by Ghil'ad Zuckermann
Pp. 68-81 (Chapter 7) of Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García (eds), Volume II (The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts) of Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, New York: Oxford University Press.
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2011. ‘HEBREW Revivalists’ Goals vis-a-vis the Emerging ISRAELI Language’, pp. 68-81 (Chapter 7)... more
Zuckermann, Ghil'ad 2011. ‘HEBREW Revivalists’ Goals vis-a-vis the Emerging ISRAELI Language’, pp. 68-81 (Chapter 7) of Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García (eds), Volume II (The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts) of Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity, New York: Oxford University Press.
I. LONG ABSTRACT
"I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so." (Haldane 1963: 464)
The public media and public education are understandably often drawn to successes rather than to failures. This chapter provides some insights into the limitations of human involvement or intervention in planned social (and linguistic) change.
Do I only see the the glass half empty? Not at all! Israeli, somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. 'Modern Hebrew', is indeed - partially - the result of a successful partial revival of literary Hebrew. But although the Hebrew revivalists, most of them native Yiddish-speaking, very much wished to speak Hebrew - with Semitic grammar and pronunciation (like Arabs), they could not avoid their Ashkenazic European background.
Their attempts (1) to deny their (more recent) roots in search of Biblical ancientness, (2) negate diasporism and disown the "weak, persecuted" exilic Jew from public memory, and (3) avoid hybridity (as reflected in Slavonized, Romance/Semitic-influenced, Germanic Yiddish itself, which they regarded as zhargon) failed.
Although they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the emerging Israeli language often mirrors the very components the revivalists sought to erase. The alleged victory of Hebrew over Yiddish was a Pyrrhic one. Victorious "Hebrew" is, after all, partly European at heart. Israeli is a hybridic Eurasian language, both Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and (Indo-)European. It is based simultaneously on "sleeping beauty"/"walking dead" Hebrew, "mame loshn" ("mother tongue") Yiddish, as well as other languages spoken by revivalists.
The language spoken in today’s Israel is a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle hybrid, based not only on “sleeping beauty” or “walking dead” Hebrew but also on the revivalists’ mother tongues such as Yiddish. The vernacularization of Hebrew – a language lacking native speakers between the second and nineteenth centuries – was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise, but I would roughly estimate that on a subjective 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success and one being a complete failure, the Hebrew revival is at six or seven.
More specifically, I propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which “Israeli” can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit (i.e. European) and discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1; sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2; semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3; word order (syntax): 4; general vocabulary: 5; word formation: 7; verbal conjugations: 9; and basic vocabulary (i.e. Hebrew): 10.
The factors leading to the partial failure of the Hebrew revival have little to do with a lack of motivation or zealousness, or with economic or political variables - not even with the fact that the revivalists, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were not as linguistically sophisticated as contemporary linguists. It is simply the case that one cannot negate one’s most recent roots, be they cultural or linguistic, even if one is keen to deny one’s parents’ and grandparents’ heritage (diasporic Yiddish) in search of cultural antiquity (Biblical Hebrew). It is thus most unlikely to revive a clinically-dead language without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s).
From the perspective of cultural heritage, attempts to revive a no-longer-spoken tongue should be supported and celebrated. But we should refrain from a purist’s approach and feel no shame about hybridity.
II. ABSTRACT
The vernacularization of Hebrew – a language lacking native speakers between the second and nineteenth centuries – was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise but I would roughly estimate that on a subjective 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success, the Hebrew revival is at 6 or 7. More specifically, I propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which “Israeli” can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit: 1 (i.e. European), discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1, sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2, semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3, word order (syntax): 3, general vocabulary: 5, word formation: 7, verbal conjugations: 9, basic vocabulary: 10 (i.e. Hebrew).
III. KEYWORDS
Revival, Hybridity, Multiple Causation, Jewish Sociolinguistics, Hebrew Bible, Yiddish Diaspora, Zionism.
IV. BRIEF BIO
Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (titular) (Cambridge), M.A. (summa cum laude) (Tel Aviv), is Professor of Linguistics and Endagered Languages, and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow, at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His website is www.zuckermann.org .
