Dissertation No Lit Review

7/31/2019 Dissertation No Lit Review

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To what extent did the revival of the Hebrew language aid the formationof a Jewish national identity and strengthen the Zionist movement in

Palestine prior to 1948?



2

“It was a revival not only of the Hebrew language, but also of Hebrew culture and a Hebrewsociety …it was not only that Hebrew was established by the young Yishuv , but Hebrew also

established the Yishuv itself .”1

1B. Harshav and B. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford, CA.: Stanford UP, 1999), p.92.



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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 4

LITERATURE REVIEW 6

CHAPTER ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF A COMMON LANGUAGE TO THEJEWISH NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 10

CHAPTER TWO: WHY WAS THE LANGUAGE OF THE JEWISH NATIONALMOVEMENT TO BE HEBREW? 18

CHAPTER THREE: HOW WOULD HEBREW BE SPOKEN? 26

BIBLIOGRAPHY 35



4

INTRODUCTION

Political Zionism was an ideological movement, developed primarily by Theodor Herzl#

in the late nineteenth century, which sought to re-establish the Jewish nation by

reunifying the separated communities of the diaspora. It culminated in the

establishment of the State of Israel on 15th May 1948.2

The actual process of reconstituting the scattered Jewish people into a contiguous

nation, however, was a complex one. It involved the creation of a national identity for a

people which had been living and developing at great distances from each other for

almost two millennia. This identity-creation was carried out in a number of ways:

through education was the national message propagated; through a common culture

were the disparate people of the diaspora to be brought together; geographically their

socio-cultural cohesion would be facilitated by a shared territory; politically they would

manage their own affairs. The most important means by which the Jewish national

identity was created, however, was through the Hebrew language. The linguistic

influence cannot be underestimated, it permeating the entirety of the process of nation-

#

Whilst Herzl did not invent the idea of Zionism itself, he is generally credited with developing it as apolitical ideology. See his work Der Judenstaat (cited below).2

A. Shlaim, Israel & Palestine : Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2009), p.xvii.



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building. The adoption of a common language was crucial to “kibbutz ha-galuyot ”, the

ingathering of the exiles as promised by Moses to the people of Israel (Deut. 30:1-5).3

This common language was to be a modernised version of Hebrew, the Jewish holy

tongue, and it was to be spoken in an accent which reflected the melting-pot of the

community the Zionist enterprise was attempting to create – the so-called “Ashkenized-

Sephardi” dialect.4

This study’s hypothesis is that the success of the Zionist mission to recreate a Jewish

national consciousness was reliant upon the revival of the Hebrew language, and thus

would not have been successful had this process not been carried out.

The argument will be split into three stages, specifically:

1) the importance of a common language to the process of creating a Jewish

nation;

2) the reasons for Hebrew’s being the best choice of language;

3) the influence of the Ashkenized-Sephardi dialect on the group’s national

consciousness.

3C.D. Ginsburg, Torah Neviim Ketuvim Be-Ìvrit Ve-Anglit : Èsrim Ve-ArbaÀh Sifre Ha-Kodesh Meduyakim

Hetev Àl Pi Ha-Masorah Ve-Àl Pi Defusim Rishonim, Ìm Hilufim Ve-Hagahot Min Kitve Yad Àtikim Ve-

Targumim Yeshenim ([Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England]: Society for Distributing Hebrew Scriptures, 2005),p.380. 4

S. Morag, "The Emergence of Modern Hebrew: Some Sociolinguistic Perspectives," in Hebrew in

Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (1993), p.214.



6

It will conclude that the revival of the Hebrew language was equivalent to the revival of

the Jewish nation itself, and that without the language the nation would not have been

able to come into existence.



7

CHAPTER ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF A COMMON LANGUAGE TO THE JEWISH

NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The process of reviving a language and modifying it in order that it may become a

vernacular for a newly reformed nation is almost certainly a phenomenon unique to the

Jewish nation in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was

by no means a natural occurrence – on the contrary, it was an active (not to mention

arduous) process, carried out with specific ideological goals. Reason would dictate,

therefore, that the result of this process have some merit, justifying its struggle, and

that there must be some benefit to a nation’s having a common language at all. This

chapter will examine this premise and the influence of language upon a nation, and

conclude that, for the formation and perpetuation of a Jewish national identity, a

common language was crucial.

