As a young ’un, I recall being taught that some languages can express concepts with greater economy than others. A prominent example comes from Deuteronomy 6, which concerns God’s commandments. In verse 7, per the King James version, the Jews are told, “And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children.”
Nine words.
In Hebrew, it only takes two words to express the same as these nine words: ושננתם לבניך
This example is not unique. Just the first one I remember learning.
A matter I confront daily is antisemitism. Not always personally. Sometimes via the boob tube, other times in print or streaming or…
It is a bit unavoidable if you are exposed to news from college campuses, some black folks, many, many Muslims, certain Christian-types, Spaniards, Norwegians, the Irish, Netherlanders, the UN, teachers groups (international!) and basically, the whole world and everyone in it but for some Jews and their way-in-the-minority supporters.
The common purpose of most of the planet is to make Earth Judenrein or Judenfrei. That would be cleansed or free of Jews, respectively.
Public domain.
While contemplating this, I wondered whether another group exists besides Jews who have a single word applied to them that expresses a desire for their extermination?
Stuck. Absolutely stuck. Could not come up with another instance.
So, reluctantly, I turned to AI. I dislike AI. I find it lacking, inconsistent, and unreliable.
Still, I gave it a whirl and wouldn’t you know it, AI could not find an equivalent economy of language to express advocacy for the extermination of any other group. Try your luck and search for yourself.
There may be some out there thinking that *****phobia (pick your racial or sexual prefix) is such an expression. Oopsie. A phobia is a fear, not a hatred or a call to kill.
Likewise, “miso-” as in misanthrope or misogyny is a hatred or dislike, but not a call to eradicate.
So, I then tried AI’s foreign language skills when it comes to genocides.
Hey, AI, is there a Turkish word for genociding the Armenians? Answer: Nope.
Hey, AI, is there a Hutu word to describe the extermination of the Tutsis? Nope. “Within their (the Hutus’) propaganda, they used the phrase ‘kubaho nk’ibimonyo’, which roughly translates to ‘to live like cockroaches’, referring to the Tutsi people in a dehumanizing way.”
Definitely dehumanizing and disturbing, but it’s still not a single word specially coined to promote the murder of a group.
Hey, AI, is there any single word comparable to Judenrein that advocates for the extermination of a group of people? Answer: “There isn’t a single word that directly mirrors Judenrein in advocating for the extermination of a group of people, but there are terms related to eliminationist ideologies.” (ChatGPT)
“Eliminationist ideologies.” So comparatively anemic. How dilute. And how inefficient. Two words. No specificity. Fuzzy, at best.
There are those who will say that Judenrein is not exterminationist. That you can have groups that are free of Jews without denying their extermination (see, for example, the College of Cardinals) but there is a difference between organizations in which one cannot simultaneously be a Jew and a member (well, almost. See, Aaron Jean-Marie Lustiger), and the single word calling for Jewish liquidation.
The Germans coined Judenfrei and Judenrein during the Holocaust to describe areas that, through relocation and slaughter, no longer had Jewish inhabitants:
While judenfrei refers merely to “freeing” an area of all of its Jewish inhabitants, the term judenrein (literally “clean of Jews”) has the even stronger connotation that any trace of Jewish blood had been removed as an alleged impurity in the minds of the criminal perpetrators.
Nazis were open about using these terms in their propaganda, so that everyone could be very clear about their goals.
Jews are distinguished from others in many ways: religion, continuous residence in their homeland for ~4 millennia, disproportionately high achievement, etc. Add to that the dubious honor of a singular linguistic fast-track to extinction.