V. CHAPTER
Hebrew Revivalists’ Goals vis-à-vis the Emerging Israeli Language
Ghil‘ad Zuckermann
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
(John Adams, 1735–1826, second president of the United States)
A Senegalese poet said “In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
(Cellist Yo Yo Ma, White House Conference on Culture and Diplomacy, 28 November 2000)
Introduction
Five Jews changed the way we perceive the world: Moses said, “the Law is everything,” Jesus said, “Love is everything,” Marx said, “Money is everything,” Freud said, “Sex is everything,” and then Einstein astutely added: “Everything is relative!”
Unfortunately, some people see the world in black-and-white terms. However, Judaism is all about “on the other hand.” In the famous play Fiddler on the Roof, after Tevye’s daughter Hodel and her radical student lover Perchik announced their engagement, Tevye, a religious Jew opposed to the match, memorably reckons: “He loves her. Love, it's a new style ... On the other hand, our old ways were once new, weren't they? On the other hand, they decided without parents, without a matchmaker! On the other hand, did Adam and Eve have a matchmaker? Well, yes they did. And it seems these two have the same matchmaker!” (cf. Stein 1964: 113).
“Modern Hebrew” (henceforth, Israeli – see Zuckermann 1999) is the most quoted example of a successful language revival. On the other hand, if we are to be brutally truthful with ourselves, the modern-day vernacular spoken in downtown Tel Aviv is a very different language – both typologically and genetically – to that of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) or of the Mishnah, the first major redaction of Jewish oral traditions.
Hebrew has been spoken since approximately the 14th century BC. It belonged to the Canaanite division of the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages, which constitutes a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Following a gradual decline, it ceased to be spoken by the second century AD. The failed Bar-Kokhba Revolt against the Romans in Judea in 132-5 AD marks the symbolic end of the period of spoken Hebrew. I believe that the Mishnah was codified around 200 AD, among other reasons, because Hebrew was then dying as a mother tongue. Rabbi Judah haNasi and his collaborators might have realized that if they did not act then to redact the oral tradition, it would soon have been too late because Jews were already speaking languages other than Hebrew. (In fact, the Gemara, the other component of the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified around 500 AD, was written in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew.)
For approximately 1,750 years thereafter, Hebrew was not spoken. A most important liturgical and literary language, it occasionally served as a lingua franca – a means of communication between people who do not share a mother tongue – for Jews of the Diaspora, but not as a native language.
Fascinating and multifaceted Israeli, which emerged in Palestine (Eretz Israel) at the end of the nineteenth century, possesses distinctive socio-historical characteristics such as the lack of a continuous chain of native speakers from spoken Hebrew to Israeli, the non-Semitic mother tongues spoken by the Hebrew revivalists, and the European impact on literary Hebrew. Consequently, it presents the sociolinguist with a unique laboratory in which to examine a wider set of theoretical problems concerning language genesis, social issues like language and politics, and practical matters, such as whether it is possible to revive a no longer spoken language.
The genetic classification of Israeli has preoccupied scholars since its genesis. The still regnant traditional thesis suggests that Israeli is Semitic, Hebrew revived. The revisionist antithesis defines Israeli as Indo-European, Yiddish relexified; that is, Yiddish, the revivalists’ mother tongue, is the “substratum,” whilst Hebrew is the “superstratum” providing the vocabulary (cf. Horvath & Wexler 1997). According to my own mosaic (rather than Mosaic) synthesis, “genetically modified” Israeli is a “semi-engineered,” multi-layered language, which is a Semito-European, or Eurasian, hybrid; it is both Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) and (Indo-) European. It is based simultaneously on “sleeping beauty” / “walking dead” Hebrew and “máme lóshn” (mother tongue) Yiddish, which are both primary contributors to modern Hebrew, and the many other languages spoken by revivalists, such as Russian, Polish, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Arabic, German and English. Israeli is therefore not a case of rétsakh yídish (Israeli for “murder of Yiddish”) but rather of yídish rédt zikh (Yiddish for “Yiddish speaks itself” [beneath Israeli]).
Was the Hebrew revival then a failure? Einstein reminds us that, “Everything is relative!” For example, in the famous “duckrabbit” picture (cf. Wittgenstein 1953: Part 2, Section 11), one could see either a duck or a rabbit. Similarly, the American consul in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, claims, “non ho studiato ornitologia” (I have not studied ornithology). Hence, I propose that one see in the rare bird Israeli either a phoenix rising from the ashes (Hebrew) or a cuckoo laying its egg in the nest of another bird and tricking it into believing that the baby cuckoos are its own offspring (Yiddish). Israeli is thus a phonenicuckoo cross with some characteristics of a magpie, the latter representing the ongoing borrowing – or rather “copying” or “stealing” – e.g. from American English.
