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Hebrew and Zionism

WDE

G
Language, Power and
Social Process 5

Editors
Monica Heller
Richard J. Watts

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Hebrew and Zionism
A Discourse Analytic Cultural Study

by
Ron Kuzar

Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 2001
M o u t o n de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. K G , Berlin.

® Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines

of the A N S I to ensure permanence and durability.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kuzar, Ron:
Hebrew and Zionism : a discourse analytic cultural study / by Ron
Kuzar. - Berlin ; New York : M o u t o n de Gruyter, 2001
(Language, power and social process ; 5)
ISBN 3-11-016993-2
ISBN 3-11-016992-4

© Copyright 2001 by Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin.

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this book
may be reproduced in any f o r m or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-
copy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider.
Printing: Werner Hildebrand, Berlin.
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer G m b H , Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
I dedicate this book to my parents.

To my father, Joseph Weissgerber (1902-1954), a cellist, who immi-

grated to Palestine from Berlin, having lost his rights to perform in Ger-
many under Nazi regulations in 1933. He assisted the violinist Bronis-
law Huberman in founding the Palestine Orchestra, which later became
the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and was a member of the orchestra
until his untimely death.

To my mother, Klara Szarvas-Weissgerber (born 1911), a harpist, who

was invited in 1938 by Bronislaw Huberman to perform as soloist with
the Palestine Orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. In response
to Toscanini's request, she decided to leave her home and professional
career in Budapest and join the orchestra in Palestine. She was first har-
pist at the PO/IPO for twenty-three years, and then played at the Kol Is-
rael (Voice of Israel) Orchestra till her retirement.

Like many of their generation, my parents came to Palestine from an in-

creasingly menacing Europe, and created here the cultural atmosphere
which I and some of my generation had the privilege to experience and
grow up in. For all this, and for much more, I am grateful to them.
Preface

The exposure to postmodernist thinking in the past decade forced me to

re-evaluate the modernist foundations of two frames of thought which
formed the basis of my political and professional education: Marxism
and linguistic structuralism. My political education began in the mid-
1950s in the socialist-Zionist youth movement Hamakhanot Ha'olim
'The Ascending Encampments', which was affiliated with Akhdut Ha'a-
voda 'Labor Union', one of the factions of Labor Zionism. This political
party tried to combine into one ideology both Marxism and an expan-
sionist Zionism that strove for a greater Israel in the full territory of his-
torical Palestine. The dominant theoretician of the movement, Yitkhak
Tabenkin, succinctly captured this ideological unity in a slogan that was
posted in many branches of the movement: "The entire Jewish people, in
its whole homeland, all in communes, in a union of communist nations".
Expansionism was at that time a Utopian dream, not a viable political op-
tion. But once the expansionist option became a possible reality with the
occupation of the territories in the 1967 Six-Day War, the tension bet-
ween the two ideological components became untenable. Today, gradu-
ates of this youth movement may be found both among the leadership of
the expansionist settler movements as well as in the ranks of the radical
peace encampment. I took the latter path, and participated in activities of
the radical Israeli left. In these organizations, I was exposed to different
critiques of Zionism and to several styles of Marxism: Soviet-oriented
communism, New Left anti-soviet socialism, and several brands of Trots-
kyite Marxism.
As a rational and tersely formulated scientific metanarrative of social
transformation, the field of Marxist theorizing constituted a hospitable
ground for the ideas of linguistic structuralism, made accessible to me
through the teachings of Haiim B. Rosén, the principal expounder of
structuralism in Israel. His cyclic three-year long introductory course
"Foundations of Linguistic Analysis" covered synchronic linguistics, dia-
chronic linguistics, and comparative and typological linguistics. In the
methodologies of Marxism and structuralism I heard a similar ring. The
rigorous extraction of structural relations from well defined foundational
entities was common to both. For myself, the rejection of bourgeois val-
ues and the appreciation of the upcoming revolution in the political do-
main harmonized with a rejection of old-guard philology and apprecia-
tion of the revolutionary power of structuralism.
The challenge to my political and linguistic persuasions came in the
form of an interdisciplinary seminar which met at the Van Leer Institute
vili Preface

