Language and Nationalism:

A Comparative Study of Language Revival and Reform in Hebrew and Turkish

A Dissertation

Presented to

The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

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Brandeis University

Near Eastern and Judaic Studies

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Avigdor Levy, Advisor

In Partial Fulfillment
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of the Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

by

İlker Aytürk

February 2005
 UMI Number: 3144380

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_______________________________________________________
UMI Microform 3144380
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This dissertation, directed and approved by İlker Aytürk’s Committee, has been

accepted and approved by the Faculty of Brandeis University in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of:

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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IE Adam B. Jafee, Dean of Arts and Sciences
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Dissertation Committee:
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Avigdor Levy, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Chair

Antony Polonsky, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies

Feroz Ahmad, History, University of Massachusetts-Boston

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the conclusion of my six years of graduate school and dissertation writing

process, it is my pleasant duty to acknowledge all the debts I have accumulated

throughout. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Avigdor

Levy, whose comments and insights were invaluable in shaping this dissertation. He has

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been a model teacher and reader, who could exercise his expertise and good judgment on

my two case studies. I am also indebted to my readers, Professors Antony Polonsky and
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Feroz Ahmad, for a careful reading of the final draft and their important comments and

criticisms. The Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University
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provided an ideal environment and funded my studies there with various fellowships,

grants and assistantships. The year I spent at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the
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height of the Second Intifada will be etched in my memory forever, for it helped me

observe Israeli politics and society during those historic months. In Jerusalem, Professor

Gideon Shimoni discussed with me some of the key issues and concepts regarding

language and nationalism. I am deeply grateful to Professor Jacob M. Landau, first, for

being the wonderful person he is, and, secondly, for his encouragement and support then

and since. Finally, Professor Jens Peter Laut of Freiburg University in Germany has

kindly shared with me some of his own ongoing research on the Turkish language reform

and I would like to thank him for his generosity.

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 I consider myself lucky for having worked with expert librarians and archivists in

the USA, Israel, Turkey, Germany and Austria and would like to thank them all. I also

wish to acknowledge my debt to the Press and Public Relations Department of the

Turkish General Staff for permitting me to study documents at the private library of

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at Anıtkabir; to Professors Ahmet Bîcan Ercilasun and Şükrü

Haluk Akalın, the past and present directors of the Türk Dil Kurumu respectively, for

letting me see important archival material about the history of their institution.

My personal debts extend well beyond and I do not think I can fully acknowledge

them all. My greatest debt and gratitude, however, is to my dear Zana, my companion in

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life, love, and thought.
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 ABSTRACT

Language and Nationalism:

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A Comparative Study of Language Revival and Reform in Hebrew and Turkish

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A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University,

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Waltham, Massachusetts
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by İlker Aytürk

This dissertation is a comparative historical study of the revival of the Hebrew

language as a spoken language and the Turkish language reform. It traces the birth of

linguistic nationalism back to its origins in both cases and attempts to explain the

crystallization of this political ideology. Departing from the instrumentalist and

deterministic approach to language, which is prevalent in the modernist theories of the

study of nationalism, it seeks to underline the unique attitude toward national language in

each case. The role of two individuals, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the Hebrew case and
father of modern Hebrew

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 father of modern Turkish
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the Turkish, are emphasized and their contribution to the

success of revival and reform are highlighted. Institutional frameworks in the service of

linguistic nationalism, such as language institutes and committees, had also played an

important part in the making of a national language and usually became battle grounds,

where different visions of national identity clashed with one another. Finally, this study

compares the attempts to introduce the Latin alphabet into the writing of Hebrew and

Turkish. It describes the struggle between the proponents of the old writing systems and

the romanizers, and explains why romanization failed in the Hebrew case and succeeded

in the Turkish. In this sense, this comparative study aims at contributing not only to our

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understanding of linguistic nationalism in the cases of Hebrew and Turkish, but also to

the field of nationalism in general.