The Hebrew revival cannot be considered a failure tout court, because without the zealous, obsessive, enthusiastic efforts of the symbolic father of Israeli, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Perelman), and of teachers, writers, poets, journalists, intellectuals, political figures, linguists, and others, Israelis would have spoken a language (such as English, German, Arabic and Yiddish) that could hardly be considered Hebrew. To call such a hypothetical language “Hebrew” would have not only been misleading but also wrong. To call today’s Israeli “Hebrew” may be misleading but not wrong: Hybridic Israeli is based on Hebrew as much as it is based on Yiddish. So, although the revivalists could not avoid the subconscious influence of their mother tongue(s), they did manage at the same time to consciously revive some components of clinically-dead Hebrew.
On the other hand, had Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jews arrived in Israel before Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, and provided that they had similar ideology and motivation to those of Ben-Yehuda and his collaborators, there is no doubt in my mind that the language resulting from their hypothetical revival would have been much more Semitic than is Israeli.
Did the guardians fail in this particular respect more so than in other areas of the national ethos? That is still to be determined by various interdisciplinary scholars, but I hypothesize that the answer is negative. Multiple causation and the often-camouflaged impact of the Diaspora can be found in each and every component of Israeli society, for example, in music, popular songs, film, economics, urban geography, architecture, political system, and more. For instance, Rami Kimchi (personal communication) explores the parallels between the allegedly-mizrahi “burekas films,” which feature Moroccan Jews living in Israeli slums, with the Ashkenazic shtetl life that can be found in works by Mendele Moikher-Sforim. In fact, the directors of such mizrahi films are often of Ashkenazic heritage. Furthermore, I strongly believe that linguistic insights such as the Congruence Principle below can be usefully employed by researchers of other areas of scholarship.
Why use the term “Israeli?” Several days before the publication in Tel Aviv of my most recent book (Zuckerman, 2008a), I finally received its cover. Whereas the title of the book was israelít safá yafá, i.e. Israeli – A Beautiful Language (challenging and modelled upon the old Zionist slogan ‘ivrít safá yafá “Hebrew is a beautiful language”), the last sentence on the back cover was “this is his first book in Hebrew!” Worried, I called the publisher, Am Oved, and was given an ultimatum: either we leave it as “this is his first book in Hebrew” or change it to “this is his first book in Israeli and his last book at Am Oved!”
Eventually, the compromise was “this is his first book published in Israel.” This is an example of a case in which the (meta-linguistic) name is extremely important because it determines the way people perceive the thing it stands for. Just as thought influences language, language can shape thought. For example, 2,500 years ago, Confucius said that the first thing one has to do is “to rectify names” (Analects, Book 13, Verse 3).
Had I continued to call Israeli “Modern Hebrew,” “Israeli Hebrew,” or merely “Hebrew” tout court, you might have assumed that my model is yet another wise-guy version of the view that Israeli is simply an evolution of Hebrew, influenced by “foreign languages” such as Yiddish. But that’s a far cry from the two main arguments proposed here: hybridity and native speech.
Hybridity and the congruence principle
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
(Nelson Mandela)
Israeli is not an evolutionary phase of Hebrew but rather a new hybrid language, based simultaneously on Hebrew, Yiddish, and a plethora of other languages spoken by Jewish pioneers in Palestine in the 1880s–1930s. Thus, Yiddish is not a “foreign language” vis-à-vis Israeli, and the word intuítsya “intuition” – to give but one example out of thousands of alleged loan words – is not a loan word (from Yiddish intuítsye, Russian intuítsiya, Polish intuicja etc., all meaning “intuition”) but rather an integral part of Israeli from its very beginning.
According to the Congruence Principle, the more revivalists speak contributing languages with specific linguistic features, the more likely these features are to prevail in the emergent language. Based on feature pool statistics, this principle weakens August Schleicher’s famous Family Tree theory in historical linguistics, which often gives the wrong impression that every language has only one parent.
