Throughout the Jewish diaspora there reigned, until the nineteenth century, a state of diglossia. In daily life the Jews spoke a vernacular language, but they read, and often carried on correspondence and wrote religious works, in Hebrew.
The return to biblical Hebrew
Although read and understood with ease in living communities, Hebrew had there lost much of its lustre. It was a sacred language, a vehicle of thought, but it was no longer an end of study in itself, as it had often been able to be in the Middle Ages in the East or in Spain. Since the sixteenth century, Hebrew grammar had become a Christian discipline, and the Jews — who read Hebrew quickly and without vowels, to the astonishment of the Christian humanists — contented themselves in fact with empirical knowledge. Disdain for grammar went hand in hand with the neglect of biblical Hebrew. To be sure, the Bible always occupied a central place in the liturgy, but the literal comprehension of the text seemed to be at the level of the children of three to five years who attended the héder (elementary religious school). The aim of education was to bring the pupil very early to the study of the commentaries and of the Talmud. The simple melamed, who taught the rudiments and the Bible, had moreover a status far inferior to that of the teacher of Talmud. This situation still persists in small ultra-conservative circles.
One of the first manifestations of the Haskala, the Jewish age of Enlightenment, was the return to the Bible advocated by Moses Mendelssohn in the years 1770–1780. Concerned to reactivate the Andalusian exegetical and philosophical tradition, he affirmed — against the weight of established tradition — the importance of the study of the Bible and of the Hebrew language; was this not the very foundation of Judaism?
To the doctrinal aspect was added an aesthetic element. Biblical Hebrew was a beautiful language, still capable of producing beautiful poetic fruit, as Mendelssohn at once proved by translating Young’s Nights (Les Nuits) into Hebrew, in preference to Yiddish, which he qualified as a “jargon”; it was also capable of being a living instrument suited to every genre. It was through it that Mendelssohn endeavoured to renew Judaism by developing the great philosophical questions debated in his time.
The road to assimilation
The review Hameassef (“The Collector,” after der Sammler), founded in 1783 at Königsberg by disciples of Mendelssohn, was the first press organ to spread the ideas of the Haskala — and this, of course, in Hebrew. It sought to combat “obscurantism” without breaking with tradition, to instruct the public by means of linguistic, literary or historical articles, and to bring it political news: it was thus that the events of the French Revolution were covered by this first Hebrew review. Its fundamental aim was to prepare the Jews for emancipation by opening them to modernity, by teaching them “the language of the nations” — in this case German — to which contributed supplements in the German language transcribed in Hebrew characters, since most Jews knew no other script.
They learned German so well that they forgot Hebrew. The project of bringing Judaism up to date was nonetheless maintained. Such was the aim set in 1819 by a circle of young students of philology and philosophy at the University of Berlin, who constituted themselves into an “association for the culture and science of the Jews.” This Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) — in adapting the philological method to Judaism — did it merely embalm it before abandoning it definitively, as Gershom Scholem maintained? It is true that, in the minds of its initiators, it was above all meant to permit — just like the religious reform then under way — a better integration of the Jews into the surrounding society, by showing Judaism in an advantageous light, by underscoring a natural evolution that made a place for it in modernity. It is true that it was also sometimes the bridge towards a total assimilation consummated by conversion. Thus, in an altogether paradoxical manner, the return to Hebrew advocated by the first Haskala had ended in the abandonment of Hebrew, and sometimes even of the religion that ensured a specificity and a cohesion to the Jewish minority. This abandonment went hand in hand with the oft-repeated idea that “the Jewish people” (am Israel) did not exist.
Toward a national culture
The sequel of history was to prove that the seed germinates differently according to the soil in which it is sown. Romantic Germany was outrageously arrogant and Germanocentric; the great movement toward German unity was already under way. The Haskala, emigrated toward the two empires — Austro-Hungarian and Russian — where mosaics of nationalities existed, found there the means to flourish. On the one hand, because numerous nationalities stifled within the Austro-Hungarian empire were beginning to make the voice of their culture heard. On the other, because Russian-Polish society left the Jews no hope of emancipation. It soon became clear to the adepts of the Haskala in the East of Europe that the access to modernity of which they dreamed could be obtained not by the opening of the doors of majority society, but by the entry of a little outside air into Jewish society.