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Korean—new writing system
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Vietnam—new writing system (romanized)
Turkish—new words and new writing system
Hebrew—new words—revival of a dead language
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii

ABSTRACT........................................................................................................................ v

TABLE OF CONTENTS.................................................................................................. vii

Chapter 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 2. The Origins of Linguistic Nationalism............................................................ 20

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2.1. Haskalah: The Jewish Response to the Enlightenment and Nationalism .............. 20

2.2. Turkish Linguistic Nationalism in the Late Ottoman Empire ............................... 40

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Chapter 3. The Role of Individuals in the Making of National Languages...................... 67

3.1. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Revival of Hebrew as a Spoken Language .............. 67
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3.2. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish Language Reform ................................. 96

Chapter 4. Institutions of Revival and Reform ............................................................... 127

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4.1. Institutions of the Hebrew Revival ...................................................................... 127

4.2. Institutionalization of the Turkish Language Reform.......................................... 153

Chapter 5. Failure and Success in Alphabet Reform ...................................................... 178

5.1. Alphabet Reform in the Yishuv ........................................................................... 178

5.2. Alphabet Reform in Turkey................................................................................. 203

Chapter 6. Conclusion..................................................................................................... 231

BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................... 246

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Chapter 1. Introduction
In the autumn of 1843 Karl Marx published what later became a notorious essay, An

die Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question), in which he equated Judaism with

capitalism, replicating one of the well-known anti-Semitic images of the Jews in the

nineteenth century. In a particularly striking passage he tried to reveal the ‘real’

essence of Judaism and of the Jews:

Let us consider the real Jew: not the Sabbath Jew, whom Bauer [Bruno Bauer]
considers, but the everyday Jew.

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Let us not seek the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us seek the secret of
the religion in the real Jew.
What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the
worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.
Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus
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from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.1
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Approximately ten years later we find Marx this time reporting to an American

newspaper on the Crimean War; however, his dispatches were actually full of general

observations about the Eastern Question as this one:

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Keep up the status quo in Turkey! Why, you might as well try to keep up the precise
degree of putridity into which the carcass of a dead horse has passed at a given time,
before dissolution is complete. Turkey goes on decaying, and will go on decaying as the
present system of “balance of power” and maintenance of the status quo goes on; and in
spite of congresses, protocols and ultimatums it will produce its yearly quota of
diplomatic difficulties and international squabbles as every other putrid body will supply
the neighbourhood with a due allowance of carburetted hydrogen and other well-scented
gaseous matter.2

These and similar observations of Marx circulated widely among the nineteenth century

European statesmen and intelligentsia as well as the ordinary citizens. In addressing the

1
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 48. The italics are in the original.

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 cultural segregation and discrimination—therefore self-interpretation is needed

two intellectual and political problems of the European mind, the Jewish Question and

the Eastern Question, Marx maybe unknowingly articulated the acuteness of his and

others’ inability to tackle those questions, namely, what to do with the Jews and the

Turks, the two essentially non-European peoples, who nonetheless had been part of

Europe or maintained close ties with the continent for the last two millennia. Their

proximity to Europe in physical-geographical and mental terms, on the one hand, and

their exclusion from the European family of nations, on the other, were all factors that

contributed to the construction of Jewish and Turkish nationalisms and national images,

both of which for this reason had a particularly strong cultural flavor.

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Hebrew, which ceased to be a spoken language at around 200 AD and remained a
the revival of IE
an existing language of sacred texts and prayer only, went through a process of revival in the
language
nineteenth century. It was transplanted into Ottoman Palestine after the 1880s by young
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Jewish nationalists and became, first, the language of the Jewish community there, the so-

called Yishuv, and, then, one of the official languages of the State of Israel in 1948. The
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reform of Turkish, on the other hand, followed a trajectory similar to other Central and

Eastern European linguistic reforms.3 After the establishment of the Republic of Turkey

in 1923, the nationalist government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk changed the alphabet from

Arabic to Latin and, later, adopted the spoken, simple Turkish dialect of Anatolia in place

2
Eleanor Marx Aveling and Edward Aveling, eds., The Eastern Question: A Reprint of Letters Written
1853-1856 Dealing with the Events of the Crimean War by Karl Marx (London: Swan Sonnenschein &
Co., 1897), 3.
3
On the significance of the East and Central European linguistic nationalism, see Tomasz D. I. Kamusella,
“Language as an Instrument of Nationalism in Central Europe,” Nations and Nationalism, Vol: 7 (2001),
235-251; Robert Auty, “The Linguistic Revival among the Slavs of the Austrian Empire, 1750-1850: The
Role of the Individuals in the Codification and Acceptance of New Literary Languages,” The Modern
Language Review, Vol: 53 (1958), 392-404; Robert Auty, “Language and Nationality in East-Central
Europe, 1750-1950,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, Vol: 12 (1979), 52-83; Einar Haugen, “Dialect,
Language, Nation,” American Anthropologist, Vol: 68 (1966), 922-935.

