1. relating to or denoting a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian, constituting the main subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family.
2. relating to the peoples who speak Semitic languages, especially Hebrew and Arabic.
Hostility towards and discrimination against Jewish people (although there are other Semitic peoples, notably the Arabs, anti‐Semitism is only used to refer to prejudice against Jewish people). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was strongly evident in France, Germany, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere, many Jewish emigrants fleeing from persecution or pogroms in south‐east Europe to Britain and the USA. After World War I early Nazi propaganda in Germany encouraged anti‐Semitism, alleging Jewish responsibility for the nation's defeat. By 1933 Jewish persecution was active throughout the country. The ‘final solution’ which Hitler worked for was to be a Holocaust or extermination of the entire Jewish race; some six million Jews were killed in concentration camps before the defeat of Nazism in 1945. Anti‐Semitism was a strong feature of society within the former Soviet Union, especially after World War II, and remains a problem in eastern Europe and in the former Soviet republics. In western Europe, especially in France and Germany, there has been an increase in racist violence by neo‐Nazi groups since the 1990s.