Just a few decades ago, Hebrew was largely limited to scholars and historical documents. Now, it\u0027s the everyday tongue of millions
“It was very helpful to have a language which every Jew was new to,” said Mira Sucharov, professor and associate chair of political science at Carleton University, and author of the recent memoir Borders and Belonging, which describes her own experience learning Hebrew from her father, in school immersion programs and at summer camp, and the thrill of going to Israel as a Jew among Hebrew speakers, but also the disorientation of feeling “partly of the group and partly not.
Languages bind people and divide them. Hebrew was the indigenous language of the Jewish people in Israel and Judah when the First Temple, Solomon’s Temple, was destroyed and the Jews exiled to Babylon in the 6th century BCE.The first few books of the Hebrew Bible, the epics of Genesis and Exodus, were written down from pre-existing oral sources in a poetic, storytelling Hebrew that often shows an archaic syntax and unusual words, reflecting Hebrew’s origins in archaic Phoenician.
The Babylonian Talmud, for example, a central part of Jewish scripture that was compiled between about 200 and 600 CE, includes the collection of oral traditions called Mishnah, mostly written in the mainly literary language known as Rabbinic Hebrew, and the commentary Gemara, completed later, much of which is in Aramaic.Article content
That archive was still an exciting new discovery when Ben-Yehuda started promoting Hebrew as a language for modern learning and life. He had been inspired as a young student to see Hebrew’s potential partly by a translation of Robinson Crusoe. He had also seen the writing on the wall for the Ottoman Empire, which lost a war to the Russian Empire that ended with lost territory and the creation of new nations.
“They called this mode of speech ‘talking dugri’ , in contrast to the stereotype of the loquacious, jabbering Diaspora Jew, perpetually compelled to live by his verbal wits,” Glinert wrote. “This new way of speaking was suited to a tough, hardened nation of farmers and soldiers. Henceforth, what would matter was not what Jews said but what Jews did.”
There is a mirror-image contrary point too. With its multi-millennial scope, Hebrew somehow transcends politics.
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