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of the cosmopolitan Ottoman Turkish, which was heavily laden with Arabic and Persian

words. False Nostalgia similar statement—systemized local dialect

The aim of this dissertation is to compare the historical evolution of the

relationship between nationalism and national languages in the Jewish and Turkish cases

at their formative period. It has to be underlined though that the approach of the

dissertation to the subject matter is not linguistic or socio-linguistic. This study does not

deal with language reform and revival from a linguistic or socio-linguistic point of view

and does not employ the methodologies of the latter two disciplines. Rather, a historical

approach, informed by political science and historical sociology, has been utilized. The

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time and geographical framework of the dissertation varies according to the specifics of
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each case. As regards Hebrew, the development of a language consciousness is traced

back to its origins in the Berlin Haskalah of late eighteenth century, and the story of its
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implantation in the Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine, the Yishuv, is told in the

following chapters. The end date for the Hebrew case is the breakout of World War I,
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since by 1914 the nucleus of a Hebrew-speaking community, however small, was a

tangible reality in the Yishuv. As for the Turkish linguistic nationalism, first, its birth in

the second half of nineteenth century is discussed, and the analysis then focuses on the

early republican era, the period of the Kemalist reforms, from 1923 to 1938. The death of

Atatürk in 1938 marks the end of the formative period of Turkish linguistic nationalism.

Presently,a comparative study of the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language and

the Turkish language reform has been undertaken only by Jacob M. Landau. In three

articles he wrote since the 1980s, Professor Landau identified the potential value of a

comparative study of those two cases both for the study of nationalism and the discipline

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of socio-linguistics.4 The literature on the Hebrew5 or the Turkish6 case independently

abounds and is growing each day. One major flaw in both scholarly literatures is the

emphasis on the uniqueness of the respective case, be it the revival of Hebrew or the

reform of Turkish. With very few exceptions, the need for a comparative approach and

methodology is not recognized especially in the case of Hebrew scholars.7 This

dissertation is also an attempt to bridge that gap with a comparative study of the language

factor in nationalism in the Yishuv and Turkey.

It is only natural that all mass movements have utilized and continue to utilize

vernacular languages. That is the only way the leaders and ideologists of such movements

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make sure that they reach the maximum number of potential followers. Nationalism,

4
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Jacob M. Landau, “Language Policy in Turkey and Israel: An Attempt at a Comparative Approach,” in
Proceedings of the 1988 International Conference on Middle Eastern Studies Held at the University of
Leeds between 10-13 July 1988, by British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Oxford: BRISMES, 1988),
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282-289; Jacob M. Landau, “Language Policy and Political Development in Israel and Turkey,” in
Language Policy and Political Development, ed. Brian Weinstein (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex
Publishing Corporation, 1990), 133-149; Jacob M. Landau, ‘The Role of Language in the National
Movements in Turkey and Israel,’ Cahiers d’Études sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le Monde Turco-
Iranien, No: 28 (1999), 41-49.
5
Joshua Blau, The Renaissance of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic: Parallels and
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Differences in the Revival of Two Semitic Languages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Jack
Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The
Hague: Mouton, 1973); Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); Shlomo Karmi, ‘Am ’ehad ve-safah ’ahat: Tehiyat ha-lashon ba-re’iyah bein-
tehomit (n. p.: Misrad ha-bitahon, 1997); Ron Kuzar, Hebrew and Zionism: A Discourse Analytic Cultural
Study (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001); Shimon Shur, ‘Ivrit: ’Idi’ologiyah, hevrah u-
folitikah (Haifa: Mosad Herzl, 2000).
6
Uriel Heyd, Language Reform in Modern Turkey (Jerusalem: The Israel Oriental Society, 1954); Karl
Steuerwald, Untersuchungen zur türkischen Sprache der Gegenwart: Die türkische Sprachpolitik seit 1928
(Berlin-Schöneberg: Langenscheidt, 1963); Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A
Catastrophic Success (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jens Peter Laut, Das
Türkische als Ursprache: Sprachwissenschaftliche Theorien in der Zeit des erwachenden türkischen
Nationalismus (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000); Agah Sırrı Levend, Türk Dilinde Gelişme ve Sadeleşme
Evreleri, 3d ed., (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1972); Zeynep Korkmaz, Türk Dilinin Tarihi
Akışı İçinde Atatürk ve Dil Devrimi (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1963); Kamile İmer, Dilde
Değişme ve Gelişme Açısından Türk Dil Devrimi (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Basımevi, 1976); Kamile
İmer, Türkiye’de Dil Planlaması: Türk Dil Devrimi (Ankara: T. C. Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1998).
7
The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Hebrew revival is not a solitary phenomenon, but is part of a
general attitude, which afflicted Israeli studies until recently. On this issue, see Michael N. Barnett, “The
Politics of Uniqueness: The Status of the Israeli Case,” in Israel in Comparative Perspective: Challenging
the Conventional Wisdom, ed. Michael N. Barnett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 3-
25.

