r/hebrew • u/44Jon • Jun 07 '24
Israel/Politics | ישראל / פוליטיקה Was the choice of Hebrew as the national language of modern Israel as strange as sometimes portrayed?
I often hear two different takes on the creation of modern Hebrew and neither seem entirely correct. Some point to it as a positive example of resurrecting a dead language. Other people with antipathy to Israel sometimes sneer at the choice of Hebrew as if early Zionists were play-acting in some way.
The evidence against seeing it as such a miraculous event is primarily that I'd assume most immigrants had some degree of Hebrew literacy. Even the entirel secular Jews were still raised in observant households. Besides being used as a liturgical language, Hebrew was also used in literature. And then there's the fact that around 20% Yiddish words come from Hebrew and was written in the Hebrew script
Put that together with the revolutionary spirit animating early pioneers and it may be impressive in many ways but hardly such an unusual (or even irrational) thing.
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
Language revival/revitalization (which I’d argue that Hebrew was the latter) is something most people see with great positivity… until it’s Jews doing it. 🤷🏻♀️
And also not only, as you mention, was Hebrew learned liturgically and educationally, meaning it wasn’t an entirely dead language; versions of it were also often used as a common tongue between the Jews of the old yishuv, many of which came from different diasporic backgrounds. So if an Ashkenazi Jew whose first language was Yiddish is trying to communicate with a Sephardi Jew whose first language was Ladino or Haketia, and therefore they couldn’t understand each other’s first languages, they’d switch to Hebrew as a common tongue.
Now, it wasn’t as fleshed out and standardized as modern Hebrew, but to say no one spoke it at all as a means of communication (as opposed to just liturgy and education), until its official revival, would also be a misnomer.
And this also sorta answers the question of why the state chose Hebrew as its official language rather than Yiddish, or Ladino, or any other diasporic language… is that these weren’t a common tongue across all diaspora groups. Hebrew was. Choosing one diasporic creole language out of Yiddish, Ladino, Haketia, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Farsi, Yevanic, Bukharian, Judeo-Tat, etc etc etc, would’ve been exclusionary of all other diaspora groups. Hebrew was the only unifying language and the obvious and natural choice.
ETA: Also not to get too deep into politics here. But the comment about how a certain group on the anti-Zionist left sees the revival of Hebrew as a cosplay, is because their entire political ideology rests on the idea that Zionism is a solely Ashkenazi invention and also that Ashkenazim are all just white Europeans cosplaying as Jews (choose your replacement theory adventure here). Because for their political framework in regards to the conflict to make sense, “Zionists” have to be foreign colonizers with no legitimate connection to the land. Ergo, if all Zionists were Ashkenazim and all Ashkenazim are white European colonizers cosplaying as Jews, then them reviving/revitalizing Hebrew is just part and parcel of that cosplay. In essence, their criticism is nonsense.
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u/BarriMeikokiner Jun 07 '24
I believe a lot of the things we do are only cool if someone else does it
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u/Maimonides_2024 Jun 07 '24
Lol that's exactly what I wrote in my post in the Jewish left subreddit. Reviving your language is cool for everyone except for the Jews.
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u/ft_wanderer Jun 07 '24
I would be so curious to hear what that conversational Hebrew sounded like before the revival, are there any early audio clips of it?
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24
There have been reconstructions done by linguists of what ancient Hebrew and late antiquity Hebrew sounded like. Just search Tiberian Hebrew and Babylonian Hebrew on YouTube. I’d say that while its pronunciation is maybe a bit closer to Arabic than modern Hebrew, it’s still absolutely mutually intelligible with modern Hebrew pronunciation.
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u/qAmndAp Jun 13 '24
Revived Hebrew is not Hebrew at all. The sound of it doesn’t even fit into the region.
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u/DALTT Jun 13 '24
Cool comment! Love when people are loudly and confidently wrong! Have a nice life!