For example, most revivalists spoke languages, mainly Yiddish, that lacked that Semitic pharyngeal gulp ‘ayin (represented, for instance, by the apostrophe in my Christian – actually Jewish – name Ghil‘ad). Naturally, their children – the ones who, in fact, shaped the real character of Israeli – could not buy the argument “do as I say, don’t do as I do!” The result is that most Israelis do not have this sound in their speech.
Similarly, má nishmà, the common Israeli “what’s up?” greeting, looks like a calque – loan translation – of the Yiddish phrase vos hért zikh, usually pronounced vsértsekh and literally meaning “what’s heard?” but actually functioning as a common greeting. However, a Romanian-speaking immigrant to Israel might have used má nishmà because of Romanian ce se aude, a Polish-speaker Jew because of Polish co słychać and a Russian-speaker Что слышно chto slyshno, all meaning the same thing and functioning in the same way.
The distinction between forms and patterns is crucial here as it demonstrates multiple causation. In the 1920s and 1930s, gdud meginéy hasafá, “the language defendants regiment” (cf. Shur 2000), whose motto was ivrí, dabér ivrít “Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew,” used to tear down signs written in “foreign” languages and disturb Yiddish theatre gatherings. However, the members of this group only looked for Yiddish forms, rather than patterns in the speech of the Israelis who did choose to speak “Hebrew.” The language defendants would thus not attack an Israeli speaker saying má nishmà.
To varying degrees, Israeli differs from Hebrew in all components of language, including sounds (phonetics and phonology) (Zuckermann 2005), meaning (semantics), word order (syntax), words (lexis) and even in word formation (morphology) (Zuckermann 2009). Some elements, however, are more revivable than others. Words and conjugations, for example, are easier to revitalize than intonation, discourse, associations, and connotations.
My research analyzes the hitherto-overlooked camouflaged semantic networking transferred from one language to another. Whereas mechanisms as calques (loan translations such as superman, from German Übermensch), phono-semantic matches (e.g. crayfish, from Old French crevice, a cognate of crab that has little to do with fish) (Zuckermann 2003) and portmanteau blends (e.g. motel, from motor+hotel, or sprummer, from spring+summer) have been studied, there is a need to uncover concealed semantic links between words in the Target Language which reflect – often subconsciously – semantic networking in the Source Language. Consider the Israeli word gakhlilít “firefly, glow-worm” – coined by poet laureate Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934). This word is semantically and etymologically linked to the Biblical Hebrew word gaħelet “burning coal, glowing ember.” Morphologically, Israeli gakhlilít derives from Hebrew gaħelet plus the reduplication of its third radical [l]. However, no Israeli dictionary reveals the crucial semantic networking aspect, namely that the Israeli concoction, gakhlilít, in using an element associated with “glow,” in fact replicates a European mindset, apparent for example in the Yiddish word glivórem, or “firefly,” literally “glow” (cf. gaħelet) + “worm,” or in German Glühwürmchen.
And yet contemporary Israelis are indoctrinated to believe that they speak the same language as the Prophet Isaiah, “with mistakes.” It is thus high time to acknowledge that Israeli is very different from ancient Hebrew. In the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld, “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” We should embrace – rather than chastise – the multisourcedness of Israeli!
Almost all revivalists were native Yiddish-speakers who wanted to speak Hebrew, with Semitic grammar and pronunciation, like Arabs. Research should be conducted on the Hebrew revivalists’ perception of the “noble savage” Arab, who was, on the one hand, an enemy and, on the other, an enviable Semite riding a Middle-Eastern camel, entering a biblical city and speaking a Semitic tongue with autochthonous pharyngeal consonants.
Not only were the revivalists European, their revivalist campaign was inspired by European – e.g. Bulgarian – nationalism. At the time, although territory and language were at the heart of European nationalism, the Jews possessed neither a national territory nor a unifying national language. Zionism could be considered a fascinating manifestation of European discourses channelled into the Holy Land (cf. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, 1876).