of Jerusalem in 1990-1991. Our motivation was to channel the shared

dissatisfaction and lack of intellectual common ground in our own depar-
tments to an interdisciplinary venture into new modes of scholarship and
social awareness. In retrospect, the directions that were tried out in those
meetings may be tagged as late structuralism and poststructuralism with a
taste of incipient postmodernism in the academic domain, and postzion-
ism in politics. Years of discussions with friends and colleagues, and a
similar discussion group at the University of Haifa during the school
years 1994-1996, brought me closer to an understanding of the common
grounds of scholarly and political discourses, a theme which is the major
organizing principle of this book.
The sabbatical year of 1997/8, which I spent as the Visiting Scholar
of The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh
University gave me the opportunity to further familiarize myself with
postmodern cultural studies. The critical distance that postmodernism
gave me helped me to reconcile myself to nineteenth-century philology,
and to put both philology and structuralism in historical perspective.
Here I also recognized how powerful and potentially destructive a relati-
vizing critique of Marxism and linguistic structuralism might be. This
realization forced me to carefully negotiate the continuities and discon-
tinuities between these modernist frameworks and their possible postmo-
dernist descendants. I have come to a moment of repose in this process,
which is embodied in this book.
I would like to express my profound appreciation and gratitude to the
professors who were my teachers at different stages of my studies and
have become objects of my research: Ze'ev Ben-Hayyim, Haim Blanc,
Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, Uzzi Ornan, and above all Haiim Rosen, my
mentor for so many years. The shocking news of his death reached me as
I was about to submit this book to the publisher. I am indebted to Haiim
Rosén and to his wife Hannah (a professor of classics, who was my Latin
teacher in high-school) for the many ways in which they have shaped my
linguistic mother tongue. Another professor of linguistics, Svi Rin, was
not my teacher, but I met him in the last year of his life during my sabba-
tical in Pennsylvania. Shifra and Svi Rin welcomed me into their home,
and our conversations made me a great deal wiser as to his linguistic and
political positions.
My debts to Hannan Hever go much beyond being a friend and col-
league. Hannan has been a source of personal encouragement and em-
powerment in undertaking this project. In many ways, he opened to me
the gates of cultural studies and postmodern theory. His broad knowledge
and understanding of the history of Israeli culture has been inspiring and
helpful at several junctures of my work.
During my sabbatical at Lehigh University, the many discussions I
had with Laurence Silberstein, the Director of the Philip and Muriel Ber-
 Preface ix

man Center for Jewish Studies, on postmodern theory and Israeli society,
were very enriching. The staff of the Berman Center, Shirley Ratushny,
Administrative Associate, and Carolyn Hudacek, Secretarial Assistant,
were helpful and kind.
Several people read the manuscript or parts of it at different phases of
its development, and I am thankful to them for their written remarks and
subsequent discussions. I extend my thanks to Shlomo Izre'el for a tho-
rough discussion which forced me to reconsider and revise the compa-
rison of the revival of Hebrew with pidgin-creole language genesis, to
George Mandel for his knowledgeable remarks on the parts dealing with
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, to Yehoshua Porath for his insistence on accuracy
throughout the whole manuscript, and especially in Chapter 4, and to
Uzzi Ornan for his remarks on the Canaanites.
Following Judy Blanc's advice, I approached Moshe Greenberg to lo-
cate Haim Blanc's letter to him from 1971. I bless his good historical
judgment in preserving this letter and thank him for making it available
to me.
Jan Blommaert's invitation to the Language Planning Workshop held
at the Political Linguistics Conference (Antwerp, 1995) helped me estab-
lish fruitful contacts with scholars working on similar issues. Jan also
edited two volumes in which earlier versions of Chapter 3 appeared (Ku-
zar 1996a, 1999).
I thank Monica Heller and Richard Watts, the co-editors of this series,
Language, Power and Social Process, for their interest in my project,
and for their encouragement to pursue it in this series. As the editor of
this book, Monica Heller invested much time and thought in turning the
raw manuscript into a readable text, drawing on her fine academic and
editorial expertise. I thank also Doron Narkiss, who touched up my style
and copy-edited the text.
My friends and colleagues at the Department of English Language
and Literature at the University of Haifa have always been encouraging,
and have patiently kept me free of departmental chores during these
years.
I have tried out different parts of the manuscript on my friends Steve
Aschheim and John Landau, whose wit and intellectual prowess continue
to humble me. Naomi Schocken Landau, a friend and the Head of the Re-
ference Department at the Mount Scopus Library of the Hebrew Univer-
sity of Jerusalem, has been forthcoming as well as skillfully helpful in
matters of library resources.
My deepest feelings of gratitude go to my beloved family, my wife
Shelley and our children Talia, Noam, and Joey, whose love and expecta-
tions of a normal family routine helped me attend to my work while kee-
ping a sense of balance in my life.
Contents