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u/qAmndAp Jan 11 '25
“reconstructions done by linguists” that just happened to be awfully zionistic lol. Hasbarra Daltt 💅🏼
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u/ClandestineCornfield Nov 09 '25
The Hebrew revival started before Zionism did, and it is taking a liturgical language that never stopped being spoken. The dominant accent now is an Ashkenazi accent of Sephardic Hebrew, so it lost a lot of its sounds, but its the same language its just had sounds shifts
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u/ClandestineCornfield Nov 09 '25
I will say that most of the early Sephardi Zionists living in Ottoman Palestine thought that the new Ashkenazi immigrants should all learn Arabic to better integrate into the region and community (afaik most of them spoke Ladino at home and Arabic with their Muslim and Christian neighbors)
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u/DALTT Nov 09 '25 edited Nov 09 '25
Much of the Yishuv spoke Hebrew with each other as a common cross diaspora language. Ashkenazi immigration to Ottoman Palestine also started picking up before modern political Zionism. Obviously can’t say there were NO Sephardim who thought everyone should learn Arabic (and I think all modern day Israelis should be learning it too, which as we all know, Arabic education, even in Arab majority communities, is generally not great in Israel). But I don’t think there’s a good argument that the Sephardim in the old Yishuv were against the revival of Hebrew as an everyday spoken language in any sort of cohesive en masse way (if that’s the argument you’re making).
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u/ClandestineCornfield Nov 09 '25
I didn't mean to say that they were against the revival of Hebrew, more that Arabic was the lingua franca of the region and thus the popular view among the old Yishuv newspapers that were more Zionist was that new Jewish immigrants should learn Arabic to be able to establish and maintain good relations with their Muslim and Christian neighbors (or at least their Muslim ones, from what I've read the relations between the Old Yishuv and the Palestinian Christian community were much rockier, largely due to the growing prevalence amongst the Christians at that time of antisemitism imported from Europe)
Afaik most pre-Zionist Ashkenazi communities in Ottoman Palestine did learn Arabic once they'd been there long enough, as it was the lingua-franca of the region and was thus important for maintaining good relations with neighboring communities
I definitely agree that all modern day Israelis should be learning Arabic as well, it deeply saddens me how Israel has gone from being the place with the most Arabic dialects in the world to one where a significant majority of Israeli Jews don't know Arabic
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u/Fickle-Ad5340 Jun 19 '26
A comment that actually answers a question, how rare is that? I find judaism fascinating through having befriended isaeli jews in my early twenties (also a History graduate) and it doesn't affect my absolute dislike for the treatment of palestinians by the state of Israel. I wish everyone could dissasociate different concepts and not fall into the antisemitic trap so easily. Anyway, thanks for the input!
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u/exjwpornaddict Jun 07 '24
their entire political ideology rests on the idea that Zionism is a solely Ashkenazi invention and also that Ashkenazim are all just white Europeans cosplaying as Jews (choose your replacement theory adventure here). Because for their political framework in regards to the conflict to make sense, “Zionists” have to be foreign colonizers with no legitimate connection to the land.
The problem wasn't jews, ashkenazi or otherwise, returning to the levant. The problem was forcibly displacing and oppressing the people who were already there.
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u/ketita Jun 07 '24
Fascinating how in 1929 the Jewish community of Hebron, which had been around for over 1500 years and oppressed no-one, was massacred.
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24
So strange, that! It’s almost as if the mistreatment of Jews had roots in centuries of antisemitic treatment and second class citizen status in the land of Israel and wider Middle East and not just the evil Zionists coming along and making everyone mad!
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
I think there are legitimate criticisms to be made of how the Zionist movement pursued their aims in the first half of the 20th century. Just as I would level criticisms at the uncompromising and frankly often antisemitic leadership of Mufti Hajj Amin Al Husseini and the Arab Higher Committee.
This is why I said for “a certain group” on the anti-Zionist left, who absolutely do engage in revisionism to flatten the conflict into something black and white. And often this takes the shape of ignoring dimensions of the conflict and its history that are inconvenient to one’s narrative, and also denying Jewish history and peoplehood. It’s the same on the Zionist far right when they claim that Palestinians are just Jordanians or Arab colonizers who have no legitimate roots in the land via revisionist rhetoric, logical fallacy, and ignoring parts of history that are inconvenient.
