The Hebrew language revival and its effects on unifying Israel and on assimilating immigrants
The increased availability of technology has improved communication in most parts of the world. This interchange among languages and cultures has had a radical impact on the composition of different societies worldwide. Instead of thousands of distinct cultures, there is a trend toward blending and global assimilation. The most noticeable consequence of this has been the extinction of a number of unique languages. Instead of preserving historic languages, people are choosing global lingua francas such as English, Mandarin, Spanish, and Arabic. There are 6,059 languages with one or more speakers and only 80 languages with 107 speakers, a staggering difference (Boroditsky Lecture, Stanford University, Psych 55). Among these 6,059 less widely spoken languages, hundreds will be extinct in the near future.
Language and culture overlap and are inextricably linked, so the loss of a language represents far more than a lost method of communication. Language embodies and reflects its society. It can be the differentiating factor among various tribes. Other sociologic aspects such as rituals, rights, and religion can all be integral parts of a language. Because of this inter-relationship between language and culture, when a language is no longer spoken by a group of people, their ancestral way of life may be pronounced dead.
However, groups and dedicated individuals have started to fight this trend of assimilation. They understand the vital role that a language can play in protecting a culture. Therefore, they are guarding and preserving their individual linguistic heritages. Many Native American tribes in the Northeastern United States have undertaken projects to revive their dead languages. One group is trying to recreate a spoken language from artifacts found centuries after the last native speaker died. As small tribes struggle to bring back their ancestral languages, they may receive inspiration and direction by looking at one of the world’s only successful language revitalization efforts, that of the Hebrew language.
Hebrew is currently one of the national languages of Israel, even though a mere century and a half ago there were no native speakers. Of course, an accomplishment this dramatic elicits questions. How did this drastic change come about? Under what circumstances did the Hebrew language revival begin, and what factors made this possible? How has this revitalization affected modern Israel? How do immigrants now cope with the language differences in Israel?
This paper will address these questions. First, the history of revitalizing the Hebrew language will be discussed. This will show how unique the circumstances surrounding this process were and why they cannot be easily duplicated for other endangered languages. Then, more current experiences of the Hebrew language in Israel will be explored. Last, the experience of immigrants coming to Israel will be examined, and the key role that the absorption centers (ulpanim) have in teaching the Hebrew language and in promoting Israeli nationalism will be analyzed. Hebrew is a spoken language today because of the convergence of favorable circumstances unique in history, and its revitalization has greatly contributed to the strong sense of national identity in Israel, an especially remarkable feat given that Israel is a nation of immigrants.
Clarification of Important Concepts
Observing the vitality of spoken Hebrew in Israel today, it is almost impossible to imagine that one hundred fifty years ago there were no native speakers and that the language was dead. This unexpected turnaround is astonishing because Hebrew has evolved from being used exclusively for religious purposes to being an accepted and essential part of Israeli everyday life.
The term “dead” needs to be clarified because the circumstances associated with Hebrew form an unusual case from the start. While Hebrew was “dead” in the sense that there was no group of native speakers who used it for daily communication, it had never been completely eradicated. Because both the Torah and the Talmud are written in Hebrew (although using very different Hebrew styles), members of the Jewish Diaspora studied in Hebrew as part of their religious observances. However, Hebrew was most frequently used in a written form. No one spoke Hebrew by choice, but only out of religious necessity. Even then it was a broken form of Hebrew as opposed to a fully vibrant and useful form. Therefore, although in some aspects Hebrew was “dead,” it still had a pulse and was ready to be revived.
In addition, it is important to differentiate among the different types of Hebrew. Modern Hebrew spoken today is distinct from the Hebrew spoken in ancient times, Biblical Hebrew, and Mishnaic Hebrew (Fellman, 1973). Although, it shares many similarities in alphabet, structure and basic grammar, it has evolved to encompass a different lexicon than that which was present thousands of years ago. So even though Hebrew has returned, an ancient speaker of the Hebrew language would not understand a modern speaker in any context. Therefore, Hebrew has been revived, but not historically preserved.
Ben Yehuda and the Reemergence of the Hebrew Language
While no single person can take sole responsibility for the revival of the Hebrew language, one early proponent of the idea was Ben Yehuda. Over time, through a massive cultural shift, many Jews realized the importance of this language to their heritage. But Ben Yehuda was the figurehead of the revival process, as he dedicated his life to reviving Hebrew as a spoken language. Born in 1858 in what is today Belarus and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, Ben Yehuda immigrated to Palestine in 1881. Through his study of Hebrew at the Sorbonne and as a result of his introduction to Zionism there, he began to appreciate the importance of having a common language to unite the Jewish Diaspora, and so did everything in his power to promote this movement (Kaufman, 2005).