Preface vii

Chapter 1: Background and theory 1

1. Introduction 1
2. The themes of the book 4
3. Theory and methodology 14
4. The Jerusalem School of Academia 30
5. A note on the language of this book 34

Chapter 2: The emergence of Israeli Hebrew 41

1. Introduction 41
2. Ben-Yehuda: A biography 42
2.1. Youth 44
2.1.1. First stage: Traditional pious upbringing 44
2.1.2. Second stage: Haskala 45
2.1.3. Third stage: Revolutionism 47
2.1.4. Fourth stage: Nationalism 60
2.1.5. Fifth stage: Finding the direction 65
2.1.6. Sixth stage: Preparing to act 67
2.2. Culmination of youth: The article "A Weighty Question" 70
2.2.1. Justification of nationalism in general 72
2.2.2. Justification of Jewish nationalism 74
2.2.3. The national solution and the way to enact it 79
2.3. The interim period 84
2.4. Adulthood 84
2.4.1. Mythical narratives on Ben-Yehuda and the revival 85
2.4.2. Scholarly narratives on Ben-Yehuda and the revival 92
3. Refraining Ben-Yehuda 107
3.1. Ben-Yehuda in his own eyes: A Biblical prophet 108
3.2. Ben-Yehuda as a Gramscian intellectual 115
3.2.1. Ben-Yehuda penetrates the Eastern European
haskala discourse 115
3.2.2. Ben-Yehuda instills a subject position in others 116
3.2.3. Ben-Yehuda establishes a discursive site 117
3.2.4. Ben-Yehuda presents himself as a role model 118
4. A non-revivalist research agenda of the history of Israeli Hebrew . 120
5. Summary 134
xi i Contents

Chapter 3: The debate over the normalcy of Hebrew 137

1. Introduction 137
2. Competing discourses in linguistics 138
3. Competing discourses in post-independence Zionism 147
4. The rounds of the debate 152
4.1. The first round 152
4.2. The second round 173
5. The problem of normalcy 185
6. The state of the debate after the 1950s 190
7. Summary 194

Chapter 4: Canaanite alternatives in politics and linguistics 197

1. Introduction 197
2. A movement and a family 199
3. Canaanite political discourse 201
3.1. Standard Canaanite political discourse 201
3.2. Oman's later political discourse 217
4. Canaanite linguistic discourse 233
4.1. Hebrew in the Land of Kedem: The case of Ugaritic 233
4.2. Modern Hebrew: A continuation of Biblical Hebrew 256
4.3. Changes in Oman's linguistic conceptions 264
4.3.1. From Modern Hebrew to Israeli Hebrew 265
4.3.2. Latinization of orthography 270
5. Summary 276