First and foremost, a shared language is an important marker of group membership,

particularly within the Judeo-Christian tradition.5 In turn, group membership is one of

the key elements of nationalism. One of its main precepts is that humanity divides itself

into discrete groups, utilising certain factors to form these groups, and certain factors to

distinguish groups from others. Of these factors, language is perhaps one of the most

important, a most effective group-delineator, simultaneously marking out both who is a

5J.A. Fishman, Language and Nationalism (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Publ., 1975), p.44.



8

group-member and who is not.6 “Language…is the shibboleth that differentiates friend

from foe”, according to Fishman.7 As Herman would have it, “Language enables self -

identification as both ‘we’ and ‘not-them’”.8 Thus, the philosophy of nationalism is itself

heavily reliant upon language. Fishman elsewhere describes language as “the symbol of

ethnicity”, a further important national group indicator.9

During the period of the diaspora, Jews lived throughout the world in communities

isolated from each other, speaking their own Jewish dialects of local languages, such as

Yiddish, derived from German; Judezmo, derived from Castilian; and Judeo-Aramaic,

derived from Aramaic. Whilst this situation did clearly separate each Jewish community

from the country in which it was situated – non-Jews speaking a different language or

dialect – it was not effective in connecting a Jewish community to another, particularly if

they were separated by great distances; indeed, these languages were mutually

unintelligible. The religious use of Hebrew was something which united them, it is true,

but this was not a spoken language, nor even particularly a language which was

understood, it being very commonplace for the focus of study to be the reciting of

Hebrew, whilst lessons were in fact carried out in the local vernacular. A common

language was therefore required to enable the transmission of culture between the

disparate groups, and to ensure that, once they did all reside in one place,

6H. Giles, R.Y. Bourhis, and D.M. Taylor, "Towards a Theory of Language in Ethnic Group Relations," in

Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations, ed. H. Giles (1977), p.325. 7

Fishman, Language and Nationalism, p.53. 8

S.N. Herman, Israelis and Jews: The Continuity of an Identity , vol. 86 (Random House, 1970), p.14. 9

J.A. Fishman, "Language and Ethnicity," in Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations, ed. H. Giles(1977), p.17.



9

communication between them would be possible. A situation can very easily be

envisioned in which, despite there being many people in Palestine calling themselves

“Jews”, they would live in separate communities speaking only their own languages, and

socio-cultural integration into the “nation” proper would be impossible. As Kedourie

states, “in areas of mixed speech, the unity of the national state is sorely disturbed”.10

A common language was, then, an important effector of group coalescence and

cohesion, but the effect of language on the greater identity of the “nation” must be

emphasised. According to many definitions of a nation, a shared language is a necessity

for a group of people to consider itself a nation. Stalin, for example, in his writings on

nationalism, considers it one of the four mandatory criteria of nationhood. 11 For

Kedourie, “Language…is the most important criterion by which a nation is recognised to

exist, and to have the right to form a state on its own.”12 Herder, perhaps the first

philosopher to write on the subject of nationalism,13 goes even further: “Without its

own language, a Volk is an absurdity, a contradiction in terms.”14

According to Schleiermacher, “Only one language is firmly implanted in an individual.

Only to one does he belong entirely, no matter how many he learns subsequently.”15

Just being able to speak a common language, therefore, was not enough – the common

10E. Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford u.a.: Blackwell, 1993), p.64.

11 J. Stalin, “The Nation”, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith, Nationalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford

University Press, 1994), pp.18-21. 12

Kedourie, Nationalism, p.58. 13

A.D. Smith, Nationalism : Theory, Ideology, History (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity), p.5. 14

In Fishman, Language and Nationalism, p.48. 15

In Kedourie, Nationalism, p.57.



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language had to be the vernacular, Harshav’s “base language of a society”.16 As Fishman

puts it, “without the mother tongue…it is clear that neither…nationality nor nation

would have come into being, nor be what they are, nor what they could be.”17 The

opinion that it was imperative that this mother tongue be Hebrew will be promulgated

in the following chapter, but for now let us content ourselves that any common

language would suffice to re-confer upon the Jews the status of “nation”, as long as it

was a mother tongue, “belonged to” in Schleiermacher’s sense.