To Yiddish, the Haskala had preferred Hebrew; to the Talmud, the Bible; to mysticism, philology and history. All these ingredients, taken up with a passionate Slavic touch, forged a Jewish national consciousness. This could constitute itself around a language that was that of no other people and that had been preserved with a fidelity and a love unique under the least favourable conditions. It rediscovered the Bible no longer under the religious aspect, but as a prestigious, universally admired literature and a possible new source of literary inspiration, as well as the foundation of a history that asked only to be continued beyond the dark centuries, “the valley of tears” into which the Jews had been plunged. It breathed in an energy that led them to abandon mystical asceticism in order to turn toward reasoned action, while keeping an inner flame that allowed the limits of the reasonable to be enlarged.
I have just thus defined the proto-Zionism that won over the Jewish populations of Galicia, of Lithuania, of Belorussia, of Ukraine, of Romania. It was encouraged by the proliferation of a Hebrew press in these regions. But nothing doubtless contributed so much to developing this state of mind as the first novel in the Hebrew language, which appeared in 1853: The Love of Zion (L’Amour de Sion / Ahavat Tsion) by Abraham Mapu. This naive tale of a shepherd, a princess, switched children, the plots of the wicked and the final triumph of Good was written in pure biblical Hebrew and was set in Jerusalem and its surroundings in the time of the prophets. The language, the subject, the geographical and historical setting were in perfect harmony. Their beauty offered a means of escape far from the sufferings and the ugliness of the present; it created, in the strictest sense of the term, a nostalgia, an aspiration to return. This aspiration would no doubt have remained a sweet reverie, had the tragic events of the end of the century (the pogroms of 1881) not intervened. The abundant literary posterity of The Love of Zion is less well known, being of lesser quality, but it long sustained in the diaspora the schematic opposition between a sombre “here” and a luminous “over there,” “in the land of the ancestors.”
The vision of Eliezer Ben Yehuda: language, people and land
As early as 1878, a young Lithuanian Jew, Eliezer Perlman — who had managed to gain access to a secular education and had reflected on the problem of nationalities in Europe — formed a seemingly utopian project. The maskilim (adepts of the Haskala) had not succeeded in transmitting their love of Hebrew to their children, for they formed islets within a majority culture full of attractions; there could therefore be no true cultural transmission except within a single people living on a single land. After the publication of a programmatic article in a Hebrew review of Vienna, Perlman, who took the surname of Ben Yehuda, himself went to settle in Jerusalem with his young wife in 1881 and threw himself into a passionate effort in the service of Hebrew, which was to end only with his death in 1922.
This figure is often called the “father of Hebrew,” for he was the first to conceive the resurrection of spoken Hebrew.
To be sure, precursors have been claimed for him here and there; appeal has also been made to the testimony of English consuls or of travellers to attest that Hebrew was already the lingua franca of the Jews in Jerusalem — but whoever says lingua franca says a poor language, spoken occasionally in the public square. Ben Yehuda brought Hebrew — Hebrew alone — into his own home. Drawing inspiration from the modern methods applied to other languages, he showed how to teach Hebrew in Hebrew. He acted also through his own Hebrew newspaper, through the creation of societies of spoken Hebrew and of an embryonic academy (the Language Committee, as early as 1890), and through the assembling of a vast Thesaurus of the Hebrew language, which he left unfinished but which was continued after him. In short, he set the example of a voluntarism that went hand in hand with a very strong personal national sentiment; but his project had above all the merit of being already ready, and even of seeing the beginnings of its realization, when political Zionism — which was to amplify it — was formulated.