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 however, is different than other mass movements in that it not only seeks to convey its

message in the vernacular for reasons of mass appeal, but it also prizes language, that is

the national language, as an end in itself. National language is the embodiment of the

spirit of the nation for the nationalist: Its revival signals the awakening of the nation, as

its decline and extinction signal the nation’s death. Nineteenth century nationalists had

invariably stressed the importance of language in delimiting the borders of the nation.

Sometimes it even replaced physical kinship and blood relationship in the eyes of the

nationalist, since the language of a nation is a more observable and demonstrable

criterion in distinguishing its members from others.8 Therefore, reviving and reforming

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vernacular languages have become a marking characteristic of all nationalist movements

in Europe and Asia.9

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False Nostalgia similar statement
importance of language to nationalism
The genesis of the perception of a sacred bond between language and nation can
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be traced back to the impact of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herder argued that
Thao 2017
similar languages are not simply the media of communication. Rather, they are the storehouses
statement,
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connection of the experiences and culture of nations. The spirit of a nation is its language, he
with culture
claimed, and as such it is of utmost value and has to be protected at all costs in order to

guarantee the uniqueness of a nation and its national ethos.10 Herder’s ideas set the

standard for a good part of the nineteenth century and they were canonized especially by

8
Carl Darling Buck, “Language and the Sentiment of Nationality,” The American Political Science Review,
Vol: 10 (1910), 46-47.
9
Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 56-68; Joshua A. Fishman, Language and
Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publishers, 1973); Maurice
Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992); Mary Anne Perkins,
Nation and Word, 1770-1850: Religious and Metaphysical Language in European National Consciousness
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael, eds., Language and Nationalism in
Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

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 the German philologists. Philology became the secular science par excellence at the

beginning of the nineteenth century, as its very name, ‘love of knowledge,’ demonstrates.

It is striking that German-speaking lands produced the leading scholars of language of

that century and the science of linguistics occupied a most respectable niche in the

German academia.11 As the Herderian link between the nation and its language became

almost axiomatic among the German scholars, they also blended this axiom with the

newly invented root-based classification of languages. This new way of classifying

languages was first put forward by Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) and was

developed by his brother August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) and Wilhelm von

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Humboldt (1767-1835).12 According to their classification, all human languages fall
discrimination IE
based on under three basic categories of isolating, agglutinative and inflectional languages, which
scientific correspond to ascending levels of civilization and human achievement.13 The so-called
evidence
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‘inflectional superiority thesis’ suggested that although the capacity for language and

articulation is universal, creativity in articulation is not equally distributed among human

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beings. The capacity of the human mind was assumed to increase in parallel to the

10
F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism, rev. ed.,
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967); F. M. Barnard, “National Culture and Political Legitimacy: Herder
and Rousseau,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol: 44 (1983), 231-253.
11
Philologists in other European countries or in America were mostly trained in German universities. For
biographical information, see Harro Stammerjohann, ed., Lexicon Grammaticorum: Who’s Who in the
History of World Linguistics (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996).
12
Anna Morpurgo Davies, “Language Classification in the Nineteenth Century,” in Current Trends in
Linguistics 13: Historiography of Linguistics, Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., (The Hague and Paris: Mouton,
1975), 607-716; Martin L. Manchester, The Philosophical Foundations of Humboldt’s Linguistic Doctrines
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1985), 125-142.
13
The assumption was that the three stages of language development reflected the three classes of
languages, as well. In the isolating stage, each root is independent and there is no difference between a root
and a word. For instance, in Chinese, which according to these philologists was stuck at the isolating stage,
there is no distinction between a noun, a verb, an adverb or a preposition. The same word-root can be used
to convey the meaning of each without a conjugation. In the agglutinative stage, when two or more roots
combine to form another word, or when suffixes are attached, one of the roots is radically independent
while others terminate and the suffixes are declined. All Ural-Altaic languages are at this stage. In the
inflectional stage, however, roots do not retain their original independence. They are constantly conjugated

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 cultural independence—cutural autonomy
plasticity of one’s language and, thus, those nations that speak inflectional languages

were considered more creative and civilized than speakers of isolating and agglutinative

languages.14 The advantage of this classification was that it provided a scientific,

philological framework that legitimized the presumption of the inferiority of non-Indo-