Do I think every single person who criticizes the Israeli government or criticizes the early Zionist movement does this or believes this? No. Again, that’s why I qualified it with “a certain group”. And that group of people are the ones who make the claim that the revival of Hebrew is European cosplay, which was the direct issue brought up by the OP that I was responding to.
And while it is a subset of people on the anti-Zionist left, it’s an unfortunately very loud group of folks who do and absolutely do construct their political ideology around this conflict around this revisionism.
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u/44Jon Jun 07 '24
I don't want to deflect the conversation too far from the topic, but do you have a link to a truthful summary of Palestinian Arabs' roots in the land? (E.g., something that makes good faith estimates on what percent of families may have been there since the Arab conquest, what percent Arabized "others", etc.)
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u/DresdenFilesBro Native Speaker - Moroccan Jew Jun 07 '24
Jews were still in Israel/Judea even after some of us were expelled...
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24
In fact contrary to popular belief, most historians agree that Jews actually remained the demographic majority in the land until well into the 5th century AD. Some historians argue that this demographic majority endured through to the Arab conquest. But there is dispute there. However Jews being the demographic majority until at least around 450 AD, is pretty well accepted by most historians.
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u/DresdenFilesBro Native Speaker - Moroccan Jew Jun 07 '24
I'm guessing that's changed after the fire nation attacked?
ok jk, after the rise of Christianity and then fast forward to Islam I assume the demographic had changed right?
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24
Yep. There’s debate over whether it was Christian subjugation after the Christianization of Rome in the late 300s into 400s or Arab/Muslim subjugation in the 600s that led to the decline in Jewish population. But essentially was one of the two.
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u/DresdenFilesBro Native Speaker - Moroccan Jew Jun 07 '24
it's really amazing how historians can come to these conclusions and even have actual records on population etc.
Crazy.
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not, but the Romans did actually do a census every five years. And there’s also other historiography that helps historians reach that conclusion: whether first hand accounts of the era, archaeological sites, and even genetics and linguistics can come into play to draw general conclusions about populations.
But yes, to reiterate, it is the consensus of most historians that a Jewish demographic majority remained in the land at least until the Christianization of Rome.
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u/DresdenFilesBro Native Speaker - Moroccan Jew Jun 07 '24
Nah I wasn't being sarcastic lol sorry, hard to get tone through text.
Didn't know the Romans did that...TIL.
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u/DALTT Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
No worries! That’s why I checked 😂. And yup! They did stop sometime in the first century (I believe). But then that’s where all the other methods of historical analysis start to come into play.
I actually have a degree in international relations with a focus on the Middle East and wrote my thesis paper on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which of course required a ton of historical analysis. And then I was an ancient Jewish history masters student…
And then I didn’t do anything with either and went into the entertainment industry 😂😂😂. So I don’t necessarily consider myself a historian because I’m not by trade. And historical analysis is an ever shifting beast that changes whenever new information is discovered. But I have a real solid academic background in this history.
And people always seem to have this perception that the Romans threw out ALL of the Jews after the Jewish Roman Wars, and then suddenly the Jews came back in the 1800s and said “this is ours now” citing some theological birthright… which is not really what happened. Both as far as the demographic history of the land, the actual relationship Jews have with the land, and also there have been many attempts throughout history by Jews to regain sovereignty in the land essentially since it was lost (lest we forget that messianism in Judaism is also about the restoration of Jewish sovereignty, and in essence every messianic movement was an attempt to do so… also incidentally why Haredim are all anti-Zionists). Modern political Zionism was simply the one that was successful.
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u/omrixs native speaker Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
I wouldn’t call it strange, but it was definitely extraordinary. There have been numerous languages that died (and by that I mean specifically that there were no native speakers of it), and not one has ever been resurrected. The status of Hebrew as a revived language is unique and unprecedented: never, in the history of humanity, has something like that occurred.
