Hebrew Troubles

A recent and interesting article in The New York Times noted that Hebrew had ceased to be widely spoken for 1,700 years before its revival in the twentieth century. That revival, The New York Times added, “is often hailed as one of the greatest feats of the Zionist enterprise; today Hebrew is the first language of millions of Israelis, a loquacious and literary nation that is said to publish an average of 5,500 books a year.”

The revival of Hebrew was, to a great extent, the accomplishment of a single man: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. We read a short text about him in my Hebrew class. (Click on the image below to enlarge it.)

Here is my rough translation from the Hebrew. (If you catch any mistakes, please leave a comment to correct them.)

Today, as in the time of the Bible, Hebrew is a living language, and people of all ages and in every place in Israel speak Hebrew, but this was not always so.

For a long time the Jews were in different places in the world and didn’t speak Hebrew. Hebrew was a book language, and in everyday life it was a dead language. All over the earth the Jews spoke in another language. For example, in Germany they spoke German, in Morocco they spoke Arabic and French, and there were also special Jewish languages, like Yiddish in Europe and Ladino in Spain. The majority of researchers think that already in the second century before the counting [B.C.E. – W.Y.] they didn’t speak Hebrew. They continued to read the Bible and the Mishnah in Hebrew, they prayed in Hebrew, and they even wrote in Hebrew, but not many Jews spoke Hebrew outside the synagogue.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a Zionist Jew named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda came from Russia to Israel. He thought that all the Jews need to return to the Land of Israel and to speak Hebrew. He said: “The land and the language – without these two things the People of Israel cannot be a people.”

Very religious people did not want to speak Hebrew. They said it is forbidden to speak Hebrew everyday because it is a holy language. They thought that Ben-Yehuda was crazy, and it was forbidden to speak with him. Other people wanted to speak Hebrew, but they said that they could not because they didn’t have enough words. They also thought that Ben-Yehuda was crazy and it was not possible to speak with him. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda did not agree – not with the former nor with the latter.

It was not only Ben-Yehuda who was “crazy” about Hebrew. There were in the Land of Israel more idealistic “crazy people” – professors, teachers, writers, journalists, doctors, and others – all of them were “soldiers” in a Hebrew army, and they looked for new words to revive everyday in the modern world. They said: We need to open Hebrew schools. In the Hebrew schools, the teachers need to speak always only Hebrew and to teach Hebrew in Hebrew.

Ben-Yehuda was also a journalist. He wrote several newspapers in Hebrew. In these newspapers he used new words; in the morning he thought of a new word [often derived from Biblical roots - W.Y.] and in the evening he wrote it in the newspaper. In this way people in the Land of Israel learned the new words, knew them, and began to use these words in the street and at home.

Ben-Yehuda wrote an important, great, and historic dictionary. In this dictionary there are words from the time of the Bible to the twentieth century. In the dictionary there are also all the new words of Ben-Yehuda and his friends. For example: soldier, ice cream, dictionary, clock, newspaper.

Most people say that the great miracle of Zionism is the revival of the Hebrew language.

From a sociological perspective, the revival of Hebrew as a language of everyday life is one of the most remarkable things about Israeli society. In 1895, at the very time that Ben-Yehuda was engaged in his seemingly quixotic pursuits in Palestine, the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim defined the subject matter of sociology as social facts. A social fact, he explained, was any way of acting, thinking, and feeling that constrained the individual from the outside: “Not only are these types of behavior and thinking external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and coercive power by virtue of which, whether he wishes it or not, they impose themselves upon him.” And one of Durkheim’s chief examples was language: “I am not forced to speak French with my compatriots … but it is impossible for me to do otherwise. If I tried to escape the necessity, my attempt would fail miserably.” (Just try going to Paris and speaking English, and you’ll see what he means.) What is so fascinating about Ben-Yehuda and the revival of Hebrew is that he and his followers, rather than being constrained by pre-existing social patterns, instead created new social facts. The revival of Hebrew, to use a bit of sociological jargon, was an astonishing imposition of agency upon structure.

Once a new social fact is created, of course, it creates the possibility of unintended and sometimes humorous deviations. Arthur Ruppin, the sociologist for whom the street on which I lived in Tel Aviv was named, tells the following story in his diary: “Jerusalem, 29 November 1936. Yesterday and the day before, Hanna and I were in Tel Aviv for the Schocken-Persitz wedding. Tremendous gathering of people. In my Hebrew speech, I committed the howler of the evening by saying of Mrs Schocken ‘ha-geveret ha-shokhevet al yadee’ instead of ‘yoshevet’ [the lady lying beside me, instead of sitting]. Much amusement. Nevertheless, I decided to make no more Hebrew after-dinner speeches.” After reading this, I felt better about my own frequent mistakes in Hebrew.

A colleague of mine at the Hebrew University told me a similarly funny story about the great German-Jewish émigré historian George Mosse, who came to Israel many times and even lectured at the Hebrew University but never learned more than a few Hebrew words – and even those he didn’t always get quite right. When he wanted to get the attention of his waiter at restaurants, Professor Mosse would call “Adonai!” (Lord) instead of “Adon!” (sir). One night at dinner he turned to my colleague and declared, “I always get the best service in Israel!”

In the end, parole always has its revenge against langue. The gist of the story in The New York Times was that modern Hebrew, like any living language, changes and develops over time; that, as a consequence of these changes, it has begun to diverge more and more from Biblical Hebrew; and that this divergence is causing a lot of anxiety among some Israelis, who view it as a corruption of the language. That, I’m afraid, is the price of Hebrew’s revival: no living language can remain static for long. In short, Ben-Yehuda may have created a new social fact, but millions of ordinary Israelis in small, gradual ways are continually recreating it everyday.