The rivalry of Yiddish
Difficulties were not lacking on the road to the return to Hebrew. The most religious circles took offence at what they considered a desacralization of the holy language. In the popular circles of Europe as among the Ashkenazim of the Holy Land, Yiddish continued to reign. More than that, this despised idiom was beginning to acquire its letters of nobility by developing unsuspected literary virtualities. With the appearance of the first Jewish political party, the Bund — which was also the first socialist party in Russia — the Yiddish spoken by all its adepts became the banner of another type of modernity, in conflict with the Zionism to which Theodor Herzl had, that same year 1897, just given its political formulation.
Although there were footbridges between them, two conceptions of the political future of the Jews were thus opposed, each with its own properly Jewish language. The Zionists gathered around Hebrew (it should be noted, however, that Theodor Herzl himself never believed in the possible renaissance of the language); the Bundist socialists, around Yiddish. The confrontation took place in 1908 at the Congress of Czernowitz, where the question of the national language of the Jewish people was raised. The unleashing of passions gave rise to a veritable “war of languages,” which ended in an inevitable compromise.
Between the national idea and socialist internationalism, the historian Dubnow, heir of the Haskala, advocated a third way which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, could appear the least utopian: that of “autonomism.” When the long-awaited liberalization had won over the empires of Eastern Europe, there would at last be room for the flowering of a secularized Jewish culture that would ensure the survival of Judaism with its two languages, each fulfilling its function: Hebrew in intellectual life, Yiddish in daily life. The aborted experiment of the Soviet Birobidzhan (from which, moreover, Hebrew was eliminated) may appear as a caricature of his project.
Hebrew resurrected
Against all likelihood, it was Ben Yehuda’s vision that was to prevail. Not by its own force alone, but through an unforeseeable chain of circumstances that made Hebrew necessary.
From 1881 onward, young “Lovers of Zion” were convinced by the pogroms of the Tsarist empire that the time had come to return to “the land of the ancestors.” At the cost of a thousand difficulties, they founded agricultural villages. They also founded families, and very soon the problem arose of the language in which they would raise their children. There could be no question of perpetuating the language of the persecutors (Russian or Romanian); as for Yiddish, it retained too much the taste of “bitter exile.” There remained Hebrew. They began by teaching the Jewish subjects in Hebrew, then, very quickly, mathematics and the other subjects — despite the absence not only of textbooks but of Hebrew terminology. A first purely Hebrew kindergarten opened in 1898 at Rishon-le-Zion. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, when Hebrew reached secondary education, there was already a generation of children who expressed themselves naturally in this language.
Hebrew also suffered the competition of various European languages — French, German or English — encouraged by Jewish philanthropic organizations. An initiative of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden gave the measure, as early as 1913, of the force of the national sentiment bound up with Hebrew. When it proposed to create at Haifa an institution of higher scientific education, the Technicum (later called the Technion), where instruction would be given in German, the street demonstrations and the strikes within the very other schools of the Hilfsverein affirmed unequivocally the attachment to Hebrew. If this result could be obtained by a handful of schoolteachers devoid of basic pedagogical means, it is without any doubt because it corresponded to a deep need in a precise conjuncture.
The political recognition of Hebrew did not take long to follow the observation that it had indeed become once again a living language. In 1922, it was placed among the three official languages of Palestine under British mandate. Throughout the mandatory period, the Hebrew cultural institutions developed (the Technion of Haifa, 1924; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1925; the future Weizmann Institute of Rehovot, 1934; the Ha-Bima theatre, 1925; the radio Qol Israel, 1934); techniques for teaching Hebrew to the new immigrants — ever more numerous — were perfected; the watchword Ivri daber ivrit (“Hebrew! Speak Hebrew!”) spread; but above all, it was the children who, according to the famous formula of the humorist Ephraim Kishon, “taught their parents their mother tongue.”
When the State of Israel was created in 1948, the Israeli nation had already existed for a long time around a modern Hebrew culture. The people had preserved its language for two millennia, but in turn the language had recreated the people.