For Fichte, the primary boundary of a state is the mother tongue itself. “Those who

speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by

nature herself , long before any human art begins”*my emphasis+.18 It is at this level that

nationalism best operates; it is one thing to reconstitute the Jewish nation by assuring

Jews that they are Jews, and so members of the same people, but quite another for

them to feel that they are one people. Through a common language of thought the

nation is bound together, becoming a cohesive whole.

This is most clearly seen in the arena of education. Education in the vernacular leads to

literacy in the vernacular, and this was the most crucial way in which the language was

utilised by the budding nation-state. It was necessary that the socio-political message of

the nationalism itself be perpetuated by the intellectual elite, and be spread to the

16Harshav and Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, p.89.

17Fishman, Language and Nationalism, p.55.

18In Kedourie, Nationalism, pp.63-64.



11

lower classes, through the mass media. The mass media in Palestine in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was almost exclusively the written word, and

therefore ideological cohesion amongst all members of the nation required at least a

reasonable rate of literacy in the vernacular. As Gellner puts it, “modern loyalties are

centred on political units whose boundaries are defined by the language…of an

educational system”.19 Without a vernacular these political units could not exist, nor

could a “national sentiment” be shown to exist. (To use an example of today, the lack of

cohesion between Flemings and Waloons in Belgium can be seen at heart to be a

linguistic issue, the spreading of a common socio-political message being hampered by

the linguistic disparities between these two peoples.20) Fishman continues, “over and

over again one finds that both the context and form of vernacular oral and written

literature are pointed to, by elites and laymen alike, as inspiring, unifying, and activating

nationalist stimuli.”21 Through national literature the national identity is impregnated

with shared meaning by the commonality of culture. Over time this leads to the

development of collective ideas and memory, yet other important national qualities.

Jabotinsky had different ides of the importance of education: “In national education

what counts is the language, and the content is only a shell…The necessary *sic+

between the individual and the nation is the language.”

22

For him, education serves

only to enforce the adoption of the common language, and important point in itself. It

19E. Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p.163.

20J. Fitzmaurice, Politics of Belgium : Unique Federalism (C. Hurst, 1995), p.2.


22V. Jabotinsky, speech at Conference of Zionists of Russia, Vienna 1931, in S.A. Shur, Hebrew in Zionism

([Haifa]: Herzl Institute for Research and Study of Zionism, University of Haifa, 2001), p.10.



12

is shown by Spolsky,23 Laoire24 and others that effective societal language-switching

follows a process whereby first or second generation children learn the “target”

language at school and in turn educate their parents in it. For the Jewish nation in

Palestine this was most important, as the children would be growing up in a society

where to their peers they would speak only the new vernacular, and it would be their

mother tongue.

The vernacular is so important because of its elusiveness and intangibility. Fishman’s

analysis is that “As other symbols of unity and authenticity become problematic because

of their delimited and evaluable nature the vernacular remains to be reinterpreted in

accord with one’s own most favoured memories and longings.”25 In other words, even if

there is nothing else left of what once bound the nation together, a vernacular is

enough to provide the seed from which it will grow again. This is most appropriate to

the case of the Jewish national movement, where what was sought was a return to a

situation confined to a past era, a heritage two thousand years old which had long been

obscured by the mists of time. It remained codified only in the religion of that epoch,

and that religion’s language.

23B. Spolsky, "Conditions for Language Revitalization: A Comparison of the Cases of Hebrew and Maori,"

in Language and the State: Revitalization and Revival in Israel and Ireland , ed. Sue Wright (Clevedon;Philadelphia (Pa.); Toronto: Multilingual matters, 1996). 24

M.Ó. Laoire, "An Historical Perspective on the Revival of Irish Outside the Gaeltacht, 1880-1930, withReference to the Revitalization of Hebrew," in Language and the State: Revitalization and Revival in Israel

and Ireland , ed. Sue Wright (Multilingual matters, 1996). 25

Fishman, Language and Nationalism, p.55.



13

A common language is also essential for that most pragmatic of a nation’s structural

organisations – the military. A nation requires a land in order to retain its socio-cultural

cohesion and, as was the goal of the Zionist movement, to establish a state. This

nation’s land requires geographical boundaries to prevent the cultural erosion resulting

from the influence of neighbouring communities. In the case of the proposed Jewish

state to be created in Palestine it is a fact that its geographical borders would separate it

from potentially hostile neighbours, and so these borders required protection by an

armed force in order to deter encroachment from these neighbours. Whilst the forces

of the British, under the terms of the Mandate, fulfilled this function for a time, the

Jewish nation would eventually require its own force. Delaisi explains that a common

language is an absolute necessity for the functioning of an effective military machine:

“How were recruits to be instructed if they did not understand the language of their leaders?

