Hebrew (Language)

The Language of Judaism

Hebrew, an ancient northwest Semitic language, has served as the principal language of Judaism, even after the Jews ceased to speak Hebrew as their everyday language. The Hebrew Scriptures (‘Old Testament,’ ‘written Torah’) of ancient Israel were mainly in Hebrew. Brief sections of Ezra and Daniel are in Aramaic. The Scriptures were translated into Greek, Aramaic, and other languages, but in the synagogue were and are declaimed in Hebrew. The great commentaries to Scripture, written by the Rabbinic sages of the first six centuries of the Common Era, were written in Hebrew, and philosophy, poetry, and liturgy favored that language as well. That preference for Hebrew persisted, even though it was explicitly stated that translation of Scripture into Aramaic was allowed, and the use of the vernacular for various purposes made explicit.

The prophet Zephaniah (3:9) speaks of the future, in which “I (God) will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech,” meaning Hebrew. Called ‘lashon haqqodesh,’ or Holy Language, the Hebrew language is accorded religious status in Judaism. A community with roots deep in the past, diverse and widely scattered, affirms its coherence through privileging a single language, Hebrew. Hebrew is a way for “identifying one's original religious allegiance” (Aaron, 2000a: 271). “By relating to their language as holy, Jews transformed Hebrew into a kind of ritual object, parallel … to the Torah-scroll itself … part of a religious system” (Aaron, 2000a: 268–9).

Though the Jewish tradition has always attached great importance to the Hebrew language of Scripture and its interpretation, (biblical) Hebrew linguistics as a discipline only arose in the early Middle Ages, particularly in Palestine and Abbasid Iraq. Arabic models served as its source of inspiration; Masoretic scholarship, which had established a definitive text of the Hebrew Bible, secured its textual basis. It was in 10th and early 11th century al-Andalus, however, that Hebrew grammar received its definitive form, which centered on the morphological and lexicographical reconstruction of the triradical Hebrew root with the help of qiyâs, analogy. In 12th century Italy and Provence, Iberian migrants took care of the dissemination of this – descriptive rather than theoretical – Andalusian canon.

From the second half of the 16th century onward, we witness an outburst of Christian Hebrew scholarship throughout Western Europe, fostered by Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation, and often (partly) dependent on Latin models of description. By contrast, Jewish interest in linguistic studies dwindled.

In the 18th century, Hebrew lost its prime position among the oriental languages (from 1781 onward: Semitic languages) to Arabic. Simultaneously, a renaissance of (enlightened) Jewish Hebraism took place, first of all in Germany.

In 19th-century academic Hebrew studies, the impact of the historical-comparative analysis of the Indo-European languages was growing. In Jewish circles, Hebrew studies first of all served the cause of sociopolitical emancipation. One outcome of this was the revival of Hebrew as a living language and the establishing of a comprehensive, secular Hebrew public sphere (from 1880 onward).

Language of Prayer; Languages of Daily Life

What is limited to Hebrew are few items, mostly involving texts supplied by Scripture, as indicated. Here the key is that the recitation must be verbatim, hence not only a fixed text, as in the Shema and the Prayer, but a set text that Scripture prescribes, in so many words, in Hebrew.

But that is only one aspect of the matter of public worship and communal rites. When it comes to prayer, Hebrew was not privileged. The Shema, the Credo recited in worship, could be said in any language, so too the formal petitions or The Prayer par excellence were said in the vernacular. But in the history of Judaism from antiquity forward, the use of Hebrew in synagogue worship predominated. Home rites, such the liturgy, Haggadah (‘Narrative’) recited at the Passover Seder, also were developed principally in Hebrew. Prayer other than in Hebrew, while licit, thus was discouraged: “When one petitions for his needs in Aramaic, the ministering angels do not listen to him, for they do not understand Aramaic” (Neusner, 1995; Bavli Shabbat, 112b).

Aramaic was the everyday language of the Rabbis of the Judaic academies, but they produced in Hebrew the law code, the Mishnah, and its supplement, the Tosefta, and commentaries, the Talmud of the Land of Israel and the Talmud of Babylonia. Their Hebrew differed from that of Scripture. But education in the Hebrew of Scripture and of the Rabbinic writings was integral to the religious nurture of the young (see Neusner, 1987; Sifre to Deuteronomy XLVI:I).

