes, that land of sand and mountain and fertile valley, land of changeless culture and tradition, so near the centres of civilization, and yet still the most inaccessible, the least known portion of the inhabited earth,—was it from Arabia that the wiser, stronger multitude came ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... of sin that was customary in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries? The sense of sin is due more to the character of the dominant religious ideas of the age than to brain structure or to race nature. I cannot agree with Mr. Takahashi that "To be religious one needs a Semitic tinge of mind." It is not a question of mind, of race nature, but of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... been founded on physical circumstance, we cannot do better than quote the able remarks of Mr. Keightley on the subject. He says (Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy, p. 109)— "The tale of Adonis is apparently an Eastern mythus. His very name is Semitic (Hebrew 'Adon,' 'Lord'), and those of his parents also refer to that part of the world. He appears to be the same with the Thammuz, mentioned by the prophet Ezekiel, and to be a Phoenician personification of the sun who, during a part of the year ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... "co-operire" was even in 1802 well-known to many. To this day, in spite of recent elaborate attempts (Most recently in H. Moller's "Semitisch und Indogermanisch", Erster Teil, Kopenhagen, 1907.) to establish connection between the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic families of languages, there is no satisfactory evidence of such relation between these families. This is not to deny the possibility of such a connection at a very early period; it is merely to say that through the lapse of long ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... 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 lounge suit, remained motionless; only ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... father to son, from one generation to another, they had handed down a bookshop, which included bookbinding in a small way. They were self-educated and widely read. Their customers were largely among the gentiles and for a long time the anti-semitic waves passed over them, leaving them untouched. They were law-abiding, inoffensive, peaceable citizens, and had been ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... he said, with a strong Semitic accent, "those sudden, raw east winds! I am so frozen as if I was enjoying myself upon the skating-rink,—and here it is the summer. Where is that long spring overcoat that German man hypotecated with us last evening? Between the saddle and ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin

... against Hebrew antiquities or by the strongest desire to construct their system without the assistance of religious records. Even now there is perhaps a disposition to undervalue these accounts, or rather to decline generalising from them, as forming part of the traditions of a Semitic people. It is to be noted, however, that the legal testimony comes nearly exclusively from the institutions of societies belonging to the Indo-European stock, the Romans, Hindoos, and Sclavonians supplying the greater part ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... is. And the Christian religion is no more an original religion than English is an original tongue. We have Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, French, Saxon, Norman words in our language; and we have Aryan, Semitic, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and all manner of ancient foreign fables, myths, and rites in ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... His intellectual Semitic face took on an ignoble expression of one who squeezes justice to petty ends for his own deserts. His whine penetrated the rising chorus of the other voices, even of the butcher, who was a countryman of his own, and who said something with dolorous ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... Kuropatkin had about 35,000, not only failed to hold their ground under fire, but by their timidity threw their comrades into panic. But good evidence can be cited from the correspondents of the Novoye Vremya, an Anti-Semitic organ, to the effect that among the Jews were found many "intrepid and intelligent soldiers," and that a number of them were awarded the St. George's cross for gallantry. [Footnote: The Nation, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee

... the position of his cigar from the left-hand to the right-hand corner of his mouth, very dexterously from within, with his tongue. He saw no reason why Jooly should not write a paper on the Semitic question in Russia, and read it to a greedy multitude in a town-hall, provided that the town-hall ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... however, to be found in any psychological peculiarity separating the European races from those of other continents, nor in any special characteristic of Christianity which fits it for European soil. For not only were its founder and his disciples Asiatics, and the original authoritative writings Semitic, but Asiatic tribes and nations coming into Europe have been readily converted. Missions in Asia too have achieved sufficient success to prove that there exists no inherent obstacle either in the gospel or in the Asiatic mind. Moreover, Christianity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... ethnic 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... 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 ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... and Sarah had a little of the good Semitic instinct in their make-up. The old gentleman must be managed; the dowry was too valuable to let slip. They needed the money in their business, and had even planned just what they would do with it. They were going to found a sort of Art Colony, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... 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, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... claimed the whole.3 The conquest of the Phoenician coast was not to be altogether easy, for Tyre shut its gates and for seven months Alexander had to sit before it—one of those obstinate sieges which mark the history of the Semitic races. When it fell, Alexander had the old Tyrian people scattered to the winds, 30,000 sold as slaves. Gaza offered a resistance equally heroic, lasting two months, and here too the old population was dispersed. The occupation of the rest of Syria and Palestine proceeded smoothly, and after the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... England with us next week," went on Chase dreamily. "We'll leave Japat to take care of itself. I don't know which it is in most danger of, seismic or Semitic disturbances." ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... Contributions to Biblical Science. By Members of the Biblical and Semitic Faculty. ...
— Mr. Edward Arnold's New and Popular Books, December, 1901 • Edward Arnold

... Khaldi, which 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

... husbandman, rooted to the soil by the pains he has taken to improve its capabilities, and by the homestead he has reared at the border of his fields. In the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis we have an echo of the earliest traditions preserved by the Semitic race of their distant origin. "And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there."[29] The land of SHINAR is the Hebrew name of what we call Chaldaea. There is no room for mistake. When the sacred writer wishes to tell ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... in South-Eastern Africa. Originally they were not one tribe but many, though the same blood was in them all. Nobody knows whence they came or who were their forefathers; but they seem to have sprung from an Arab or Semitic stock, and many of their customs, such as the annual feast of the first fruits, resemble those of the Jews. At the beginning of this century there arose a warrior king, called Chaka, who gathered ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... since Semitic Carthage had fallen before Aryan Rome. Now once again the Semites, far more dangerous because in the full tide of the religious frenzy of their race, threatened to engulf the Aryan world. They were repulsed by the still sturdy Franks under their great leader, Charles Martel, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... Barada River, and 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

... letters which represent the sounds only, and will often be found to resemble words in some of our ancient and modern languages. The very name of the City "Montalluyah," to which all the fragments refer, is apparently compounded of heterogeneous roots, one of Aryan the other of Semitic origin. These seeming accidents, if such they be, must not be attributed to either carelessness or design on the part of the Editor; nor does he attempt to explain them. The reader may, if he please, account for the ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... Babylon," was Van Horn's greeting, for so he had named him because of fancied Semitic resemblance blended with the crude power that marked his visage and informed ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... loved... is worthless to me.-At that point I was startled by the slow, soulful screams of blind little Kohn, with whom I had established a friendship, in spite of my anti-semitic principles. I leaped up, hurried out. I saw how Max Mechenmal was running back and forth, pinching Kohn in the legs or doing other nasty things, while calling out: "Catch me." The little Kohn was pale. In his helplessness. He ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... the term cipher or zero (which are so obviously the same as to need no remark), it is admitted on all hands to be derived from one or other of the Semitic languages, the Hebrew or the Arabic. It is customery with the mathematical historians to refer it to the Arabic, they being in general more conversant with it than with the Hebrew. The Arabic being a smaller hand than the Hebrew, a dot ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various

... decent Christian society. Cherchez le Juif is, indeed, no empty cry, whenever a new artistic or journalistic planet swims into our ken. That the Jew rules over the Continental press is not quite so untrue as most anti-Semitic cries. "Have you any Christians on your staff?" I said to the editor of the great Budapest newspaper, "Pesther Lloyd," a fine figure of a man, long-bearded and benevolent, like an ancient sage. He pondered. "I think we have one," he said. On the other ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... a perfect New Jerusalem as regards Sheenies, every civilian about the camp appearing to be a German Jew refugee. They have stalls and sell soap, buns, braces, belts, &c., and so forth. Every now and again a big Semitic proboscis appears at our tent door, and the question 'Does anypody vant to puy a vatch' ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross



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



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