European peoples. The science of philology came to reflect the political, military and

economic superiority of Europe in the nineteenth century and comparative philology

became an apparatus of conveying the self-image of the European civilization.15 William

Dwight Whitney, professor of Sanskrit at Yale University, provided an eloquent

statement of this line of thought in 1867:

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It is true . . . that linguistic science, as a branch of human history, aims at
universality, and finds the tongues of the humblest tribes as essential to her completeness
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as those of the most cultivated and gifted nations; but it is also true that, mindful of
proportion, she passes more lightly over the one, to give her longer and more engrossed
attention to the other. While the weal and woe of every individual that ever lived goes to
make up the sum of human interests, with which our human nature both justifies and
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demands our sympathy, we cannot but linger longest and with keenest participation over
the fortunes of those who have played a great part among their fellows, whose deeds and
words have had a wide and deep-reaching influence. And this is, in a very marked degree,
the character of the Indo-European race.16
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August Schleicher, the most important figure in mid-nineteenth century comparative

philology, vigorously supported the inflectional superiority thesis, as well. Schleicher, a

genuine representative of nineteenth-century believers in the methodological similarity of

according to their grammatical use. This is the case with Indo-European and Semitic languages. See F. Max
Müller, The Science of Language, Vol: 1, (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), 391-393.
14
R. L. Brown, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1967), 68-84; Manchester, The Philosophical Foundations, 125-142.
15
Mária Tsiapera, “Organic Metaphor in Early 19th Century Linguistics,” in History and Historiography of
Linguistics, Hans-Josef Niederehe, et.al., (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, 1990), 577-587; Joan Leopold, “Ethnic Stereotypes in Linguistics: The Case of Friedrich Max
Müller (1847-51),” in Papers in the History of Linguistics, Hans Aarsleff, et.al., (Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1987), 501-512; T. Craig Christy, “Steinthal and the
Development of Linguistic Science: The Convergence of Psychology and Linguistics,” in Papers, Aarsleff,
et.al., 491-499; Olender, The Languages of Paradise; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance:
Europe’s Discovery of India and the East, 1680-1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

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the natural and social sciences, was interested in botany and was inspired by the

Linneaus’ classificatory model in developing his genealogical tree model of languages.

He, too, classified languages as isolating, agglutinative and inflectional. The novelty in

Schleicher’s theory was his combination of the concept of language as a creative capacity

with the Darwinian principle of ‘the survival of the fittest.’17 The battle for the survival of

a language, hence, had been identified with the survival of the nation that spoke that

language. Speakers of the, so-called, superior inflectional languages, according to this

view, had displayed a greater ability and talent for survival than other nations, whose

mother tongues were non-inflectional. That decisive identification shaped much of the

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later nationalist thought regarding the national language. Jewish and Turkish nationalists

were no exception.
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linguistic interpretation—cultural interpretation
—historical interpretation
Nineteenth century myths—and we safely call the inflectional superiority thesis a
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myth today—about language had an impact on Jewish and Turkish nationalists in exactly

the opposite ways. Hebrew had always maintained an eminence in the eyes of
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European/Christian scholars because it was the original language of the Old Testament

and supposedly the lingua Adamica, leading the Catholic Church and, later, the Protestant

clerics to encourage the study of it.18 Then Herder accorded to it the status of ‘one of the

eldest daughters of the Ursprache.’19 It is true that, soon, Hebrew’s prestige was eclipsed

by the discovery of the Sanskrit and its relationship with the ‘Aryan’ languages.

16
William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language: Twelve Lectures on the Principles of
Linguistic Science (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1867), 229-230.
17
August Schleicher, Die darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (Weimar: Böhlau, 1873); F.
Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (London: Longman, 1992), 202-204.
18
Milka Rubin, “The Language of Creation or the Primordial Language: A Case of Cultural Polemics in
Antiquity,” Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol: 49 (1998), 319-333.
19
Olender, 3; and Johann Gottfried Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry [Vom Geist der hebräischen
Poesie], trans. James Marsh, (Burlington, Vt.: E. Smith, 1833); F. M. Barnard, “The Hebrews and Herder’s

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Nevertheless, belonging to the most inflectional language family, the Semitic, Hebrew

preserved its reputation in the circles of philologists and linguists as one of the primary

languages of civilization.20 It is for this reason that the Hebrew language fulfilled an

important role in the construction of the modern Jewish, or shall we say Hebrew, nation:

