An anthropologist wrongly applied the word "Semitic" not just to languages like Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and Hebrew but specifically to ethnically and culturally Jewish people. More ominously, from 1880 through the Nazi period of German history, racists extended the word "Aryan," which had meant the Sanskrit-Persian language family, to deliberately foster the vile and discredited theory of a so-called Aryan race.
Source: tatoeba (8113157)