Completed on December 20, 2020, for an honor’s sophomore-level anthropology course.
disclaimer: free Palestine. the language revival is admirable, not Israel
*This paper was presented at the 2021 Maryland Honor’s Collegiate Council Conference*
Abstract: The Revival of Hebrew is an astounding sociolinguistic phenomenon that influenced the Zionist movement, and ultimately, the establishment of Israel as the state of the Jewish ethnie. The process of the Revival includes the persistent dedication of Jewish people in both corpus and status planning. Having the advantage and roots of written Hebrew in religion, Hebrew was revived and rebuilt through unique lexical codification and secularization. Recognized by some scholars as a dead spoken language nearly a century ago, Hebrew is now famously understood as Israel’s official language. By exploring the influential driving factors of the Revival, we can better understand the significance of Hebrew in cultural identity.
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Language is a fundamental component of identity as it influences our perspectives in varying contexts and allows us to communicate. The death of a language is also the death of a cultural identity. Because Hebrew is a defining factor of Jewish culture and identity, the Revival of Hebrew has promoted Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state. In exploring the different elements and characteristics of the Revival, I have gained an understanding of how language and cultural identity interact in religious, political, and social contexts. The Revival of Hebrew continues to play a significant role in determining the Israeli-Jewish identity.
Spoken Hebrew nearly died out almost a century following the Temple’s destruction in Jerusalem, but written Hebrew remained relevant to the stateless Jewish population as a form of cultural continuity (Balint, 4). Written Hebrew grew as a means to create sacred works such as Mishnah. During the Hebrew literature golden age, Andalusian poets such as Judah Halevi and Soloman ibn Gabirol blurred the lines between “sacred and sensual” (Balint, 7). Eliezer Ben-Yehuda triggered the Revival on October 13th, 1881, after he and his friends chose to speak Hebrew with each other exclusively. During that same year, Yehuda made aliya to Palestine with the belief, “The Hebrew language can only exist if we revive the nation and return it to the fatherland” (Bensadoun, 4). It can be inferred that the Revival of Hebrew has deep roots in Jewish-inspired imagined communities.
During the Revival, Hebrew expanded from its original form. Hebrew is a Semitic language, closely related to Aramaic. The evolution of Biblical Hebrew to modern, secularized Hebrews results from lexical codification in corpus planning. Some of the significant codifications include: “inserting new roots to existing patterns,” “drawing words from old sources and assigning them new meanings,” “loan translation,” and “adding Aramaic, European and Hebrew prefixes and suffixes” (Shafrir, p. 3). Corpus planning was an informal process followed through by individuals to solve communicative vacuums in their works (Shafrir, p. 2). Not only had corpus planning allowed Hebrew to be more verbally accessible and less limited, but it also rebuilt Hebrew using the available linguistic resources of neighboring languages such as Yiddish, Russian, Arabic, and Aramaic (Shafrir, p. 3).
These unique advantages supported the status planning of Hebrew. The first step was the declaration that Hebrew would be the national language as “The language is recognized as a central symbol of the state’s identity and functions as an extremely important cultural institution” (Shafrir, p. 4). Hebrew remains the premier official language in the sense that it is statutory, working, and symbolic; English and Arabic, although highly common in the area, do not hold all three senses (Shafrir, p. 5). The second step in status planning began diverting from Yiddish to Hebrew. Hebrew was spoken at home to children, standardized in schools from kindergarten through post-graduate university levels, and modernized to be more verbally accessible and relevant (Shafrir, p. 6).
Because of its low status in Jewish ethnicity, possible recent bills would “remove Arabic as an official language alongside Hebrew, increase the influence of Jewish law, reduce the power of the Supreme Court, and entrench the automatic citizenship of Jews worldwide and Jewish symbols of the state” (Rudoren, 7). The removal of Arabic accentuates Hebrew being the sole representative of the Jewish people in Israel, and reinforces the intimate relationship between Hebrew and the Jewish identity.