How were orders to be rapidly transmitted to these immense moving bodies of men? Above

all, how was moral cohesion between them to be attained?”26

Without a common language the nation’s military would not have been able to function.

Without a military the nation would eventually have perished, whether absorbed into

neighbouring lands and culturally supplanted, or eradicated physically by forces which

had efficient methods of communication.

26F. Delaisi, Political Myths and Economic Realities (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971), p.172.



14

It is thus shown that a common language is integral to the formation, rebirth or

continued existence of a national entity, and that in fact this language must hold the

status of vernacular. This is for reasons of group identification, cohesion, cultural unity,

effective socio-political endeavour and military effectiveness.



15

CHAPTER TWO: WHY WAS THE LANGUAGE OF THE JEWISH NATIONAL MOVEMENT TO

BE HEBREW?

It is clear, therefore, that for a nation to thrive it is imperative that it have a common

language. This chapter will examine why the choice was made that, for the Jewish

nation in Palestine, this language be Hebrew. Below will be discussed the motivations

behind the constitution of Hebrew as the national vernacular, and the effects that this

had on the construction of a Jewish national identity in Eretz-Israel .

Whilst it is debatable whether Hebrew can be considered ever to have been truly a

“dead” language, in the way that, for example, Ugaritic or Sumerian are,° it remains the

case that for around two thousand years it did not function as a vernacular or mother

tongue of anyone, reserved only (to use the linguistic term) for the “H -functions” of

prayer, legal rulings and high literature. It is true that there are documented occasions

when Jews from disparate places, speakers of different mother tongues, who met might

have tried to communicate with each other in the smattering of Hebrew which they

° See for example Harshav (cited elsewhere): “The question *of whether Hebrew was alive or

dead+…cannot be intelligently discussed as an either-or issue…A language called “English” is spoken in the

United States , but is Shakespeare’s English “alive”?...Isn’t it the case that in any language there are layers

of the language that are not “alive” in the sense of being used in daily speech, or even in habitual

writing?...The fuzzy biological metaphor must be dropped – and is used here [i.e. in his discussion] only asa convenient label.” (p.115)



16

knew from Bible study,27 but the language lacked both the basic vocabulary and the

widespread national fluency which would provide the functionality required for use as a

day-to-day language.28 Even the visionary and supreme optimist Theodor Herzl, the

founder of political Zionism, was sceptical of even the possibility of communicating in

Hebrew – “Wir können doch nicht Hebräisch miteinander reden. Wer von uns weiss

genug Hebräisch, um in dieser Sprache ein Bahnbillet zu verlangen? ”29 Yet, from this

virtual absence of vernacular Hebrew use a situation was engineered in which, today, it

is the first language of 5.3 million people.30 To undergo this drastic change required a

vast amount of investment in time, money, hope and effort, and so there must have

been benefits to the use specifically of Hebrew, rather than the already-known mother

tongue of the majority of early immigrants, Yiddish. Spolsky explains:

“*The+ many different social factors involved *in language choice+…may generally be grouped

into two major categories, the pragmatic or instrumental on the one hand, and the ideological

or integrative on the other. That is to say, one chooses to use a language because it is directly

useful (economically, practically, for access to power or control) or because one values it for

some social, cultural, nationalistic, or religious reason.”31

It is my contention that to use specifically Hebrew at the beginning of mass Jewish

immigration to Palestine (i.e. in the late nineteenth century), before it was widely



29T. Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Leipzig und Wien: M. Breitenstein's Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896), p.75.

30Ethnologue: Statistical Summaries, http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size,

accessed 8/5/11 31

Bernard Spolsky in S. Wright, Language and the State : Revitalisation and Revival in Israel and Eire (Clevedon; Philadelphia (Pa.); Toronto: Multilingual matters), p.7.



17

understood or adapted to the needs of modern life, had very little “directly useful”

benefit. Thus, for the first immigrants, the switch from their usual vernacular, be it

Yiddish, Judezmo, Judeo-Arabic or any other of the myriad diasporic vernaculars,

required a strong ideological commitment to the Hebrew language itself, and the ideas

it represented. The reasons for this commitment will be explored here.