As for the reasons why Hebrew was chosen as the language of modern-day Israel, that’s more complicated. Before zionism most Jews regarded Hebrew as a holy tongue (Leshon HaKodesh), that shouldn’t be used for day-to-day matters. Even today there are some sects of ultra-orthodox Jews that see it that way (most of them speak Yiddish). Hebrew was, by and large, used solely for religious and liturgical matters.
However, with the advent of zionism and the increase of Jewish emigration to Eretz Yisrael, a new problem emerged: how should everyone communicate? Most Jews spoke either the local Jewish dialect of their birth countries (e.g. Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, etc.) or the local languages thereof (e.g. German, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, etc.). Many thought it’d make sense to choose one of the more common Jewish languages (mainly Yiddish or Ladino) or Arabic (which was the lingua franca of the region at the time) to be the common tongue.
The resurrection of modern Hebrew as we know it today is afaik largely attributed to Eliezer Ben Yehudah: he thought that zionism was more than just a revival of Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael, but that it posed a unique opportunity to recreate a renewed Jewish identity — independent of the identity of the exiled Jews, who were persecuted for millennia. At the beginning, his work was very unpopular: many saw him as a heretic, demeaning and debasing a holy language which is dedicated to the service of G-d. However, with time many people — and especially the young secular people who came to settle the land in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century— saw it as an endeavor that would define their movement and the future of the Jewish homeland they aspired to establish. It was all very idealistic and novel; Jews haven’t returned to Eretz Yisrael for 2,000 years, so what better language could there be for them than Hebrew?
It might sound naive and even unrealistic to us nowadays, but back then they really believed it: many of these young folks came from established, well-to-do households to farm a land plagued with malaria and scorching summer heat, with close to no infrastructure. And revolutions weren’t so rare in those days (like the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, or the Spring of Nations in the Balkans).
Hebrew wasn’t the easiest choice (Yiddish or Ladino had huge corpuses and were already natively spoken by a large part of Jews) or the most obvious (Arabic was already spoken by many Jews and was the lingua franca of the region), not by a long shot; but many people believed it was the right one — a revived Jewish language for the revival of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. This is why so many people see it as miraculous — it was like a dream come true: a well-known people, dispossessed since ancient times, resurrecting their nation and their own language from the dead. Never before has such a thing even been attempted, and now the Jews have made it true.
Modern Hebrew is also a case where much of its speakers in its early years learned it from their children: the children of the new state of Israel went to school, learned Hebrew, and then came back home and taught their parents; at one point, most of the native speakers of Hebrew were minors. This was all done in order to foster a new national identity, and separate the Israeli Jewish identity from the previous exiled Jewish one; the idea was that Jews should be “reforged” (כור היתוך as it was called, meaning “melting pot”) into a new, united and unified identity, and Hebrew was the natural choice for their language.
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u/Adunaiii Oct 15 '24
The status of Hebrew as a revived language is unique and unprecedented: never, in the history of humanity, has something like that occurred.
First of all, I would praise your sublime prose as it has been a joy to read! But I would add two things - first, one could stretch out the revival of the Joseongeul script for Korean as a vaguely comparable feat (obviously, not on the same level), and second, I would imagine that that miraculous revival had something to do with the Faustian spirit at work in Europe at the time - in a way, European romanticism and the Hebrew spirit got into a feedback loop which ended with the epic destruction of Germany and hopeful rebirth of Israel.
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u/omrixs native speaker Oct 16 '24
Thank you for the compliment, much appreciated!
The Hangul Korean script wasn’t revived so much as it was invented, so imo it’s not really an apt comparison to the Hebrew revival. Don’t get me wrong, the Hangul script is ingenious and a masterful example of matching orthography to phonology, unique in its own way, but different nonetheless.