Reversing language shift (“RLS”) (Fishman 1991, 2001, Hagège 2009, Evans 2010) is a crucial issue. In his seminal work, Reversing Language Shift, Fishman (1991: 287) argues that RLS efforts often originate in Europe. In the case of Hebrew, he is even more right than he might have thought. RLS efforts in the case of Hebrew are not only sociological – the mindset behind the motivation to revive the language was a reflection of a European nationalism – but also linguistic – the mindset of the emerging language itself is European. The revivalists’ attempt to (1) deny their (more recent) roots in search of Biblical ancientness, (2) negate diasporism and disown the “weak, persecuted” exilic Jew, and (3) avoid hybridity (as reflected in Slavonized, Romance/Semitic-influenced, Germanic Yiddish itself, which they despised) could not fully succeed. Ironically, although they have engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the emerging Israeli language often mirrors the very scorned syncretism and despised diasporism the revivalists sought to erase.
The reason is simple: the revival of a no longer spoken language is most unlikely without influences from the mother tongue(s) of those at the forefront of the revival. Thus, when most native Israeli-speakers speak Israeli, their intonation is much more similar to that of Yiddish, the mother tongue of most revivalists, than to that of Arabic or any other language belonging to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family.
Native Israeli speech and the Academy of the Hebrew Language
On a bus in Tel Aviv, a mother was talking animatedly, in Yiddish, to her little boy – who kept answering her in Hebrew. And each time the mother said, “No, no, talk Yiddish!”
An impatient Israeli, overhearing this, exclaimed, “Lady, why do you insist the boy talk Yiddish instead of Hebrew?”
Replied the mother, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”
(Rosten 1970: xxi)
Since its conception, Israeli has been the subject of purism (the dislike of foreign words – as in Icelandic: Sapir and Zuckermann 2008) and the enforcement of correct pronunciation. Brought into being by legislation in 1953 as the supreme institute for “Hebrew,” the Academy of the Hebrew Language (known in Israeli as haakadémya lalashón haivrít) is funded by the Ministry of Education, which increasingly suffers from budgetary cutbacks. It superseded the (Hebrew) Language Council (váad halashón (haivrít)), which was established in 1889 – as a branch of Safá Brurá (Clear Language) – by Ben-Yehuda and colleagues.
As described on its website, the Academy, based in Giv‘at Ram, Jerusalem, “prescribes standards for Modern Hebrew grammar, orthography, transliteration [in fact, transcription], and punctuation [vocalization, vowel marking] based upon the study of Hebrew's historical development.” (http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/english.html) The Academy's plenum – which holds five or six annual sessions – consists of 23 members and an additional 15 academic advisors. These are either scholars from the disciplines of languages, linguistics, and Jewish studies, or accomplished writers and translators. The Academy's decisions are binding upon all governmental agencies, including the Israel Broadcasting Authority.
As defined in its constitution, the Academy's functions are:
(1) To investigate and compile the Hebrew lexicon according to its historical strata and layers;
(2) To study the structure, history, and offshoots of the Hebrew language; and
(3) To direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, requirements, and potential, its daily and academic needs, by setting its lexicon, grammar, characters, orthography and transliteration [in fact, transcription].
The first goal is most useful, as Israeli is indeed a multi-layered language. For example, one could say both (a) khashkhú enáv, literally “His eyes became dark,” meaning "He saw black" (‘black’ in this context meaning ‘bad news’), and (b) niyá/naasá lo khóshekh baenáim, meaning the same, albeit structurally different. While khashkhú enáv is Hebrew, niyá lo khóshekh baenáim is a calque of the Yiddish phrase siz im gevórn fíntster in di óygn, which might in turn be an adaptation of the very Hebrew khashkhú enáv (transcribed here in its Israeli form, which would have been almost unintelligible for an ancient Hebrew-speaker).
Israeli has many other minimal pairs, such as asá din leatsmó and lakákh et hakhók layadáim, both referring to a person violating the law, with the latter being more colloquial, as well as yamím kelelót, literally “days as nights,” and misavív lashaón, literally “round the clock,” both often referring to hard work.
Somewhat resembling the “catastrophic success” of the 1928-1936 Turkish Language Revolution (see Lewis 1999), many referents have several Israeli signifiers, one of which is puristically Hebrew and the other, often more commonly used, “foreign” (in fact, Israeli ab initio). These include many “internationalisms,” such as opozítsya “Opposition” (according to the Academy, the word should be negdá – cf. Hebrew néged “against”) and koalítsya “Coalition” (according to the Academy: yakhdá – cf. Hebrew yaħad “together”).
However, goal three, to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, is intriguing (cf. Zuckermann 2008b:139) is oxymoronic. If the nature of a language is to evolve in a specific direction (cf. Sapir's “drift,” the pattern of change in which the structure of a language shifts in a determinate direction), why direct its evolution by language policing?