Chapter 5: Afterword 279

1. General 279
2. The nation 280
3. The language 287

Appendix: Transliteration of Hebrew 293

1. Simplified transliteration 293
1.1. Consonants 293
1.2. Vowels 294
2. Scholarly transliteration 294
2.1. Graphemes 294
2.2. Allophones 295
2.3. Phonemes 295

References 297

Index 317
Chapter 1
Background and theory

1. Introduction

This book targets the nation-language nexus as its object of investiga-

tion, focusing on the case of Hebrew in Israel. It strives to illuminate
some of the processes by which the Zionist movement, which viewed it-
self as the revival movement of the Jewish nation, came to attach impor-
tance to the revival of the ancient Hebrew tongue of that nation, and to
conceptualize the resulting language as the national language of Israel,
called "Modern" or "Israeli Hebrew". The book examines this process by
analyzing the role of Hebrew linguists and historiographers of Hebrew at
three different moments.
Hebrew linguistics and the historiography of the emergence of Heb-
rew may first seem to constitute two separate fields of study. Linguistics
investigates the language as it is, while the historical discipline investi-
gates the way this language came into being. Under this impression, we
may expect scholars well equipped with scientific methodology approp-
riate for each of the domains to come up with truthful statements about
the nature of the new Hebrew language in the first case and of its emer-
gence in the second.
However, when the actual texts produced by these scholars are put
under analysis, they betray significant harmonies with one another, in
other words, the linguistic description of contemporary Hebrew has con-
ceptual affinities with the way its historiography is written. These affin-
ities are encoded in the descriptive language used in both. Moreover, the
linguistic and historiographie accounts turn out to be harmonious also
with the political ideologies of their times. Here too, these are encoded in
the language of texts from both domains. We may conclude, then, that
the linguistic texts are informed not only by scientific methodology, but
also by the social, political, and cultural ideologies held by these prac-
titioners of academic research.
Since political ideologies are viewed as contingent knowledge, com-
pared to the hard core data of scientific evidence, the political overtones
of the scholarly texts are a valuable asset to the political ideologies they
harmonize with. In our case here, the national ideology of the Jewish col-
lective harmonized with scholarly descriptions of the state of the Hebrew
language and with descriptions of the way it emerged. The Hebrew lan-
guage is a constitutive element of Zionist ideology, which gives its adhe-
rents a clear sense that the Jews are a nation with a language.
2 Background and theory

In order to expose the congruence between political ideologies and

linguistic-cum-historiographic analyses of contemporary Hebrew, I have
submitted the texts of scholars of Hebrew to a close analysis. The lin-
guistic discourses are then mapped onto their respective politico-cultural
counterparts. Caution has to be exercised here, since Zionism has never
been one uniform doctrine, but rather a broad field of partly conflicting
forces. Because the level of political overtones in linguistic texts varies
in density and specificity, no simple one-to-one mapping can be carried
out. And since it is not only texts that interact but also their authors, as
producers and disseminators of knowledge, their interactions within the
scholarly community and the power relations that they establish among
themselves and with political agents is highly significant in Israeli cul-
ture.
These mechanisms will be shown to have operated in three moments
in the life of contemporary Hebrew. These moments have been foci of
debate, therefore they more easily present themselves as questions rather
than as titles. 1. How did the language emerge? 2. Has it become a nor-
mal language? 3. What is the nature of the collective that speaks this lan-
guage? Put differently, they are also known as the question of the revival
of Hebrew, the question of the existence and normalcy of Israeli Hebrew,
and the Canaanite challenge to the hegemonic Zionist narrative of nation-
al and linguistic revival.
The affinities between Zionism and Hebrew language studies are not
an isolated case. In all fields of social science and humanities Israeli aca-
demics have produced such hybrid discourses, combining Zionism with
academic areas. This tendency was so radical that domains of research
dealing with Judaism and Israel were viewed as "disciplines" of "Jewish
studies", which differ from their parallel "general" disciplines and justify
different departments at the universities, such as Jewish history versus
general history, Jewish philosophy versus general philosophy, Hebrew
literature versus general literature, and so on. Even where only one de-
partment exists, e.g. sociology, the salience of Israeli sociology as a uni-
que discipline is very obvious. Since the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
(est. 1925) was first the only university and then, until the late 1960s, the
most esteemed university in Israel, the widely known name of this pheno-
menon is the Jerusalem School of Israeli Academia.
Having reigned almost unchallenged for some four decades this app-
roach came under critique in the 1970s. As recently as May 1999 The
Van Leer Jerusalem Institute held a conference entitled The Big Divide:
The Separation of "Jewish Studies" from "General Humanities" and its
Continuation in Israeli Universities, with speakers elaborating the pros
and cons on both sides of the scholarly divide. The debates of the past
two decades have run along thematic, methodological, and epistemologi-
ca! fault lines, and they are far from being resolved.
 Introduction 3