16th and 17th Centuries

Before the 16th century, the study of Hebrew grammar had been an almost exclusively Jewish pursuit. Even if medieval Christian scholars occasionally displayed an interest in Hebrew sources, they never studied the Hebrew language itself. With the exception of a few rudimentary excerpts, they produced no Hebrew textbooks. By contrast, the first half of the 16th century witnessed an outburst of Christian Hebrew erudition, fostered by two intellectual currents: (1) Renaissance Humanism and its ideal of eruditio trilinguis, i.e., the knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and (2) the Reformation, which, preferring the authority of the Bible to that of the Church, called for a new interpretation of Scripture and, with it, for the study of Hebrew.

The first generation of Christian Hebraists turned to the work of Jewish predecessors, especially the grammars of Moses and David Qim$\underset{.}{\text{h}}$i, and to Jewish teachers. The most famous of these was Eliah Levita (d. 1549), author of several introductory works on Hebrew and Aramaic and teacher of, among others, Sebastian Münster (d. 1552). The Hebrew grammars written by Münster and his contemporaries remained rather elementary. They continued traditional Jewish elements (such as the tripartition of the language into noun, verb, and particle, and the word-based approach to syntax), while simultaneously introducing terminology, classifications, and definitions from the Latin tradition. At this stage, this procedure entailed no significant changes in grammatical content and methodology.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Christian Hebraism flourished in Western Europe. In the universities, prestigious chairs were founded. In the faculties of theology, Hebrew was taught as an introduction to the theological exegesis of the Old Testament or to Jewish antiquities, and occasionally for missionary purposes. Christian Hebrew grammars became increasingly sophisticated, often reflecting current developments in the Latin tradition or even recent critical approaches in Hebrew studies. In the Republic of Letters, countless popular grammars of Hebrew were published for a growing audience, and great energy was devoted to perfecting didactic strategies. For many years, the work of the Swiss Buxtorf family (father and son, d. 1629 and 1664, respectively) remained of seminal importance.

In contrast, Jewish interest in linguistic studies dwindled. In Germany and Central Europe, only a handful of rudimentary school manuals was published. In Amsterdam, several Portuguese-Jewish rabbis composed Hebrew textbooks, again to be used in the classroom, which foreshadow later, enlightened, developments. Written in Portuguese, these grammars were organized like grammars of Latin and combined elements from the Western tradition (e.g., the use of cases) with traditional Jewish classifications. Spinoza's Compendium grammatices linguae hebraeae (1677) forms the (rather idiosyncratic) climax of this small corpus.

19th and 20th Centuries

In 19th-century academic Hebrew studies, the impact of the historical-comparative analysis of the Indo-European languages was growing. This trend was strengthened by the discovery of Akkadian and other (cognate) languages. The systematic application of diachronic methods enabled scholars to reconstruct proto-Semitic forms, which for the first time added a dimension to biblical Hebrew that went beyond the authoritative masoretic text. In addition, there arose an interest in other Jewish languages besides biblical Hebrew, notably in Mishnaic Hebrew and Aramaic, due to the growing awareness of the Jewish context of the New Testament.

One outcome of the process of modern Jewish emancipation was the revival of Hebrew as a living language. First in Eastern Europe, where it was propagated as the language of Jewish literature and journalism, then in Palestine, where it became a spoken language. In three successive waves of immigration (from the 1880s onward), a comprehensive, secularized, Hebrew public sphere was established, which was soon institutionalized. From 1890 onward, the process was monitored by the Hebrew Language Committee (which was replaced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in 1953). The chief ideologue of the revival, the Lithuanian-born Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (d. 1922), became a national icon of mythological proportions.

As the language of the State of Israel, Israeli Hebrew soon became both object and medium of intensive linguistic study. Today a plethora of linguistic methods, synchronic as well as diachronic, are applied to all phases of Hebrew and Aramaic by scholars in, especially, Israel, Europe, and the United States.