It served as a prestige item and reminded the Jews as well as the Gentiles of the antiquity

and grandeur of the Jewish nation. The Turkish case was more complicated. Interest in

Turkish studies was born only in the second half of the nineteenth century and the

amount of work done in those years could not be considered sympathetic toward the

Turks or their language. In general, Turkish, an agglutinative language, was considered

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only secondary in importance to the inflectional languages. Friedrich Max Müller, a
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German philologist who taught at Oxford for more than half a century, called it a ‘nomad

language.’21 The exposure to the writings of Müller and the likeminded scholars led to a
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painful awareness, on the part of the Turkish readers, of the nineteenth century Western

attitudes toward the Turks and their language, the most succinct expression of which can
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be found in Müller’s work. Although historical comparative philology, as it was practiced

in the early nineteenth century, was falling out of fashion in the first decades of the

twentieth century, leaving the field open to new vistas of linguistic inquiry, Atatürk’s

team of linguists remained preoccupied with correcting what they saw as the slight on

Political Creed,” The Modern Language Review, Vol: 54 (1959), 539-545; F. M. Barnard, “Herder and
Israel,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol: 28 (1966), 25-33.
20
There was an important dissenting view, which has to be mentioned though. Pioneered by the well-
known French philologist and theologian Ernest Renan, this point of view categorized Semitic languages,
especially Hebrew and Arabic, as languages of dead civilizations and juxtaposed them with the vitality of
the Aryan tongues, which still breathed life into their own, European, civilization. See Ernest Renan,
Histoire générale et système compare des langues sémitiques, 4th ed., (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863).
21
[Friedrich] Max Müller, Letter to Chevalier Bunsen on the Classification of the Turanian Languages
(London: n.p., 1854), 21-22; The Languages of the Seat of War in the East: With a Survey of the Three
Families of Language, Semitic, Arian, and Turanian, 2d ed., (London: Williams and Norgate, 1855), 86-88;

9
Turkish honor. This they did with great verve and plenty of imagination. The Turkish

reaction in the early republican era took two distinct forms: First was the attempt to blur

the line distinguishing between the inflectional and agglutinative categories and to assert

that Turkish is an Indo-European language. The second form of reaction was even more

daring than the first. It aimed at establishing Turkish as the Ursprache, the original

mother tongue of all human beings. The apogee of the second movement was the

notorious Sun-Language Theory of 1936. In other words, philological paradigms about

Hebrew and Turkish provided a different source of motivation in each case for the

nationalists to engage the question of national language. Jewish nationalists wanted to

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appropriate and enlist Hebrew for their political ends, in particular for the recognition it
IE
promised to bring to the Zionist cause. The primary motive of the Turkish linguists of the

early republican era, however, can be better categorized as defensive, since they
EV
attempted to refute what they perceived as the ‘slanders’ of the ‘racist,’ ‘imperialist’ and

‘Christian’ science of philology in the West against the Turkish language. One of the
PR

aims of this dissertation, hence, is to argue that national languages in the Jewish and

Turkish cases had carried a symbolic value, which matched, if not surpassed, all other

practical considerations.

Most of the scholars in the field of nationalism studies today agree on the

modernity of ‘nations’ and hold that they are ‘constructs,’ ‘artefacts,’ or ‘imagined

communities,’ invented with the help of a particular political ideology that appeared in

late eighteenth century, namely nationalism. Scholars such as Hans Kohn, Karl Deutsch,

Müller, The Science of Language, 402; George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of
European Racism (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1980), 42-44.

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Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Benedict Anderson22 all maintained

that the so-called objective factors—common descent, language, common history and

traditions, etc.—which were thought to have made a social group a nation, are actually

secondary in importance to ideology. The nation exists first and foremost as an idea, in

the words of Kohn, and not as a fact of nature. The agreement on the dating of the origins

of nationalism disappears when the issue at hand is the cause that triggered its inception.

Kohn and Kedourie credited human agency, the former emphasizing German romantics

whereas the latter put the blame—as he lamented the birth of nationalism—squarely on

Kant. For Deutsch, the ever-growing web of media of communications enabled the

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spread of the feeling of nationality, while Anderson singled out one among many media,
IE
the publishing industry, or print-capitalism as he likes to call it, as the conducive factor in

the imagining of nations. Gellner linked the rise of nationalism in early nineteenth
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century with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which according to him, necessitated

the creation of a culturally homogeneous population.