The academic debates have been paralleled by political debates about

the Zionist nature of the State of Israel and the resolution of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. Once again, we find harmonies
between positions taken in the academic and the political debates. Often
politically conservative positions (Zionism is not over yet, Israel is still
in a state of formation, human rights issues may have to be temporarily
suspended in favor of security considerations) harmonize with the preser-
vation of Jewish and Israeli disciplines in the humanities and social sci-
ences, while politically innovative positions (Zionism as a political pro-
gram is over, Israel is a normal state attentive to human and civil rights, a
state of all its citizens, Arabs as well as Jews) harmonize with the aboli-
tion of Jewish and Israeli studies as disciplines, viewing them instead as
domains within general disciplines.
Politics and scholarship in the Jerusalem School are not blended ac-
cording to a single recipe. Therefore a critique of the Jerusalem School
must be attentive to the different ingredients, proportions, and types of
contact in every individual case. In my discussion of Israeli linguists and
historiographers of Hebrew I will locate them as participants in this pro-
cess of blending their linguistic views with political ideologies. The field
of Hebrew research offers an especially interesting environment: in addi-
tion to different blends of scholarship with Zionist ideology there was
also one case of an anti-Zionist cultural enterprise which attempted to
construct a different local nationhood, not Jewish but Canaanite, seeking
its roots not in Jewish tradition but in the cultural tradition of the Heb-
rews (or Canaanites) of the ancient Middle East. The Canaanite alterna-
tive to Zionism separated itself from it, but it also interacted with it. Ca-
naanite scholars of Hebrew maintained views which at times deviated
from mainstream scholarship, but in other cases converged with it, con-
stituting mostly a challenge but in a way also a variant of the Jerusalem
School of Academia.
This book takes a clear position in the academic debate: it joins the
critical efforts to contextualize and historicize the Jewish-Israeli particu-
larist academic position, and to enhance the view that the different fields
of Jewish and Israeli studies are domains within general disciplines ra-
ther than separate disciplines. Like any other text, this book also main-
tains harmonies between academic framework and politico-cultural ideo-
logy, thus constituting an indirect yet quite visible and intended interven-
tion in Israeli political discourse, supporting (without going into a de-
tailed discussion) tendencies to normalize Israel as a state, to defer its
Jewishness to a less politicized cultural domain as a major ingredient in a
multicultural society, and to institute "the citizen" rather than "the Jew"
as its relevant civic subject, obligated by duties and worthy of rights.
In addition to dealing with local Israeli matters, this book has also a
global context, since the concept of the traditional nation-state has been
4 Background and theory