Despite such intensive efforts towards grammatical enforcement, Israeli is by now a fully-fledged language, and can never be Hebrew. Some prescriptive purists – for instance, Sarid (2008), Hitron (2008) and Levitan (2009) – argue that the current generation of Israelis is reckless and that Israeli used to be much better. I, on the other hand, view many alleged “reckless changes” within Israeli as recognition that the language was never Hebrew ab initio. For example, unlike the common myth that such a development is recent, Israeli-speakers “made mistakes” in the numeral-noun polarity-of-gender agreement from the very inception of Israeli. I once asked an old man, “Have you changed throughout your life?” His response was very telling and relevant to the Israeli language: “I haven’t changed but I suddenly realized who I was.” Every live-and-kicking language changes through time, but the most important change I predict for Israeli is that the myth that we speak the language of Isaiah will eventually be replaced by a more sober, syncretic analysis of Israeli genesis.
There is no good reason to force a Hebrew grammar on native Israeli-speakers, simply because they already speak their mother tongue perfectly, according to internalized grammatical rules. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the term “habitus” to refer to a social convention; for example, eating with chopsticks versus a knife and fork. Unlike literary language, which is indeed a “habitus,” the native spoken tongue is not learned but rather acquired automatically and effortlessly. This is the diametric opposite of the admired, albeit mistaken, claim, made in 1953, by the former president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language Ze’ev Ben-Hayyim: “one learns his spoken language in years of effort, in very hard work throughout one’s life” (cf. Ben-Hayyim 1953: 83 and 1992: 80).
The relationship between hybridity and native speech is complex. Supporting one of them does not necessarily imply accepting the other. For example, I might convince some that Israeli is a wonderful mishmash of many languages yet they would still prefer enforcing an elitist standard on Israeli-speakers. Overlooking its hybrid vigor, others might continue to blindly believe that Israeli is Hebrew but would still allow Israelis to speak as they wish. Nevertheless, the main innovation here, besides the hybridity model, is the link between hybridity and native speech: Even if there are numerous Israelis who believe that we must enforce a standard, might they eventually be convinced to modify the characteristics of that standard? Who said that it must be based on Hebrew?
Let my people know! Do Israelis really understand Hebrew?
Language is a guide to “social reality”. Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
(Sapir 1921)
One of the arguments against my synthesis has been that Israelis can easily understand the Hebrew Bible. The otherwise perspicacious intellectual Avi(ezer) Ravitzky wrote that “Modern Greek, for example, boasts many similarities to its ancestor, yet a speaker of the current language must struggle to read ancient texts. The modern Hebrew speaker, however, moves smoothly through the Bible” (2000: 13-14). Leaving aside the crucial difference between the evolution of Classical into Modern Greek and the unparalleled genesis of Israeli, the alleged smoothness is mere myth.
Israelis not only do not understand the Bible, but much worse: they misunderstand it without even realizing it! By and large, Israeli-speakers are the worst students in advanced studies of the Bible. Notwithstanding, Israel’s Education Ministry axiomatically assumes that Israeli is simply an organic evolution of Hebrew and that the Bible is thus written in the very same language – albeit in a higher register, of course – spoken by Israeli pupils at primary and secondary schools. The publishers of Hartom-Cassuto, and other volumes providing numerous glosses to the unfathomable Biblical verses, have benefited from such a purism prism, which might be related to self-righteousness, hubris, simple conservatism, or blindness on behalf of Israel’s educational system.
Israelis might understand the most general meaning of “bereshit- bara ’elohim ’et hashamayim we’et ha’arets” (Genesis 1:1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth) but very few would be able to explain the construct-state nomen regens (nismákh) bereshít-: in the beginning of what? And how many Israelis could fathom this sentence from the perspective of the temporal sequence of creation: were the heaven and the earth created at the same time? Is it, therefore, possible that the expression “the heaven and the earth” here refers to “the world” in general? And which Israeli-speaker uses a Verb-Subject-Object word order (a.k.a. constituent order) as in “created God the heaven and the earth”? Ask Israelis what “’avaním shaħaqú máyim” (Job 14:19) means and they will tell you that the stones eroded the water. On second thought, they might guess that semantically it would make more sense that the water eroded the stones. Yet such an Object-Verb-Subject order is ungrammatical in Israeli (see Zuckermann 2008a, 2009).
