The apparently incongruous expression ‘Old-New’ is taken from the title of Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel, inspired most likely by the name of the famous Altneuschul, Europe’s oldest functioning synagogue, located in Prague. Today’s Israeli vernacular, Modern Hebrew, may well be defined as Old-New.
Language is a key ingredient of organic nationalism, of which Zionism is but one example. It assumes even greater importance when other elements of collective identity are absent or weak. Modern national identity often rests upon a usually romanticized sense of belonging to a linguistic group and to a territory, which is why Zionism accords paramount importance to language.
In Europe, where Zionism was born, language ‘replaced territory as the focus of national awakening’; this explains why, ‘unique among national movements, Zionism might be said to have been conceived in language’ (Chaver 2004: 2). This may result not only from the absence of its ‘own’ territory but also from the traditional Jewish emphasis on the word as something fundamental and primordial. Certain trends in Jewish tradition consider Hebrew letters to have existed prior to Creation. According to a classical commentary on the first verse of Genesis, God looked at the letters of the Torah and created the world.
Traces of this centrality of the written word persisted among secularized Jews long after they abandoned Judaic practice and learning. In line with European ethnic nationalism, Zionist ideology claimed to ‘own’ Hebrew as its exclusive ‘national’ inheritance. Just like the land, ‘language – imagined as a cultural territory – is similarly treated as a matter of exclusive ownership, as if it too needs to be protected and guarded against invasions and repopulation. . . . In other words, it is not only about how and what language is used, but also about who uses it’ (Hochberg 2007: 74–75). This process of ethnonationalisation of Hebrew intensified after the proclamation of the state in 1948 as part of a broader attempt to nationalise Jews. From the early 20th century, the new common language was meant to form the New Hebrew Man, an antithesis of the Diaspora Jew.
Zionist activists were imbued with anti-Jewish stereotypes, eager to obliterate two millennia of Jewish history as shameful and degenerative. It is no wonder the early Zionist settlers were intent on ‘inventing a Land and inventing a Nation’ (Berlovitz 1996). Jewish selbsthass/self-hate is a fundamental constituent of Zionist ideology. In this case, it is expressed as ‘negation of the Diaspora’ and its vernacular, Yiddish. Other Jewish languages did not draw as much Zionist ire, primarily because the movement’s founders were raised almost exclusively in the Yiddish-speaking milieu, and Zionism initially targeted the Ashkenazim of Europe.
This campaign involved a deliberate act of forgetting. It has been noted that ‘the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’. Zionists followed this dictum assiduously, accomplishing a consistent work of forgetting a culture imbued with reverence for the past. Zionism sought ‘to discard diasporic Jewish culture and to obliterate its very existence from collective memory in order to realize its own ideology and vision. The success of the new culture depended on the suppression of the old one, including its most emblematic element, the Yiddish language’ (Chaver 2004: 16–17).
The idea of separate development that underlies the entire Zionist project manifests itself in the relative neglect of Arabic, the most commonly spoken language in the land, as a competitor to modern Hebrew. Palestine was viewed as ‘a culturally virgin soil on which a new national culture could become the definitive, ultimately hegemonic, cultural force of a new metropole’ (Saposnik 2008: 69). Yiddish was seen as a threat because new immigrants from Europe spoke it. Yet, the fact that far more numerous Muslims, Christians and Jews in Palestine spoke Arabic was viewed with indifference. Zionist settlers, including the most left wing among them, were imbued with the colonial sense of cultural superiority: their East European Zionist culture was assumed to be on ‘a higher level’ than the Arab one (Saposnik 2008: 269).
This Ashkenazi anti-religious origin of Modern Hebrew continues to haunt it since it remains alien to Arab Jews, who upom arrival in Israel were considered ‘primitive’. One of them, Albert Swissa, a prominent Israeli Hebrew writer, considers the language he uses ‘a completely new invention: a modern, national, and alienating language that has little, if anything, to do with its Jewish origins’ (Hochberg 2007: 112).
To the extent it stems from earlier versions of Hebrew, Modern Hebrew appears as an unprecedented historical achievement, representing a break from its status as the language of prayer and learning, ‘the language of holiness’ (leshon ha-kodesh). Secular literature in Hebrew spread throughout nineteenth-century Europe, but the Russian Empire, with a Jewish male population often more proficient in biblical Hebrew than in Russian, provided the most fertile ground for the propagation of Zionism, and thus of Modern Hebrew. Several former students of the famous Lithuanian yeshivas, for example Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934), abandoned Judaism and became pillars of the new Hebrew literature and cultural icons of the Zionist colonies in Palestine.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), usually considered the initiator of the Hebrew revival, was originally Lazar Perlman, a graduate of a Talmudic school in the Russian Empire. From the age of 17, the creation of a national language became Ben-Yehuda’s overriding objective. Upon settling in Jerusalem in 1881, his home became the first to use Modern Hebrew as a vernacular. In open revolt against Judaism, he promoted the language’s secularisation as a means of creating the New Hebrew Man.
The promoters of the new vernacular assigned new, secular meanings to traditional Judaic concepts. Thus, the eschatological term keren kayemet, which originally meant the accumulation of merits in this life to be ‘expended’ in the world to come, was transformed into the name of the Jewish National Fund, the land acquisition agency of the Zionist movement. Zionists used Judaic terms familiar to the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe to facilitate the propagation of a radical ideology that retained traditional forms to appease widespread apprehension. This is how new Zionist sacralities were established in the course of developing ‘a new civil religion, which places the individual’s obligations to the nation at its centre’ (Liebman 1983: 229).
Unlike Lithuanian or Ukrainian nationalists, Zionists could not rely on a language already spoken by the group they were determined to shape into a modern nation. Many scholars doubt that Jews ever constituted a single ethnic entity, let alone a nation (Sand 2008). Some Israeli linguists suggest that the formation of Modern Israeli Hebrew is not unique and that various modern languages have been created in similar ways. Those who repudiate Zionism typically do not subscribe to the revivalist doctrine of Modern Hebrew and consider the Israeli vernacular a normal language.
This emphasis on commonalities, rather than the uniqueness of Modern Hebrew, resonates with attempts—mostly by Israeli intellectuals—to question the exceptionalism inherent in Zionist ideology and Israel’s legitimacy. The uniqueness of Modern Hebrew is often challenged alongside the uniqueness of the Nazi genocide, of antisemitism, and of Jewish history itself. The story of Modern Hebrew is thus one facet of a fundamental historical debate about Zionism, a debate that questions the sense of exceptional entitlement and boundless impunity widespread in today’s Israel.
References
Berlovitz, Yafa (1996) Lehamtsi Eretz, Lehamtsi ‘Am: Sifrut Ha’aliya Harishona [Inventing a Land, Inventing a People: The Literature of the First Aliyah] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad).
Chaver, Yael (2004) What Must be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press).
Hochberg, Gil Z. (2007) In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Liebman, Charles S., and Eliezer Don Yehiya (1983) Civil Religion in Israel (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Sand, Shlomo (2008) Comment fut inventé le peuple juif (Paris: Fayard).
Saposnik, Arieh Bruce (2008) Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of Jewish National Culture in the Ottoman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Yakov M. Rabkin, Professor Emeritus of History at the Université de Montréal, is the author of hundreds of articles and several books including, most recently, Israel in Palestine: Jewish Rejection of Zionism and Le sionisme en 101 citations. One of his books has been published in Turkish: Yahudilerin Siyonizm Karşıtlığı
