By the way… Lot of shitty replies and I don't want to sift through them all. I'll get straight to the point.
The
semite thing came up like in the nineteenth century. Basically, the most narcissistic ethno-religious group currently existing was labelled as "semites" because their - supposed - ancestors thousands of years before spoke a semitic language. Btw, educate yourselves about semitic languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languagesYeah, I know, wikipaedo is not that great, but still, this article seems to be decent and the introduction alone, if you just give it five minutes to read, would clarify what actually semite is supposed to mean.
Basically, semite is from Sem, one of the sons of Noah or someone like that in the Bible. Noah - or whoever that was - also had two other sons: Yafet and Ham.
Sem/Shem is thought of as the ancestors of "semite", i.e. middle-eastern speakers of semitic languages.
Yafet is the ancestor of crackers, who anyway got to get called "Caucasians" for some stupid and disproven theory that all crackers came out of the Caucasus - hence why Burgers always talk about "Caucasian male, or female or whoever".
Ham/Kham/Cham is the ancestor of uyghur – s. To this day, some linguists use the name "Semito-Hamitic" for the hypothesized larger language family comprising both Semitic and various North African languages (Berber, Ancient Egyptian and its modern version of Coptic, various languages in the Horn of Africa that can't be grouped with Semitic). That macro-family is more commonly called "Afro-Asiatic".