How many Israelis can really fathom “tohu wavohu” or “təhom” (Genesis 1:2), the Israeli misleading senses being “mess” and “abyss” respectively? Or “haşvi yisra’el ‘al bamotekha ħalal” (II Samuel 1:19: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places)? Most Israelis understand “yéled sha‘ashu‘ím” (Jeremiah 31:19, King James 20) as “playboy” rather than “pleasant child.” “Bá’u baním ‘ad mashbér” (Isaiah 37:3) is interpreted by Israelis as “children arrived at a crisis” rather than as “children arrived at the mouth of the womb, to be born.” “’Adam lə‘amal yullad” (Job 5:7) is taken to mean “man was born to do productive work” rather than “mischief” or “trouble” – in the Bible this sentence stands as an accusation of the inherent wickedness of mankind.
Some Hebrew normativists repeat the red herring that if we correct Israelis’ alleged “grammatical mistakes” they would be more likely to understand Classical Hebrew. Does an Israeli saying “asará shkalím” (10 shekels) have more chance to understand the unfathomable “egla meshulleshet” (“a heifer of three years old,” Genesis 15:9) than if he stuck to the actually more commonly grammatical “éser shékel?” Just as the “Jerusalem artichoke” has nothing to do with either Jerusalem or artichoke (even though some Jerusalem restaurants take pride in serving it), what Yossi Sarid – to mention but one linguistic right-winger – calls “mistaken Hebrew” is neither mistaken nor Hebrew: it is grammatical Israeli!
Obviously, one could give thousands of other examples, and from post-Biblical Hebrew too. For instance, how many Israelis can follow the meaning of the Passover Haggadah or the Hanukkah hymn “Ma‘oz Tsur Yeshu‘ati?” Is Hebrew “menabeaħ” (blaspheming) indeed related, after all, to Israeli “novéakh” (barking)? Most importantly, however, the available examples are far from being only lexical: Israelis are incapable of recognizing moods and aspects in the Bible. For example, “nappíla goralót wened‘á” (Jonah 1:7, “let us cast lots”) was thought by some Israelis to be the rhetorical future rather than the cohortative verb tense, the latter apparent, for example, in Israeli “yeushar hataktsiv!” (may the budget be approved!).
Despite eleven years of Biblical training, Israeli-speakers still understand the perfect aspect (e.g. ’amar “said” as in “I will have said…”) as if it were past tense. The imperfect aspect (e.g. yomar “would/will say” as in “I thought I would say…”) is misunderstood as the future tense. In reality, a Biblical verb in the perfect aspect can refer to a completed action in the future – cf., mutatis mutandis, the Israeli colloquial question “záznu?” (literally, “have we gone/moved?”), utterable instead of “yala bay,” meaning “let’s go.” I remember my tironut (IDF recruit training) commander ordering us in a sadaút session (“fieldcraft,” etymologically unrelated to sadism): “od khamésh dakót hayítem kan!” (Within five minutes you will have been here), hayítem being, in Israeli, grammatically past but actually referring, in this specific colloquial case, to an action in the future. In the Bible, heyitém refers regularly – not only colloquially – to an action that has been completed, regardless of whether or not it is in the past or future – hence the term “aspect” rather than “tense.” Such Biblical mindset is in harsh contradistinction to the Weltanschauung of the Homo sapiens sapiens (the human who knows s/he knows) israelicus vulgaris, and to the way Israelis read the Hebrew Bible.
Negating the Diaspora, Ben-Yehuda would have been most content had Israelis spoken Biblical Hebrew. Had the Hebrew revival been fully successful, Israelis would indeed have spoken a language closer to ancient Hebrew than Modern English is to Middle English because we would have bypassed more than 1,750 years of natural development. On the other hand, let us assume for a moment that Hebrew had never died as a spoken language by the second century AD and it continued to be the mother tongue of generations of Jews. They would eventually have returned to the Holy Land, continuing to speak Hebrew. From the perspective of mutual intelligibility, it might well be the case that that Hebrew would have differed more from Biblical Hebrew than does Israeli, but this says little about the genesis of modern Israeli.