Yiddish was considered the natural choice for the vernacular of the (at this point still

theoretical) Jewish state, by virtue of its being the spoken language of two thirds of the

world’s Jews.32 It was, however, strongly associated with the diasporic Jew of Eastern

Europe, reminiscent of time spent in the thrall of other nations’ governments. To once

again take charge of their own affairs by reforming the nation of Israel in Palestine, the

spiritual home of the Jew for millennia (“Next year in Jerusalem!” the cry every Yom

Kippur), afforded the opportunity to reinvent the Jew himself . Gone the image of the

malnourished, ghetto-dwelling “feeble Jew of the Diaspora” (according to Itamar Ben-

Avi, son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) and the “Fiddler on the Roof existence of small-town

Eastern Europe”;33 it was time to become the “Hebrew” - the strong, brave, worker of

the land, master of his own affairs and destiny, as in days of old, through “Hebrew land,

32A. Neher, "The Renaissance of Hebrew in the Twentieth Century," Religion & Literature 16, no. 1 (1984):

p.23. 33

L. Glinert, "The 'Back to the Future' Syndrome in Language Planning: The Case of Modern Hebrew," inLanguage Planning: Focusschrift in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday , ed.David F. Marshall (Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1991), p.229.



18

Hebrew work, and Hebrew language”, the 1906 slogan of Ha-poel Ha-tzair (the Young

Workers’ movement).34

Schleiermacher’s view is that “Language…is an expression of a peculiar way of life.”35

Enmeshed within the Yiddish language was the sociocultural reality of the East European

diaspora, which the very goal of Zionism was to change. To effect this change,

therefore, Yiddish had to be left with the diaspora – a new language was required. As

Katznelson-Rubashow wrote: “Although Yiddish was a living tongue, the tongue of the

people and democracy, Hebrew was the language to express the current of thought that

was revolutionary for us.”36 To choose Hebrew was to choose to renounce the diaspora,

to choose the ideals of Zionism – to effect the national ideological revolution within the

very thoughts of its proponents.

Hebrew had the advantage of not already being spoken as a mother tongue by any

segments of the ethnically-diverse re-formed Jewish population of Palestine.37 As such,

no section automatically had the upper hand, and so there were no ab initio outsiders

within the movement, at least from a linguistic perspective. Everyone could begin from

scratch on the same footing, an ethos befitting the socialist ideals of the Yishuv . As the

language of the religious tradition, the one thing that united everyone (the secular

nature of the Zionist enterprise notwithstanding), Hebrew was the method by which the

34Spolsky, "Conditions for Language Revitalization: A Comparison of the Cases of Hebrew and Maori,"

p.15. 35

In Kedourie, Nationalism, p.63. 36

R. Katznelson-Rubashow, The Plough Woman, ed. M. Samuel (New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1932). 37

Shur, Hebrew in Zionism, p.43.



19

shared cultural backgrounds of all comers could be woven into the fabric of the new

culture.

Morag refers to “The Full Return to Hebrew” as “a process of selective continuation”, “a

mix of perpetuation on the one hand and of rejection on the other”.38 In other words,

there was an ability to pick and choose which aspects of diasporic, and indeed pre-

diasporic, culture were relevant or desirable for the new national spirit. ‡ This is

particularly true vis-à-vis religion: during the period of the diaspora, in order to affirm

one’s identity as a member of the Jewish community one was forced actively to practise

Judaism – to keep the Sabbath and the holy days, to attend religious services in the

synagogue, to observe specific codes of dress, etc. The Hebrew language was a large

part of this religious life. Under a Jewish state the identity-preserving nature of religious

practice would become redundant, instead allowing citizens to take their Jewishness for

granted, as is the case with respect to Christianity in many western Christian countries.

By adopting it into the everyday secular life of the Jew it was possible to juxtapose the

Jewish nature of the Zionist movement with its secular nature – a space was created for

this secular ideology by appealing to the fundamental identity of the Jew through the

use of the religious language in the secular setting. As Kedourie states, “In Zionism,

38Morag, "The Emergence of Modern Hebrew: Some Sociolinguistic Perspectives," p.211.