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This dissertation’s argument regarding the symbolism of national languages

stands in contrast to the prevailing theories in the field of nationalism studies. Before the

age of nationalism, “[t]he spoken language was accepted as a natural fact,” and “[i]t was

in no way regarded as a political or cultural factor, still less as an object of political and

22
Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1944); Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the
Foundations of Nationality (New York: The MIT Press and John Wiley & Sons, 1953); Elie Kedourie,
Nationalism, 4th ed., (Oxford and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1993); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia
and Africa (New York and Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1970); Ernest Gellner, Nations and
Nationalism (Oxford and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1983); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev.ed., (London
and New York: Verso, 1996). Anthony Smith, who also accepts the modernity of nations, does not,
however, consider them pure inventions. He argued that an ‘ethnic’ baggage is invariably necessary, whose
elements would be forged into a new political reality for the construction of the nation. See Anthony D.

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cultural struggle.”23 What took place after, however, the transformation of the attitude

toward national languages, continued to puzzle theoreticians of nationalism. Scholars of

the modernist school generally came up with instrumentalist explanations that sought to

unravel that puzzle. Beneath the instrumentalist approaches of those scholars generally

lay condescension and sometimes even contempt for the ideology of nationalism.24

Compared to other ideologies of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as liberalism,

Marxism and conservatism, they could not find much in nationalism that is worthy of

respect. Anderson, for instance, complained about the paradox of ‘the political power of

nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty,’ and added that “unlike most other isms

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nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles,
IE
Marxes, or Webers.”25 This pervasive belief regarding nationalism has also spilled over

to and colored their understanding of language-nationalism relationship. Accordingly, if a

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nationalist professed his or her love for the national tongue, that piece of evidence should

not be taken at face value. The nationalist’s love for the national tongue, in this line of
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thought, must be a form of ‘false consciousness,’ to borrow a Marxist term. It is to be

rather treated as a façade that hides something deeper, social or economic forces that run

beneath the surface and that are camouflaged intentionally or unintentionally by the

nationalist jargon. That is why nationalism studies today are, on the whole, reduced to

exercises in deconstruction.

Smith, The Ethnic Revival (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and The Ethnic Origins of
Nations (Oxford and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1986).
23
Kohn, 6-7.
24
Hobsbawm and Anderson were openly contemptuous, probably because of their Marxist convictions. For
Kedouire and Gellner, both of whom had a personal experience with it, nationalism was that invasive and
destructive force that tore the societies of their childhood apart.
25
Anderson, 5. For an opposite view, see Roman Szporluk, Communism & Nationalism: Karl Marx versus
Friedrich List (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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 It is true that almost all of what today pass as national languages are reformed or

standardized versions, and sometimes a patchwork, of local vernaculars. The processes of

purification, standardization and lexical modernization at the hands of usually nationalist

linguists unavoidably involved an element of artificiality and there is room for

deconstructing the motives of the makers of languages and those who provided them with

enough political clout to legitimize the whole endeavor. The modernists are on less safe

ground, however, when they insert the element of inevitability into their theories.

According to Deutsch, “[t]he communicative facilities of a society include a socially

standardized system of symbols which is a language, and any number of auxiliary codes,”

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and “[m]embership in a people essentially consists in wide complementarity of social
IE
communication.”26 In other words, Deutsch claimed that if an ethnic group X

appropriates and implements a higher technology and achieves increasing levels of social
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communication, bringing all members of X into contact, it would inevitably transform

into the nation X. On the other hand, Anderson, who posited a similar theory to that of
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Deutsch, believed that:

[w]hat, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous,
but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations
(capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic
diversity. . . . The element of fatality is essential. For whatever superhuman feats
capitalism was capable of, it found in death and languages two tenacious adversaries.
Particular languages can die or be wiped out, but there was and is no possibility of
humankind’s general linguistic unification. Yet this mutual incomprehensibility was
historically of only slight importance until capitalism and print created monoglot mass
reading publics.27

Where Anderson saw half-fortuitous circumstances and fatality, the readers might find a

covert form of historical determinism, in the sense that once Anderson’s deus ex machina

26
Deutsch, 70-71.
27
Anderson, 42-43.

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is set in motion, it would unstoppably churn out nations. To put it differently, Anderson’s

theory does not leave room for cases where the overlapping of capitalism, print

technology and diversity of languages does not bring about new nations.