Given such a magnificently hybridic yíkhes (heritage), as well as the omnipresent misunderstandings of the Hebrew Bible by Israelis, Israel’s Education Ministry should revise the way it teaches the Bible and instead teach the Bible the way Latin is taught, employing the most advanced methods of second language teaching, which can be most joyful and memorable. Such a measure has the potential to reduce Israeli pupils’ disdain for Bible lessons, as well as to attract more secular Jews to Biblical scholarship.
Thus, Tanakh RAM – a project recently launched by the experienced Bible teacher Avraham Ahuvia, as well as the insightful publisher Rafi Mozes, acronymized in this biblionym – fulfills the mission of “red ’el ha‘am” not only in its Hebrew meaning (Go down to the people) but also – more importantly – in its Yiddish meaning (“red” meaning “speak!”). Ahuvia’s translation is most useful and dignified. Given its high register, however, I predict that the future promises biblical translations into more colloquial forms of Israeli, a beautifully multi-layered and intricately multi-sourced language, of which we should be proud.
On the other hand – and as if the picture were not complex enough – Yadin and Zuckermann (2010) demonstrate the success of Zionism in deifying the Israeli State by shrewdly employing divine Hebrew terms and turning them into signifiers for nationalist referents. For example, Biblical Hebrew mishkån meant both “dwelling-place” and “Tabernacle of the Congregation” (where Moses kept the Ark in the wilderness) and “inner sanctum” (known as ’ohel mo‘ed). Israeli mishkán haknéset, however, refers to ‘the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) building.’ Translating mishkán haknéset as ‘The Knesset Building’ (as on the official Knesset website) is lacking. The word mishkán is loaded with holiness and evokes sanctity (cf. sanctuary), as if Members of Knesset (cf. MPs) were, at the very least, angels or seraphim. Another example, not mentioned by Yadin and Zuckermann, is mékhes: Whereas in the Hebrew Bible it was a tribute to God (e.g. Numbers 31:37), in Israeli is it “customs” paid to the State.
Conclusion
I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: 1. This is worthless nonsense. 2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view. 3. This is true, but quite unimportant. 4. I always said so.
(Haldane 1963: 464)
The fin-de-siècle Hebrew revivalists had several advantages compared with revivalists of indigenous languages such as no-longer spoken Aboriginal languages in Australia. For example, (1) extensive documentation (e.g. the aforementioned Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah), (2) Hebrew was considered a most prestigious language (as opposed to Yiddish, for example), and (3) Jews from all over the globe only had Hebrew in common, whereas there are dozens of “sleeping” Aboriginal languages to be revived and it would obviously be extremely hard to choose only one unifying tongue, unless one resorts to Aboriginal English.
And yet, the Hebrew revivalists - who wished to speak pure Hebrew - failed in their purism prism. The language spoken in today’s Israel is a multifaceted and fascinating fin-de-siècle hybrid, based not only on “sleeping beauty” or “walking dead” Hebrew but also on the revivalists’ mother tongues such as Yiddish. The vernacularization of Hebrew – a language lacking native speakers between the second and nineteenth centuries – was partially a success and partially a failure. It is hard to provide an exact quantification for such a multi-variable enterprise, but I would roughly estimate that on a subjective 1-10 scale, 10 being a complete success and one being a complete failure, the Hebrew revival is at six or seven.
More specifically, I propose the following continuum approximations for the extent to which “Israeli” can be considered Hebrew: mindset/spirit (i.e. European) and discourse (communicative tools, speech acts): 1; sounds (phonetics and phonology): 2; semantics (meaning, associations, connotations, semantic networkings): 3; word order (syntax): 4; general vocabulary: 5; word formation: 7; verbal conjugations: 9; and basic vocabulary (i.e. Hebrew): 10.
The factors leading to the partial failure of the Hebrew revival have little to do with a lack of motivation or zealousness, or with economic or political variables - not even with the fact that the revivalists, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were not as linguistically sophisticated as contemporary linguists. It is simply the case that one cannot negate one’s most recent roots, be they cultural or linguistic, even if one is keen to deny one’s parents’ and grandparents’ heritage (diasporic Yiddish) in search of cultural antiquity (Biblical Hebrew). It is thus most unlikely to revive a clinically-dead language without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s).
From the perspective of cultural heritage, attempts to revive a no-longer-spoken tongue should be supported and celebrated. But we should refrain from a purist’s approach and feel no shame about hybridity.
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