Jerusalem (AFP)

A word doomed to disappear and therefore did not deserve its place in a dictionary: this is how the term "anti-Semitic" was considered at the end of the 19th century by the author of the English dictionary of Oxford, according to archives made public in Monday Israel.

In 1879, the British lexicographer James Murray began to compile with his collaborators a list of words to appear in the first "Oxford English Dictionnary", reference dictionary in English.

Among these terms, several with the prefix "anti", but no "anti-Semite".

When Claude Montefiore, an influential member of the British Jewish community, discovered this absence, he told Mr. Murray of his incomprehension.

In a letter dated July 5, 1900, discovered in Jerusalem in recent months by the Israeli National Library archivist Rachel Misrati, Mr. Murray replied that the term, of German origin, appeared in English in 1881 and that its use should only be temporary.

In the early 1880s, he wrote, "the use of the word" anti-Semitic "was probably completely new in English and not considered to be established (...). a specific entry in the dictionary ".

In addition, he notes, "the street would say more" anti-Jewish + than anti-Semitic ".

"+ Antisemitic + has a professorial side", still believes Mr. Murray, who was a teacher before publishing the first Oxford dictionary, published gradually from 1884 to 1928.

- "Unspeakable sadness" -

Rachel Misrati discovered James Murray's letter while working on autographs of British non-Jewish figures, contained in one of the collections of the National Library which includes some 40,000 autographs and portraits.

Ms. Misrati noted several elements of interest in the letter: the text suggests, for example, that the word "Semite" was already used at that time to speak of Jews only, while its exact meaning refers to people speaking Hebrew, l Arab and Aramaic, says the archivist at AFP.

Also, the correspondence between MM. Montefiore and Murray underlines, according to her, the concerns of the British Jewish community at the end of the XIXth century, even if, "in England, the Jews enjoyed a better situation than in other countries".

Europe was then shaken by the "Dreyfus affair", named after an Alsatian Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, accused of high treason in France, a scandal mixing judicial error, denial of justice and anti-Semitism.

In his text, James Murray explains that he hoped that after the "People's Spring", revolutions in several European countries in 1848, the continent would have "left behind its ignorance, its suspicion and its brutality", but also its anti-Semitic impulses.

Mr. Murray does not hesitate to speak of the "unspeakable sadness" of those who, like him, remember the "hopes that (they had) in the 1850s".

"How the devil must have sneered at the sight of our stupid dreams!" He wrote.

"It is likely that if we were to publish the dictionary today, we would have made" anti-Semitic "one of the main words," he wrote in 1900.

It is not clear when the word was finally incorporated into the Oxford Dictionary. Linguists Susan Blackwell and Willem Meijs mention the use of the term in the 1880s, without further details.

In French, the first appearance of the word "anti-Semite" dates from 1890, according to the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

© 2020 AFP