You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity by Greene Robert Lane

Author:Greene, Robert Lane [Greene, Robert Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440339762
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Published: 2011-02-23T21:00:00+00:00

A Language for Israel, or a State for Hebrew?

It is one of the ironies of history that, as Europe was learning the painful lessons of nationalism, one of the peoples most oppressed by Europeans was taking the opposite lesson: that the ethno-nationalist state was the peak of human accomplishment, to be attained no matter the cost. There are few more painfully ironic examples of the triumph, and the pain, of nationalism than the creation of modern Israel in 1948, achieved with the help of the extraordinary resuscitation of Hebrew.

The Jews, dispersed throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe after the destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple by the Romans, were one of the world’s most storied nations without a state. Those in the Middle East—ironically, in the light of modern times—got along as second-class, but reasonably tolerated, subjects in largely Muslim states. But those in Europe suffered heavily. The oldest form of anti-Semitism was based upon the notion of Jews as the murderers of Christ. Jews were banned from professions, landholding, and simple rights granted ordinary Christian citizens.

But in the age of nationalism, the Jews became not mainly Christ-killers but an unloved ethnic minority. The Central European states had flourishing Jewish populations that had contributed hugely to European culture, through music, science, philosophy and other areas of learning, assimilating linguistically and nationally. Many Jews had abandoned Yiddish and tried to be good citizens of their countries. But they were still objects of suspicion and scorn. And in the eastern reaches of Jewish settlement, especially in Russia, a virulent anti-Semitism led to bloody pogroms against already impoverished, isolated, and unassimilated Jewish communities.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Theodor Herzl, an Austrian, thought he had found the answer. In his pamphlet “Der Judenstaat,” (“The Jewish State”), he proposed a solution for his stateless people: “Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.”

A minority taste at first, Zionism caught on gradually among a certain slice of Europe’s Jews. The World Zionist Organization—which met for the first time in Basel in 1897—discussed where a Jewish state might be established, briefly considering even a home in British East Africa. But the focus of Zionist longing was the ancestral homeland itself: Palestine, then a backward and, as they saw it, sparsely populated province of the Ottoman Empire. Zionists began raising money through the Jewish National Fund and lobbying the Ottoman authorities to allow land purchases in Palestine. European Jews were encouraged to emigrate there to join a small community, the “old yishuv,” of Jews who had never left.

At the same time, an astonishing cultural project began: the reconstruction of Hebrew as a living language. Hebrew had not disappeared. It was nobody’s native language, but Jews in the diaspora still used it for serious writing. Several literary works had been composed in Hebrew: plays, essays, and a nineteenth-century novel. But no one spoke it spontaneously.

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