World Dictionary New Words and Meaning: jew

Words change with changing the time: change in meaning, pronunciation, spelling and so on.

Today I’ve learned that there is another word I were not aware of the modern meaning, this word is Jew.

Actually this is a word that have had different meanings through the recent and not so recent history, in my naïve vision the word was referring to someone who is a member of a specific religion or religious group but today I’ve learned a more specific set of meanings.

Accordingly to social networks and broadcast media today the word assume different meaning but somehow I’ve been able to understand some of them anyway.

Seems undisputed that Jew is not referring to a religious group but, specifically, to people living in Israel or living outside Israel but actively supporting Israel and the Zionist movement. Seems quite clear that there is an accepted accordance that Jew and Zionist are the same thing.

According to the different fonts I have got in touch there are at least two mainstream that define the term Jude:

a western meaning that is

a. “righteous people living in Israel and fighting against disgusting terrorists”

and a middle east one that is

b. “disgusting terrorists fighting against righteous people living in Palestine“

It’s interesting to notice that neither the first nor the second meaning have a real implication on the old meaning of the term Jew, so it comes to me some problem when I have to define what is a Rabbi that is against the official position of the Israeli government or, even worse, not a Zionist supporter, likewise I’m not sure how to define the bunch of pacifists that still exist in Israel because of the equation Israeli citizen = Jew = Zionist = one of the definition I found before that is common on both side of the world.

Although according to some commenter those could be called either “terrorist supporters”, “Traitors” or even “Communists” (Fox News).

There are a few more descriptions related to the term Jew, some of them are mostly used in Europe, some are used to depict

c. a population which interest is only to collect money,

some other to

d. the population that killed “God”

and so on.

It’s interesting to notice that the meaning of the word can vary in different contexts, so is not uncommon to hear people from the right-wing political parties to use the term with meaning “a” when talking about foreign politics and refer to the meaning “c” or “d” when talking about internal politics.