Two significant turning points during the Revival were the first and second Aliya. The first Aliya emphasized Hebrew in school instruction, while the second Aliya created and established the Yishuv, the Jewish identity resulting from “Hebrew-speaking social cells” (Reshef, p. 2). The Yishuv was greatly important in supporting the Zionist movement and the Revival of Hebrew, which further established the relationship between them. Roman Vater refers to Professor Yasir Suleiman, who states, “Language is the medium which makes the nation as an ‘imagined community’ imaginable,” creating a divide in those who speak the language and those who don’t (p. 486). This is significant as it highlights the Jewish ethnie and their relationship to Hebrew beyond religion. Hebrew is then recognized as an essential component of identity and ethnicity.
Of the many attractive traits of the Revival, the planning process is perhaps the most impressive. To successfully revive a language, there are four essential sociolinguistic factors to consider and implement: communicative factor, political factor, the religious factor, and literary factor. Each of these factors has a unique and vital role in the Revival.
The communicative factor ensures that the language wants to be revived. Because Hebrew has been identified as an indicator of the Jewish ethnie, it’s absence resulted in a “communicative vacuum” (Nahir, p. 340). Jewish people in Jerusalem were multi-lingual; some spoke Judeo-Spanish, Palestinian Arabic, North African Arabic, Georgian, and Yiddish dialects (Peres 1964, as cited in Nahir, p. 340). Bridging the communicative vacuum aligned with the Zionist movement’s goals to synchronize the Jewish people, leading to the political factor. It was critically recognized that “In order for an ethnie to become a nation, it must develop its own unique culture, which normally takes a linguistic form” (Vater, p. 488). Vater emphasizes that the Revival plays a significant role in establishing Israel as the Jewish state, a concept that hadn’t entirely existed before the 19th century.
Written Hebrew, in the context of religion, provided a unique advantage to the Revival as it kept Hebrew in “constant use,” and resulted in the “uninterrupted production” of Hebrew works, and “secured the survival of the phonology of Hebrew” (Nahir, p. 343). For most Jewish people, religion was a significant indicator of identity, more than nationality, leading them to believe they are “people based on religion” (Fellman, p. 253). The impact of the religious factor fueled the fourth and final literary factor. The literary factor secularized Hebrew, which “freed the language from old restrictive forms” (Nahir, p. 344). This secularization modernized Hebrew while making it more accessible to express modern experiences in different mediums such as “journalism, news commentaries, literary criticism, reviews, popular science, essays, reference books, and dictionaries” (Nahir, p. 344).
The secularization of Hebrew is a compilation of these four factors. When expanding the Hebrew vocabulary, “Hebrew tapped into mainly it’s own resources, Biblical and post-biblical” (Kantor, p. 604). Many younger Hebrew words have gone through three phases of development. In the first phase, the word appears in Biblical or post-Biblical literature in the secular meaning. The second phase word is sanctified and used exclusively in the Jewish religious context (Kantor, p. 604). The final phase of this development is when the word or phrase becomes reestablished and resecularized. This final phase was essential to the Revival as it also bridged the communicative vacuum by allowing Hebrew to be more accessible and relevant.
In his column of Cleveland Jewish News, Cliff Savren shares his appreciation of the Revival of Hebrew, stating, “Not only do I live much of my life in Hebrew but my children are perfectly bilingual, speaking fluent Hebrew – and unaccented English…” (2). Savren’s and his children’s experience results from the decades-long process of reviving, expanding, and rebuilding Hebrew. Like other nations such as India and Croatia, language in Israel plays a significant role in politics (Reality Check Team, 2-3). The Jewish identity is still debated today. For example, historian Tony Judt believes that the Jewish identity is “an anachronism” (as cited in Fisher, 19).
The Revival of Hebrew has been a strenuous and complicated process, and I admire the persistent efforts that Zionists, scholars, and others have maintained to bring Hebrew back. I feel that compared to other languages such as Gaelic in Ireland, Hebrew has an almost unfair advantage because of how relevant written Hebrew had stayed. Because Hebrew was still understood and taught in the religious context, it didn’t suffer the same losses as other dead languages. I also find it interesting that Jewish people remained stateless for so long, and how the Zionist movement and the Revival pushed each other’s agendas. Researching for this paper has allowed me to understand the roles that Punjabi and Urdu play in my Pakistani identity, especially regarding the Pakistan and India Partition.
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