Language Revival

The 20th century saw the revival of several languages. The best known of these perhaps is Modern Hebrew, adopted by early Jewish settlers in the Near East as their everyday language from the 1890s on. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Modern Hebrew was adopted as the national language. Speakers of Hebrew then had to create hundreds of new words for all the everyday things they needed to be able to talk about in modern life, from tractors and engine parts to postal systems and school-leaving exams. They borrowed extensively from other languages, through loan translations, and they coined words for whatever they needed in agriculture (including fish farming, raising turkeys, and meat packing), plumbing, child rearing, schooling, and marketing, as well as in politics, economics, and science (Blau, 1981; Bolozky, 1999; Ravid, 1995). Israel also set up an Academy of the Hebrew Language to make recommendations about new vocabulary as speakers expanded the existing resources from historical and ritual varieties of Hebrew. The Academy continues to make recommendations today, often lagging behind speakers who take the initiative before any official recommendation appears.

The Irish Gaelic language in Eire faced a similar challenge as the government pushed for its revival as people's everyday language (Watson, 2003; Wright, 1996). Reintroducing Irish in geographic areas where it had not been spoken for several generations, and adding the range of vocabulary needed so it could indeed be used for all everyday purposes presented a formidable challenge. Speakers who had retained their Irish tended to be from rural areas and rural occupations, so, as in Israel, the need for new vocabulary in many social and scientific domains was extensive. Welsh faces similar challenges in maintaining itself as a full everyday language (Aitchison, 2000), as does Scots Gaelic and many other minority languages that often received little official support.

Other languages currently undergoing similar attempts at revival include a number of Australian aboriginal languages and American Indian languages (e.g., Amery, 2000; Hinton and Hale, 2001). In many cases, linguists have been called on to help devise writing systems and help prepare teaching materials, so the languages in question can be (re-)introduced into the community at the nursery school level and up, within the local school system. Few of these revivals, though, have gone as far as Hebrew or Irish Gaelic in building up vocabularies adequate for all facets of modern life. Yet this infusion of vocabulary may be a vital ingredient for endangered languages: speakers' willingness to invigorate the language with new words may well be essential if a language is to remain viable.

Computerized Resources

Similar CD corpora of (different) rabbinical books have also been circulated in recent years in Israel, too numerous to mention here. In terms of software, two operational programs, both developed by Yaacov Choueka and the Rav-Milim team, can be mentioned: Milim, a program for the complete and accurate lemmatization and morphological analysis of any word in Modern Hebrew, and Nakdan, a program for the automatic vocalization of Hebrew texts with an accuracy of 98%.

Finally, a government-supported Knowledge Center for Processing Hebrew has recently been established at the Technion in Haifa, whose mission is to research and produce tools necessary for the intelligent processing of Modern Hebrew, including the building of appropriate tagged corpora and the dissemination of reliable operational software for such processing.

5 Political Agendas and the Writing of Jewish History

The first Jewish writer to embark on such an endeavor was Isaak Markus Jost, a member of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden and one of the pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums. The modern secular education he received as a student at Berlin and Goettingen is visible in his attempt to present a sober and objective view of Jewish history in his nine-volume Geschichte der Israeliten seit der Zeit der Maccabäer bis auf unsere Tage (1820–28). Jost's work is clearly centered on the German-Jewish experience and draws a picture of Judaism as a religion which has lost all its original national characteristics. Depicting modern Jews as a purely religious community was part of the larger German-Jewish struggle for Emancipation. The title of his later work, the three-volume Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten reveals the urge to present Judaism as a religion analogous to Christianity.

When Heinrich Graetz wrote his 11-volume Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart—the most popular such history ever written—one generation later (1853–76), he deviated from the early works of Wissenschaft des Judentum representatives in his stronger emphasis on the existence of a Jewish people and by a more passionate presentation. Although he was later claimed as a proto-Zionist writer, it is important to note that his definition of the Jewish nation is that of a community held together by an essentially religious idea. Like Jost, for whom modern Jewish history begins with the enlightened Prussian monarch Frederick the Great, Graetz located the beginnings of Jewish modernity in Germany, with the appearance of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the Berlin Jewish Enlightenment.