under attack not only in Israel but all over the world. Processes of global-
ization have been dwarfing the nation-state on behalf of larger regional
formations. At the same time, ethnic minorities have been claiming more
collective rights within the state. These processes have their linguistic
counterparts: on the one hand, English has been spreading as the uncon-
tested international language, entering the national scene in unprece-
dented ways. On the other hand, local languages, both at the level of the
nation-state and beneath it, at the level of minority languages, have been
troubled by questions of protection and self-preservation. This book does
not have a separate thematic chapter on these issues, but since I find the
general thread of the book to be relevant to them, I will revisit them at
the end of this chapter.
The rest of the chapter consists of four parts. First I will give a short
account of the cultural context of the book and a foretaste of its three the-
matic chapters (Chapters 2, 3, and 4). Then I will describe the theoretical
perspective and the methodology to be utilized in my analysis. Using
these tools I will discuss the way that the Jerusalem School of Israeli Ac-
ademia has been critiqued, and the way I believe this ought to be done. I
will show the relevance of this kind of critique to the themes of the book.
A note on my choice to write this book in English rather than in Hebrew
concludes the chapter.

2. The themes of the book

Zionism is the movement which undertook the project of turning the

Jews into a modern nation, that is, into a nation-state. Before modernity,
medieval Jewishness could not be encapsulated by any single concept,
such as religion, peoplehood, nationhood, or ethnicity. These very terms
are products of modernity. Medieval Jews lived in local communities that
encompassed their total existence, without singling out or ranking its in-
gredients. Nonetheless, these communities shared a considerable body of
practices, texts, and Utopian dreams which gave them a sense of belong-
ing to the same broad community. Internally, many terms were used to
describe this collective identity, such as kahal and eda 'congregation',
yisrdel (with singular or plural grammatical concord), am 'people' and
urna 'nation', all of them within the traditional religious premodern
understanding of these terms. The choice between these terms highlight-
ed different aspects of Jewish life, but they were not mutually exclusive.
The emergence of modern nations in Europe signaled a general trend in
Europe to transform traditional communities into nation-states, a process
of which the Jews were aware.
Two stages or moves signal the emergence of modern Europe from
the Middle Ages: enlightenment and nationalism. This is true for Jewish
 The themes of the book 5

history as well. The haskala 'enlightenment' movement emphasized

secularization of life (although not necessarily of beliefs), modern educa-
tion, humanism, and all other values of general enlightenment, as pertain-
ing to the individual. This led many Jews to embark on a project of assi-
milation, in an attempt to participate in the secular life of the countries in
which they lived. But European nationalism was not as welcoming as
those Jews wanted it to be; in fact it often used anti-Semitism as a tool to
consolidate its own existence. Zionism emerged in Eastern European
haskala as a disillusioned re-analysis of this failure in Jewish national
terms. It was the Jewish mirror image of European nationalism and one
of the answers to the rejection of the Jews from the national communities
of Europe (along with insistence on assimilation, immigration to the New
World, and socialism or communism).
Zionist historiography often begins the story of the Zionist national
movement with the 1881 pogroms 'bloody riots' against the Jews in the
Russian empire, which broke out after the murder of Czar Alexander II
(see for example Encyclopaedia Judaica 16: 1038; Hertzberg [1952]
1972: 40, and many high-school textbooks). These riots targeted the Jews
as the source of the empire's problems, and were accompanied by the
silent consent, and at times even the encouragement of the Czar's admin-
istration. They produced a shock wave among Eastern European Jews,
which brought some of them to renounce the haskala enterprise of eman-
cipating the Jews and assimilating them into their host nations. Relinqui-
shing hopes for a progressive Europe, these disillusioned Jews proposed
to reformulate Jewish collectivity in modern national terms, and to focus
on Eretz Yisrdel 'the Land of Israel', the "historic birth place" of Juda-
ism as the site of national revival. The movement started with the estab-
lishment of organizations of Khovevey Tziyon 'lovers of Zion', which
propagated the new ideas, and started colonization activities in Palestine.
A few thousand Jews settled in Palestine as a result of these activities, in
what has become to be known as the first aliya 'wave of immigration' of
1881-1903.
During the same period, Western European Jews had been emanci-
pated to various degrees and served their countries in civil and even mili-
tary administrations. But through the Dreyfus affair, they also underwent
a sobering experience, a decade after their Eastern brethren. In 1884, the
French military found out that the Germans had a spy on their General
Staff. The highest ranking Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfiis, was selected
as scapegoat, and was found guilty of treason, publicly demoted, and sen-
tenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guinea. The trial
aroused strong anti-Semitic sentiments in France. Although it did not cul-
minate in violence, the Dreyfus affair had a shattering effect on Western
Jews. Dreyfus was eventually acquitted, but the damage had already been
done.
6 Background and theory