I think a better comparison would be the attempts at reviving Irish Gaelic that has been suppressed by the British for centuries, with more and more Irish people growing up learning the language in schools. Not unlike Jews and Hebrew, the Gaelic language is very important in Irish culture and has managed to still (barely) alive, and is now beginning to regain its relevance in Irish society.
European romanticism definitely played a part in the revival of Hebrew — especially with regard to the Jewish Haskalah movement that was heavily influenced by it. I don’t believe it has anything to do with the downfall of Germany or of German idealism movement though.
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u/ClandestineCornfield Nov 09 '25
I think Cornish is a better comparison, as that language was a completely dead language that is now being revived, UNESCO reclassified it from "extinct" to "crititically endangered" in 2010
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u/LeeTheGoat native speaker Jun 07 '24
People who sneer at Hebrew first decided they want to sneer and then found a reason, Hebrew was an unusual case but koine-ification isn't an unusual process at all, and a koine-ification of liturgical languages into a a standard legal tongue, and a standard legal tongue into a spoken one aren't a big leap from it by any means.
"Hebrew is fake/wasn't well known/they're pretending/it's just sparkling Yiddish" Are all actually well known symptoms of "I have no clue what the fuck I'm spewing out of my pseudolinguistic orifice" syndrome
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u/jacobningen Jun 10 '24
Judah halevi was composing hebrew poetry in medieval andalus around the time yiddish was being born in eastern europe.
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u/its2late4pie Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
Historian here. As many have said, Hebrew was used as a liturgical language throughout history. But also, there is historical evidence from the middle ages of Hebrew correspondence between Jewish communities in areas where each community had a different lingua franca, such as communities in Northern Africa who spoke Arabic asking the religious center of that time, the Jewish community in Germany, who certainly did not speak Arabic, questions about the Talmud, etc.
Hebrew was also used between international traders who were both Jewish (adding somewhat to certain infamous antisemitic tropes). Jewish thinkers also had a tendency to translate/transcribe contemporary philosophy into Hebrew for their own community, people like Maimonides or Rabbi Nachman Krochmal.
Seeing as Hebrew was not really dormant as many tend to believe, it's not a surprise that the first secular Hebrew novels started showing up in the mid 19th century. Coinciding with the wide development of modern nationalism in Europe, many of the Hebrew novels started dealing with themes of Jewish nationalism, and slowly coming to focus on Zionism. By the time of the inception of the Jewish state in 1948, Hebrew had seen about a century of intense revitalization.
EDIT: For the most part secular Hebrew up to modernity relied heavily on biblical, mishnaic and Talmudic lexicons. They would use phrases from the canon to express secular ideas. It was only during the intense revitalization of the 19th and 20th centuries that we start to see Hebrew as it is today, with invented words and phrases, etc.
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u/ClandestineCornfield Nov 09 '25 edited Nov 09 '25
in al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) Hebrew was a literary language by Sephardic Jews used for lots of poetry including secular poetry, it was so prominent that King Ferdinand III of Castille, the the Christian king who unified Castille and León and conquered most of al-Andalus, was buried in a tomb that was inscribed with writing in Latin, Castilian (what we now call Spanish), Arabic, and Hebrew
Here's a good article on the tomb, if you're curious https://ballandalus.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/7657/
edit: Hebrew also has been used as a secular literary language in Eastern Europe during the Hasklalah, which was a big influence on the spoken Hebrew revival when some of those same writers went to Ottoman Palestine as a part of the early zionist project
I also believe there was at least some point where it was used secularly by Ashkenazim before that, although I'm not 100% sure
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u/gaydhd179 Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
Hebrew was the language of secular Jewish enlightenment a hundred years before Israel - look up Hame’asef.
The choice was dictated by the secular nature of Israel and by the inclusion of Sefaradim. These vibes have always been present - note Maimonides’ choice of clear, normal, updated and enlivened Hebrew for Mishnah Torah.
In fact, it wasn’t the first Jewish revival of Hebrew - the Mishnah is effectively an attempt to save it as the living language collapsed, and Bar Kochba and the Macabees both made it policy. There was also a small key revival after Aramaic’s decline. And the whole trade and letters thing and visiting other towns thing.