‡ See e.g. Eisenstadt (cited below): “The Zionist movement aimed not just at the continuation of Jewish

tradition, but at its radical reconstruction.” (p.90)



20

Judaism ceases to be the raison d’être of the Jew, and becomes, instead, a product of

Jewish national consciousness.”39

Equally important is the blurred line between religion and history. By this is meant that,

for example, whilst religion might say that Abraham was the father of the Jewish people,

even in the secular realm this can still be held as a truth, a nation-binding common myth

of creation.

“The sagas of the Norsemen, the vedas of the Hindus, the Pentateuch…of the Hebrews, the

Homeric poems…have served to inspire linguistic groups with corporate consciousness and to

render them true nationalities.”40

Jews in the diaspora may have been able to read the Bible, but for them to be able to

pick up and read the stories in their mother tongue, without having to go through a

translator, is a powerful connection to the secular-historical stories of the nation’s

collective history. To know that one is reading the history of one’s people in the

language in which it was written one is to feel directly connected to that ancestor. This

is particularly important with regard to Fishman’s “inspiring, unifying and activating

nationalist stimuli”.41 If a nation is indeed “a group of persons united by a common

39Kedourie, Nationalism, pp.70-71.

40C.J.H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York, The Macmillan company: 1926), p.17.




21

error about their ancestry”, as Karl Deutsch opines, then reinforcing this error is an

integral part of reuniting a divided nation.42

The fact that Hebrew was not being spoken by anyone, anywhere, meant that,

culturally, the nation was only reliant upon itself – it was free to carry out this “selective

continuation” without recourse to the cultural norms of a parent society. In this way

there was cultural equality both internal to the nation – between its members – and

external to it – between the nation and others. As Eisenstadt notes,

“The fact that this ‘religious’ and ‘traditional’ language became the national vernacular and the

means of communication in a modern society reduced…the possibilities, first that differences

between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernists’ would centre around different linguistic identities

and, at the same time, that there would develop cultural dependence on foreign centres as

major and exclusive sources of broader cultural innovation and creativity.”43

This is important with respect to the cultural autonomy which lends a nation

authenticity. Were it reliant upon, say, French literature to form its cultural milieu it

would forever be subservient to French ideas and French thought. Fishman quotes

Ludwig Jahn: “in its mother tongue every people honours itself; in the treasury of its

speech is contained the charter of its cultural history.”44 This cultural history is crucial to

42K.W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Its Alternatives (New York: Knopf [distributed by Random House], 1969),

p.3. 43

S.N. Eisenstadt, The Transformation of Israeli Society : An Essay in Interpretation (London: Weidenfeldand Nicolson, 1985), pp.89-90. 44

In Fishman, Language and Nationalism, p.45.



22

the fabric of the national identity. With Hebrew speech comes Hebrew culture, rooted

in the words of the glory days of Jewish civilisation, and entirely rejecting the horror of

ghetto existence.

Shur states, “Language is not only a means to convey a message, but the message

itself”.45 Hebrew was this message, modernity amalgamated with the most ancient of

traditions. It was an intrinsic link to the land to which the Jewish nation sought to

return, the language spoken by the heroes of old – Abraham, Moses and King David

stood on the same soil as their descendants, and, crucially, used the same words to

describe it. Harshav comments, “They called Palestine by the old name ‘Eretz-Israel ’

(i.e. the land of the Jews); and the Hebrew language was enshrined as the language of

that land…That…link to a land *was+ missing in Yiddish.”46 Being Semitic, Hebrew was

itself a geographical fit with the territory in which it was sought to be spoken, by its very

nature authenticating the Jews’ presence in the land. To speak Indo-European Yiddish

in the land of Israel would have served only to highlight their status as immigrants, and

the artificiality of the recreation of a nation two thousand years after its rending and

scattering. To speak Arabic would have been the worst choice of all – a rejection of

Jewish cultural and national autonomy, and a refusal to distinguish themselves from

their neighbours, would have bee folly with respect to the attempt to craft a unique

45Shur, Hebrew in Zionism, p.4.






24

categories, based on their diasporic geographical origin: Ashkenazi or Sephardi. (The

Yemenite accent was also a possibility, however its pronunciation of the harsher

consonants – heth, cayin, qoph – was unpleasant to European ears, not to mention the

difficulty non-Yemeni speakers would have trying to recreate them. 47) These labels are

helpful less because of their geographical nature, but because differing patterns of

evolution and usage had lent these two categories certain distinguishing features. This

is so much the case that it is in fact useful for our purposes merely to refer to ‘Ashkenazi

Hebrew’ or ‘Sephardi Hebrew’ and, for the most part, not to distinguish between the

various sub-accents.