In 1896, deeply affected by the Dreyfus affair, the journalist Theodor

Herzl (correspondent of Die Neue Freie Presse to the trial), published his
booklet The Jewish State. In 1897, he played a leading role in summon-
ing the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and in founding the World Zion-
ist Organization, of which he became president. Both the congress and
the organization signaled a sharp upgrading of Jewish Zionist activities
from a local to an international level.
Issues of language and nation have always been viewed as intercon-
nected in modern theory and practice. All over Europe, processes of na-
tion-building have been accompanied by processes of language standar-
dization, in which a certain vernacular was selected as the national lan-
guage, to be fortified, enriched, and disseminated through the educational
system of the state. In all these cases, the two pillars of the process, nam-
ely the perceived necessity for the population to become a national com-
munity and for the language to become a national standard, were always
there. The Jewish national movement had a societal base in the tradi-
tional Jewish communities, as awkward and different from others as they
were, but what would be the language of the national enterprise?
The only language that was common to all Jews during the Middle
Ages and up until the nineteenth century was Hebrew, used by the tradi-
tional communities for prayer, religious rites, holy books, practical gui-
des, some literary writings, written communication beetween communi-
ties, and occasional speech when needed or self-imposed. However, this
language had had no native speakers for some eighteen hundred years.
To the extent that native speech is the benchmark of vitality, Hebrew was
a dead language. Yiddish, a Judeo-German vernacular, was spoken by
most ashkenazi 'European' (lit. German) communities, primarily in East-
ern Europe, which was the cradle of emergent national sentiment, but it
was not the language of all Jews. The Jews of the Balkan countries, of
Turkey, and of several other sephardi 'Mediterranean' (lit. Spanish)
communities in the Middle East spoke Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish verna-
cular. Other Jews spoke either the local languages of their host com-
munities, or Jewish dialects derived from them.
Hebrew was not at all the obvious and immediate choice of the Zion-
ist movement at its inception. In fact, in light of the Swiss experience, the
language question was not considered crucial by incipient Zionism. In
The Jewish State Herzl expressed his ignorance of the processes of Heb-
rew language emergence already underway both in Palestine and in East-
ern Europe, stating that "we cannot converse with one another in Heb-
rew. Who amongst us has sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for
a railway ticket in that language? Such a thing cannot be done" (Herzl
1896: 88). This sentiment was shared by most Western European Jews.
The issue of Hebrew became an item on the official national agenda only
 The themes of the book 7