It was not until the late nineteenth century that a clear break from the earlier Germanocentric view of Jewish history and from the strong emphasis upon a ‘history of suffering and scholarship’ (Graetz) appeared in the work of the Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow. His 10-volume World History of the Jewish People was written in Russian but published first in German translation (1925–29). Motivated partly by his own political agenda—he was the founder of the autonomist Jewish movement which represented Jewish diaspora nationalism in eastern Europe—his version of Jewish history centered on institutions of Jewish life in the diaspora, most notably the kehilla, the semi-autonomous Jewish community.

Dubnow was also among the founders of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research—an institution established in Berlin and Vilnius in 1925 to systematically research the Jewish past and present in Eastern Europe and other Ashkenazic communities. In contrast to the traditional German dominance of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums and to Hebrew-language Zionist scholarship, the YIVO deliberately presented its research in Yiddish, the language spoken by the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe.

From the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish historiography was increasingly influenced by new subdisciplines of Wissenschaft des Judentums, such as ethnography, sociology, and demography. The Gesellschaft fuer Juedische Volkskunde, a society of Jewish folkloristics founded in 1898 and led by the Hamburg rabbi Max Grunwald, played a pioneering role in the scholarly research of Jewish folk traditions around the globe. Its journal, the Mitteilungen fuer Juedische Volkskunde, published the most important findings in the field for almost three deacades (1898–1929). In Russia, an expedition to the traditional communities of the Ukraine led by the playwright and folklorist An-Ski from 1912 to 1915 was the culmination of a long search for the remnants of rural Jewish life.

Jewish demographers created their own institutional framework when they established an Office for Statistics among the Jews in Berlin, which from 1904 published its own journal and was closely related to the burgeoning interest in Jewish sociology best expressed in the pioneering works of Arthur Ruppin. Most of these endeavors were clearly related to the ‘Jewish Renaissance’ propounded by the emerging Zionist movement. Zionist scholars reacted against what they alleged to be the orientation of nineteenth-century Jewish scholars exclusively to the Jewish past and broadened their interest to include contemporary issues within their research.

After the establishment of the Hebrew University in 1925, scholars with a Zionist outlook formed a vaguely connected group of Jewish historians, sometimes referred to as the ‘Jerusalem School,’ emphasizing the centrality of Palestine in the course of Jewish history. Their most outspoken representative was the later Israeli minister of education Benzion Dinur (Dünaburg), who in 1935 helped to establish the most important Hebrew-language historical journal, Zion (an earlier series of the journal had been aborted), together with the first professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, German-born Yitshak (Fritz) Baer.

From the very early works of Zionist historiography, usually written by Zionist activists who were not professional historians (such as Nahum Sokolov and Adolf Böhm), a teleological view of history leading to the return to the Jewish homeland is clearly visible. At the same time, the Jewish past in the Land of Israel is placed in the center of interest at the expense of diaspora history. In contrast to most historians, Benzion Dinur thus commences the period of exile not with the destruction of the Second Temple in the first century CE but much later, with the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the seventh century CE. In a similar vein, he concludes the period of diaspora domination as early as 1700, when a group of pious Jews from Eastern Europe made their way to Palestine. In his History of Zionism, 1600–1918 (1919) Nahum Sokolov anachronistically dates the Zionist movement back to the seventeenth century.

While Dubnow's conception of Jewish history represented a corporate view of Jewish diaspora life and the Jerusalem School emphasized the centrality of Palestine, the last historian who attempted a single-handed multi-volume universal Jewish history, Salo Wittmayer Baron, stood for a more positive approach to individuals' diaspora experience. His 16-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews (1952–76) reaches only the year 1650. His more affirmative view of the diaspora was certainly influenced by his own experience of spending most of his life in the United States, where he was appointed in 1930 as the first professor of Jewish history at a Western university, Columbia University in New York.

Jewish historiography has thus to a large extent been determined by the political context, the geographical situation, and the ideological and religious outlook of the respective historians. Since all these factors differed considerably in the Jewish world, the outcome was a highly diverse array of Jewish historical writing – even though, at least up until the second half of the twentieth century, most of those who undertook to write Jewish history were themselves Jews. The destruction of European Jewry, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the flourishing of Jewish studies in the United States led to an entirely new situation for Jewish historiography after World War II.