Ashkenazi Hebrew was, in some ways, seen as more conservative of grammatical

correctness, in that in speech were preserved the distinctions between all of the fifteen

different vowels (i.e. “a fixed vowel assigned to each diacritic sign”), as were the

distinctions between, for example, the tav with and without dagesh (“t ” and “s”

respectively).48 Sephardi Hebrew, on the other hand, made no distinction between, for

example, the kamats and the patah (“o” and “a” respectively in Ashkenazi, both “a” in

Sephardi), and pronounced both kinds of tav as “t ”.

Whilst Ashkenazi Hebrew seemed therefore to be more authentic from a linguistic point

of view (or at least grammatically paid more attention to detail), it was in fact the case

that its “preservation” of the vowel-distinction was a custom introduced “some time





25

after the thirteenth century”,49 and was not actually more “correct” than the Sephardi.

It is also important to note that some Hebrew words had been adopted into the Eastern

European diasporic vernacular (i.e. Yiddish), which led to certain consonantal shifts,

slurring of pronunciation, gender reversal and other colloquialisms, which were then re-

imposed on Ashkenazi Hebrew through rabbinical exegetic texts, theological treatises,

and so on. Such changes had not taken place in Sephardi Hebrew, due to its not being

incorporated into the diasporic vernacular to any great extent.50 As such the Sephardi

had been able to resist the changes which had been imposed on the Ashkenazi by

regular usage.

To the untrained ears of the first Ashkenazi immigrants, the accent of the long-

established Sephardi communities, particularly in Jerusalem, sounded more “Oriental”,

possessing a foreign, anti-diasporic quality congruent to its use for the Jewish nation in

Palestine. It was suited to the land, as Hebrew itself was, and represented a shift away

from the “oy s” and “ay s”, the whining “singing” sounds of the diaspora.51

For Morag, Ashkenazi Hebrew “formed part of a semiotic system that portrayed the Old

World from which *the early immigrants+ sought to escape”.52 The shtetl was portrayed

through the European consonants and vowels it shared with Yiddish. Harshav explains,



51V. Jabotinsky, Ha-Mivta Ha-Ìvri (Yerushalayim: ha-Mahlakah le-hinukh ule-tarbut ba-golah shel ha-

Histadrut ha-tsiyonit ha-òlamit, 1930). 52

Morag, "The Emergence of Modern Hebrew: Some Sociolinguistic Perspectives," p.213.



26

“The stereotype, first formulated most harshly by Moses Mendelssohn, that Yiddish was a

perverted language…reflecting the perversion of the soul of the Diaspora Jew, was as relevant

for Ashkenazi Hebrew. The revulsion from this dialect, therefore, is a recoil from Diaspora

existence, from the Yiddish language.”53

Thus, to turn away from the old habits of Hebrew-speaking was an important part of the

internal mental-ideological change required for the ingathering of the exiles Zionism

was seeking to accomplish. As the choice of Hebrew over Yiddish represented a

renunciation of European diasporic existence, the Sephardi accent and the Ashkenazi

accent were an analogous pair of ideologically polar choices. Sephardi was modern,

“Hebrew” in Saposnik’s sense.54 Its “Oriental” quality had an authenticity which was

missing in the Ashkenazi system – it belonged to Eretz-Israel ; it represented renaissance

by conjuring up the Jews’ Oriental linguistic past, and casting it in a new light, as

something modern. Just as Hebrew itself was – the new by way of the old.

Ashkenazi Hebrew’s multiplicity of sub-dialects – Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, etc. –

symbolised and legitimised the interethnic tensions which existed between

communities of Jews who had lived in separated territories for centuries (and hence

spoke these different sub-dialects). By all beginning to speak the same accent these

animosities would (at least theoretically) evaporate, or at least their “linguistic garb”


54A.B. Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew : The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2008).



27

would be removed.55 The differences which were perceived to be along tribal lines

would no longer be problematic, as all would embrace fully their new identity as

Hebrews. The “clean break” required from their old diasporic identities would have to

reach as far inside them as their accent if this were to be accomplished.