at the Tenth Zionist Congress in 1911, when the Zionist leader Mena-
khem Ussishkin conducted an entire session on Hebrew culture in Heb-
rew. By that time the first generation of native Hebrew speakers in Pales-
tine had probably already exceeded the 20,000 mark. (Bachi 1957: 69
assesses the number of users of Hebrew as their main language in 1914
as 34,000).
Several pre-Zionist processes facilitated the emergence of Israeli Heb-
rew. Let me mention two of them here. The first process took place in the
target land of Zionist aspirations. Prior to the Zionist awakening, Pales-
tine of the nineteenth century experienced a constant trickle of Jewish
immigration from different parts of the traditional Jewish world. These
immigrants joined existing communities or founded new ones in Jerusa-
lem and in other traditional communities of Palestine, such as Tzfat
(Safed) and Tverya (Tiberias). This nineteenth-century Jewish commu-
nity in Palestine, known as the old yishuv 'settlement' / 'community',
shared no common language among themselves. At the same time, they
needed a commercial communicative device in the marketplace, and they
needed a political communicative device as a milet 'a recognized reli-
gious minority within the Ottoman empire' to discuss their shared inter-
ests vis-à-vis the authorities. Alongside prevailing multilingualism,
which they needed in order to communicate with Arabs and Turks, they
also developed a limited spoken lingua franca based on the Hebrew lan-
guage they shared, which was dead as a native tongue but was very well
mastered as the language of liturgy and religious learning. So at least one
source of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew was not a result of the Zionist
national awakening.
The second background process took place in Europe in the nine-
teenth century. The haskala movement, which started out in Western Eu-
rope and later also reached the East, purported to deliver the Jews out of
medieval darkness into the light of modernity. Similar to the general Eu-
ropean enlightenment, it adopted a negative view of many aspects of cur-
rent traditional life and glorified distant antiquity. This included scorn
for Yiddish as a corrupted German "jargon", and a loving respect for
Biblical Hebrew, as the symbol of past accomplishments. The haskala
movement effected a literary revival of Hebrew writing, which was first
purely pseudo-Biblical, but later also more lenient and open to other less
glorious phases of Hebrew. Being secular by nature, this literature re-
quired a significant enrichment of vocabulary which laid the linguistic
and attitudinal foundations for the later expansion of Hebrew into the
spoken domain.
The strongest impetus to the spread of Hebrew as a spoken language -
and one related to Zionism - was provided by the second aliya which
started to arrive in Palestine in 1904, following a series of pogroms start-
8 Background and theory

ing in Kishinev in 1903. The struggle of workers, teachers, and students

for the implementation of Hebrew as the language of culture and school-
ing at all levels of education in Palestine culminated in the language
wars of 1913-1914. These "wars" were triggered by the decision of the
philanthropic organization Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden to use Ger-
man as the language of the high institute of technology, the Technion,
supported by this organization. This decision, and similar ones by other
educational institutions, provoked strong opposition, and resulted in Heb-
rew being accepted by all Zionist factions and by all educational and cul-
tural agencies as the language of the nation-building enterprise.
The different social settings comprising the Hebrew language genesis,
the uneven development of the community of its speakers, and different
cultural and political concerns and interests gave rise to a large number
of narratives about this linguistic process, which consider these factors
from different perspectives. Many of these narratives take broad social
factors into account, but many are also structured around the importance
of the individual actor in history, focusing especially on Eliezer Ben-
Yehuda, called by some "the reviver of Hebrew", although this attribute
is highly contested. The range of attitudes to Ben-Yehuda is very broad,
extending from full-fledged mythical narratives to total denial of his ins-
trumentality in the process.
Narratives about the process of the emergence of Hebrew and about
Ben-Yehuda's role in it are the subject of Chapter 2. Although many of
them are avowedly demythologizing, they all use the term "revival" to
capture the spirit of the process in one concept. These narratives repre-
sent the sectors in Israeli society which they strive to glorify: the second
aliya, the teachers' union, the Jewish working class in Palestine, etc.
Revivalist approaches consider the emergence of Hebrew as a singular
event, thereby viewing it, or at least parts of it, as unexplainable and un-
analyzable. This scholarly confining view created a state of mind which
forestalls any serious search for explanations that might undermine the
revivalist hypothesis.
In defiance of these forces, some new narrative voices have recently
arisen from less affected quarters of the scholarly world, offering non-
revivalist perspectives on the process. One approach suggests to view the
process of the emergence of Hebrew as an instance, albeit atypical, of
creole language formation. This approach is non-revivalist in that it pla-
ces the process within a normal sociolinguistic framework of language
genesis. The second approach suggests viewing the process of the emer-
gence of Hebrew as an activation of a written language that prevailed in
widely circulating unsupervised texts. Phenomena which have been tradi-
tionally attributed to Israeli Hebrew are claimed to have existed already
in that written language, certainly in its last stage at the end of the nine-
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