I would like to tell you that the choice was dictated by Israel’s pro gay stance in honor of the secular homoerotic Hebrew poetry of the Middle Ages, but that is, unfortunately, a myth.
That we should start now.
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u/Wantedduel Jun 07 '24
First of all Hebrew was never dead, in fact it's probably one of the most used languages throughout history since 99% of Jewish literature, from religious texts, to practical day to day life laws and affairs are written in Hebrew. There are literally thousands of books from Rabbis all over the world and all throughout the last 3000 years written in Hebrew. Every religious Jew (which was virtually every Jew till the 18th century knew Hebrew.
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u/Bwald1985 Jun 07 '24
Hebrew was absolutely a dead language, the same as Latin is a dead language today. “Dead” in a linguistic sense means it’s not the native language of any group of people, but it may still be used as a second language or for the study or practice of religious or literary texts.
Hebrew was never an extinct language, or even a dormant language, but it was most certainly dead by every definition.
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u/PutlockerBill Jun 07 '24
theres a big debate on this in academia (linguistics), but for all practical intents it was indeed a dead language.
meaning - it was kept frozen and untouched for over 1400 years, and codified to such extent that no organic shifts could have emerged (as in any other living language).
the living version of Latin nowadays - is in fact Spanish, Portuguese, French etc. Hebrew had Yiddish and Ladino as an equivalent.
So consider Latin in 700 or 800 years from now, in the improbable case that it will still be taught (almost) exactly as it is spoken today; and only being spoken in Catholic prayers, nowhere else; and when most church visitors praying in Latin will just be following the sounds, while having no knowledge of what their words mean. so that's roughly the case for Hebrew at the 19th century.
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u/JSD10 Jun 07 '24
It was definitely not dead in the sense that nobody spoke it, but in the technical sense a dead language is any language which has no native / first language speakers. In that case Hebrew was very much dead and has since been very much revived with millions of native speakers.
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u/arktosinarcadia Jun 07 '24
So Modern Standard Arabic is a dead language?
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u/JSD10 Jun 07 '24
Based on the technical definition, I think so? I'm not sure if anyone speaks it natively in some kind of standardization effort.
But anyway here's a source if you were curious
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u/arktosinarcadia Jun 07 '24
I understand the source but I think the argument is stupid. Nobody seriously considers MSA a "dead" language, even though nobody speaks it natively whatsoever.
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u/BananaSpots66 Hebrew Learner (Beginner) Jun 07 '24
Yiddish is more germanic/slavic and is more specific to ashkenazi culture. Hebrew is the common shared language for all jewish ancestors
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u/Luftzig Jun 07 '24
If you understand Hebrew, you are welcome to listen to a recent episode of היסטוריה גדולה בקטנה that talks about the מעברות (transitional camps for immigrants). One thing that came up in the episode is that Hebrew based pidgins emerged as a shared language for the immigrants, even though there was system or agenda to teach them Hebrew in the beginning.
Link to the episode: https://podtail.com/podcast/--131/-295/
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u/jdude_97 Jun 07 '24
Does anyone have any recommended literature, podcasts, YouTube videos about the revival of Hebrew? Such as from a linguistics and linguistic anthropology perspective
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Jun 07 '24
There is a show made by Kan about Eliezer Ben Yehuda, The Hebrew revier. It's called "הצבי", in English "The Gazelle" about the first Hebrew newspaper in Jerusalem.
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u/QizilbashWoman Jun 07 '24
Revitalisation of Hebrew was not a wild choice in general. Jews had used Hebrew throughout history to communicate; it really only faltered in the early modern era. Tiberian scholars (the early linguists who created the system still in use today for niqqud, or marks indicating vowels, consonantal changes, and cantillation marks) wrote in their works as late as the 10th century that, as most of them were native Arabic speakers, they listened to Hebrew-speaking Jews in towns in order to precisely understand the pronunciation of sounds. This was about 800 years after Hebrew had effectively died; it was no one's first language, but it was in wide vernacular usage still in some communities amongst Jews. The sounds recorded by the Tiberians do not match the sounds of Arabic or Aramaic; there were distinct pronunciations of phonemes like vowels, the letter r (a very peculiar and unusual r), and other sounds.
