In a recently discovered letter, James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, responds to a query about why he did not include an entry for anti-Semitism. Zack Rothbart writes:
The reasons for the word’s exclusion are elaborated by Murray in the letter, which he wrote on July 5, 1900 to Claude Montefiore, a scholar, ardent anti-Zionist, and scion of the renowned British Jewish family. Montefiore was . . . the great-nephew of Moses Montefiore, one of the most important early supporters of the modern Zionist movement.
Besides the fact that “the material for anti- words was so enormous that much violence had to be employed” to [choose which should be included], Murray noted [that at the time he began work on the dictionary] “Anti-Semite and its family were then probably very new in English use, and not thought likely to be more than passing nonce-words. . . . Would that Anti-Semitism had had no more than a fleeting interest!”
Interestingly, the term Semitism did appear in the first edition of the dictionary, along with mention of the fact that in “recent use,” it had already come to be associated with “Jewish ideas or Jewish influence in policy and society.”
Read more on The Librarians: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/djm_oxford/