Interestingly enough, one of the examples Anderson put forward to bolster his

theory is the case of the Ottoman Empire. He suggested that “the seeds of Turkish

nationalism are easily detectable in the appearance of a lively vernacular press in Istanbul

[sic] in the 1870s.”28 What he failed to notice, though, was that the Turkish press in

İstanbul was disseminating the Tanzimat ideal of a pan-Ottoman nationality, an invented

umbrella identity somewhat akin to the Habsburg, American, or Australian national

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identity. Therefore, Anderson’s theory does not explain why Ottoman print-capitalism in
IE
the last decades of nineteenth century did not inculcate in the minds of at least the

Turkish-speaking, Muslim citizens of the empire a sense of Ottoman nationhood—if,

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after all, all nations are invented—but gave way to a different sort, namely, Turkish

nationalism. If we apply the same theory to Jewish nationalism, we encounter further

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complications. Why did the splendid Yiddish literature of late nineteenth century not lead

to a Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation? Or, if it were not for the Holocaust, could there

have been two Jewish nations and, possibly two Jewish nation-states, one speaking

Yiddish and the other Hebrew?29

Another influential and equally deterministic theory regarding language-

nationalism relationship was proposed by Gellner. As maintained by him, “if an industrial

economy is established in a culturally heterogeneous society (or if it even casts its

28
Ibid., 75.
29
Our understanding of nationalism would have been enriched if there had been two Jewish states, a
Yiddish-speaking Birobidzhan and the Hebrew-speaking Israel.

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advance shadow on it), then tensions result which will engender nationalism.”30 In other

words, economic necessities imposed uniformity on the otherwise diverse subjects of

kingdoms and empires. Continuity of the supply of laborers, which was vital for the

process of industrialization, depended on the extension of mass education among the

subject peoples. Thus, the role of education and the language of education were of

primary importance in the process of the invention of nations. The states that aspired to

industrialize rapidly elevated the status of local vernaculars at the expense of classical

and/or holy languages in order to facilitate the education of masses, who spoke nothing

but vernaculars. This, in turn, caged that particular group within a cultural idiom, creating

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a national milieu. In this framework, Gellner ascribed an instrumental role to national
IE
languages. They were nothing but a means of spreading sufficient amount of knowledge

among potential labor forces. That is to say, all that commotion about the revival and
EV
reform of national languages in nineteenth century had been economically motivated.

The deterministic and instrumentalist aspects of Gellner’s theory might lead us to

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ask a few questions: Might linguistic nationalism, or nationalism for that matter, be ever

born in a non-industrial environment? Can we consider the Ottoman Empire of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an industrializing state? And how about its

desolate areas that were later called Palestine? If we are supposed to search for an

economic motivation behind linguistic nationalism, then how are we to account for

Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s lifelong commitment to Hebrew, which can hardly be described as

profitable?

These criticisms are not meant to belittle the elaborate theoretical structures

constructed by nationalism scholars. On the contrary, they are intended to improve the

30
Gellner, 108-109. Italics are in the original.

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existing theories with the help of the Hebrew and Turkish cases that constitute the basis

of this study. One of the aims of this dissertation is to draw attention to human agency in

history and the large number of probable outcomes it introduces. By stressing the role of

the broader framework of socio-economic forces, fashionable theories of nationalism

today have come to discount the part of the individual. Without a doubt history is an

outcome of the interaction between the individual and the broader framework within

which he or she operates. We also have to take into account the element of unexpected

outcomes in history, the historical contingency, which those theories ought to give an

explanation for. There is indeed one modernist theorist, Liah Greenfeld,31 who devised a

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theoretical framework for language-nationalism relationship that is flexible enough to be
IE
applied to many cases. Instead of attributing a single, predetermined function to

language, Greenfeld proposed that each national movement might have a different
EV
relationship with its own national language and that it is the task of the historian or the

sociologist to uncover the unique nature of each such relationship. In her theory, “there is
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no one-to-one correspondence between language and nationality, which should

necessarily exist if language is the determinant of nationality,”32 and added that:

National, as any other, identity frequently utilized the available primordial or ‘ethnic’
characteristics of a population, such as language, which contributed to its sense of
uniqueness. Yet it should be realized that such characteristics in themselves do not
constitute an identity, but represent elements which can be organized and rendered
meaningful in various ways, thus becoming parts of any number of identities. . . . As
much as language, these are universal attributes of human groupings; in distinction,
national identity is an historically circumscribed, modern phenomenon, and cannot be
explained by its association with such universal attributes. Any one ethnic element serves
as the raw material for the national identity only if interpreted as an element of

31
For Greenfeld’s modernist works, see her Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass. and
London: Harvard University Press, 1992); and The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic
Growth (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001).
32
Liah Greenfeld, “Nationalism and Language,” in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 1994
ed., 2708.

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