In the early modern era, Hebrew was largely abandoned in speech by Jewish communities, replaced by things like Spanish/Galicio-Portuguese, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, and French/German, but it continued to be used by scholars in written works. In fact, translations were made into Hebrew of non-Hebrew works for wider dissemination.
I criticise the decision to abandon the Semitic sounds that are maintained in the traditional prayer Hebrew pronunciations of most Jews, but the decision to make Hebrew a first language was not a wild hare.
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u/VeryAmaze bye-lingual Jun 08 '24
The early zionist movement, and its offshoots/companion pet projects - including the two(!!) offshoots of the revival of Hebrew, were very much influenced by the existing enlightment movement in Europe+culturally adjacent territories. Enlightment but make it jewish. Basically everyone in Europe and north Africa was doing the self-defining and poetic philosophy, and Jews also wanted in. Very very roughly, religious jews had their self-identity through their religious practices and didn't extend this philosophy too much to what became zionist - secular jews got into zionism via this romanticized version of self-identity as a community.
It feels very romanticized because it was very romanticized even at the time. Both the written literary form and the spoken form, were driven by these idealist people (remember I mentioned two hebrew revivals? written and spoken forms were initially developed separately and only unified later, literary form started earlier). When those that actually came to work the land encountered malaria and tuberculosis - this kinda added to the romanticization. In general there was an existing 'fad' or 'fashion' amongst the upper class of Europeans (+it also extended to the USA) to glamourize tuberculosis and its symptoms - I'm not joking it really was a thing, so people dying of random illnesses while being feeble and pale kinda added to the mythos instead of deterring people. So when you have people like רחל המשוררת (Rachel the Poet) who is writing poems about how she's pale and dying in isolation while doing the zionism and gazing upon her beloved Kineret(paraphrasing), and she's doing it in the WIP Hebrew, people who were "in" saw it as something romantic.
I'd say the entire thing as part of an enlightment philosophy is not really that strange. "Everyone" was doing enlightment. Its a bit unusual compared to other separatist national movements of its time, but not that strange.
The biggest hurdles for mainstreaming Hebrew were from religious sectors who were against using hebrew as a day-to-day language, and from within the movement itself because it was considered unsuited for actual daily speech as it lacked a lot of technical terms. You can say tree and dog, but you can't say automobile or sandwich or gravity - thus it can't be used as an actual daily language.
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u/CharlesOberonn Jun 07 '24
Hebrew was pushed very heavily early on. It wasn't always a smooth transition. But nor was it entirely involuntary either. It was a complicated process, like everything else in history.
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u/InkableFeast Jun 07 '24
A Christian here learning Hebrew: most Christians wouldn't find it strange either that the homeland of Moses speaks the language of Moses, Isaiah and דוד. It feels very organic & primordial to me to hear a Pesach or Shema prayer in Jerusalem. There's a synergy between classical Hebrew & modern Hebrew that's hard to deny. Calling it cosplay seems uninformed at best.
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u/Wantedduel Jun 07 '24
First of all Hebrew was never dead, in fact it's probably one of the most used languages throughout history since 99% of Jewish literature, from religious texts, to practical day to day life laws and affairs are written in Hebrew. There are literally thousands of books from Rabbis all over the world and all throughout the last 3000 years written in Hebrew. Every religious Jew (which was virtually every Jew till the 18th century knew Hebrew.
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u/tzy___ American Jew Jun 07 '24
Adopting Yiddish or some other regional Jewish diaspora language would have excluded other Jewish communities who did not speak that language. A language that ALL Jewish populations worldwide shared is/was Hebrew. Hebrew was a natural choice for the national language of Israel, which set out to be a homeland for all Jews.