The finalised, “accepted”, standard accent of Hebrew for the Zionist nation in Palestine

was the product of phonetic convergence between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi

communities, “the lowest common denominator between the two main dialects…the

range of Ashkenazi consonants and Sephardi vowels – the minimal range in each

case”,56 Morag’s “Ashkenized-Sephardi”.

57 From the amalgamation of these two

accents into one, one can observe a microcosmic ideological parallel to the whole of the

Zionist enterprise – the blurring of lines between different group identities in order that

they may become one. An Ashkenazi Jew, once hostile to his “foreign” neighbour,

would feel an affinity with him as their linguistic convergence became an ideological

one.

Importantly, the adoption of the Ashkenized-Sephardi accent facilitated the

secularisation of the Jews which was Zionism’s aim. Morag asserts that, “For traditional

Ashkenazi society, the acceptance of the Sephardi pronunciation was sociolinguistically


56Harshav and Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, pp.164-65.




28

a radical about-turn.”58 Their fixed, inward-looking diasporic moeurs were challenged

by a dialect which did not place great emphasis on the specifics of the pronunciation of

the Bible, at least to the level which pure Ashkenazi Hebrew did, and so too was

challenged the religiously-influenced self-ostracisation so common in the diaspora. It

encouraged the integration of all groups into the society itself, as a whole.

As Hofman puts it,

“A good case could be made for the contention that language variants within a language may

be more powerful reminders of who is ‘we’ and who is ‘they’ than the total silence between

speakers of mutually incomprehensible languages.”59

Thus, whilst a common language is an important focal point for the unification of a

group, as we saw in Chapter One, it is vital that this language be spoken in a common

way. As an example, whilst the people of the USA and Great Britain both speak English,

the subtle differences between their dialects would seem to preclude them from ever

feeling, on the level of identity, that they are one nation. Thus, the common dialect

perhaps did even more than did the Hebrew language alone to unite the Jewish people.

From this perspective it could be said that the choice of this dialect was the most

important linguistic decision of the Zionist enterprise.


59J.E. Hofman, "The Commitment to Modern Hebrew: Value or Instrument?," Readings in the sociology of

Jewish languages (1985): p.54.



29

It must also be noted that, on a class level, the Ashkenazis were the intellectual elite,

and as such it could be argued that their choice to approach the Sephardi accent was a

way of bridging the gap between them and the Sephardis. Whilst the Ashkenazis were

the more powerful, the Sephardis were more “native” to the land, and the trade -off

therefore had bidirectional benefit, providing authenticity to the Ashkenazis and

seeming to seek to incorporate the Sephardis into the higher social strata.

Thus, the choice to utilise the Ashkenized-Sephardi pronunciation was as important as, if

not more important than, the selection of Hebrew as the common language of the

Yishuv , as it removed the socio-cultural barriers which existed between the speakers of

different dialects.



30

Conclusion

This study has made three main contentions. In Chapter One several arguments were

made with respect to the premise that the Jewish nation required a common language:

that it is an indicator of group membership and non-membership; that it is an important

effector of group cohesion; that it is, in many definitions, a mandatory criterion of

nationhood; that it was imperative that this common language operate on the level of

the mother tongue; that it is crucial for the perpetuation of the socio-political message

of nationalism; and that it is necessary for the functioning of an effective military.

In Chapter Two the importance that this language be Hebrew was argued: it

represented a rejection of diasporic existence; it was not spoken by anyone, hence the

linguistic equality it conferred upon all; it allowed the secularisation of the Jewish

nation; it was a link to the nation’s historic past; it promoted cultural autonomy; and it

was geographically suited to Palestine.



31

The case was made in Chapter Three for the imperativeness that Hebrew be spoken

with the Ashkenized-Sephardi accent: it was more progressive than the “default”

Ashkenazi dialect; it was “Oriental” and therefore seen as native to the land; it was itself

a rejection of Yiddish and the experience of the diaspora; it was a link to the pre-exilic

condition of the Jews; it facilitated the erosion of the tribal differences between the

disparate Ashkenazi sects; finally, it allowed the ideological convergence between the

Ashkenazi and Sephardi members of the new nation.

It has been shown, therefore, that, for the Jewish nation in Palestine prior to the

foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, a common language was necessary; that this

language needed to be Hebrew; and that it must be spoken in the Ashkenized-Sephardi

accent. Without these three aspects it is probable that the Zionist mission would have

been a failure.



32

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