For thousands of years, the Jewish people tried to maintain their distinctive character and their unity in spite of the Diaspora. Most scholars believed that Jews would be reunited by reclaiming the Palestinian land promised to them in the Bible. The Jewish people were physically dispersed throughout the world with only their religion to unite them. In this historical setting the Jewish dream of a common land and a common language seemed unrealistic and unattainable (Kutscher, 1957). The twenty-one year old Ben Yehuda, however, published an article that captured the imagination and awakened the hope of the dispersed Jewish population. He proposed that emigration and settlement in Palestine was the answer to freeing the Jewish population from outside assimilation. Further, he introduced a completely new term, leomut, which means nationalism, into the Hebrew vocabulary (Fellman, 1973). As a means of achieving this end, he suggested that the only way the Jewish Diaspora could gain a sense of nationalism similar to that of European countries was to have a language unique to the Jewish people. His was thus the defining criterion that galvanized the Jews and challenged them to become a more unified and legitimate force (Kaufman, 2005). Ben Yehuda hoped that the revival and use of the Hebrew language would one day lead to its instatement as Israel’s national language.
Even though his vision was powerfully simple, bringing it to pass was an extremely difficult process. There were no native speakers of Hebrew at that time. The only types of Hebrew commonly known were thousands of years old. And even these (Biblical, Yemenite, Talmudic, Medieval) did not resemble each other very closely (Kaufman, 2005). Therefore, when Jews from different places tried to communicate with each other, they used broken Market Hebrew, which was a mix of all these different types. This resulted in limited conversation because there were so few modern words available in any of these types of Hebrew (Fellman, 1973). Jews tended to use a grammar that was a Biblical and Talmudic hybrid, but it could vary greatly depending on the province or the country (Kaufman, 2005). There was no standardization and generally great confusion. Most only used this broken language as a last resort so that they could communicate with other Jews. No group of Jews, however, used Hebrew as a primary language, responsible for conducting all aspects of modern life. In addition to these obstacles, two different pronunciations of Hebrew, Sephardic and Yiddish, existed in Palestine as a result of immigration by different ethnic groups (Kaufman, 2005).
This was the state of Hebrew when Ben Yehuda decided to undertake its revival. He devoted his entire life to standardizing, changing, and modernizing Hebrew into a more useful form. There were three important components to the revitalization process. These included the exclusive use of Hebrew in his home, the use of Hebrew socially (especially in schools), and the creation of the Language Committee or Language Academy to oversee the use of Hebrew in Palestine (Kaufman, 2005).
Ben Yehuda first implemented his vision in his own home as he and his family agreed to speak only Hebrew in their house. Ben Yehuda’s son, Ben Aviv, was raised hearing only Hebrew for the first seven years of his life. Probably because of the limits and brokenness of the language at that time, Ben Aviv did not start to speak until he was four years old. However, once he did, he became the first native speaker of Hebrew in two millennia (Fellman, 1973). It was through this personal example that Ben Yehuda started to convince others of the practicality of his plan. This tangible evidence of the feasibility of using Hebrew brought his proposal out of the purely theoretical realm. No other family was willing to make such a dramatic change until Ben Yehuda proved it could be implemented successfully.
The next step for Ben Yehuda was to introduce Hebrew into the social spheres. In 1884, he began to edit a weekly newspaper, the Ha-Zevi, written entirely in Hebrew. It was through this medium that he actually started to develop the lexicon of Modern Hebrew. He felt no qualms about coining neologisms, as he filled the gaps in Biblical Hebrew with Talmudic and Medieval Hebrew and even Market Hebrew. In this way, Ben Yehuda created a new, functional hybrid language from his available sources (Fellman, 1973).
Ben Yehuda also sought to influence youthful minds through the education system, so he began to teach classes in Hebrew. He did not teach his students how to speak Hebrew but instead used Hebrew to teach other subjects. Many people became convinced about the efficacy of his approach and so joined his effort to teach in Hebrew as well (Kaufman, 2005). In teaching young adults and children, people who were still impressionable, he reached a motivated and attentive audience.
The last step in Ben Yehuda’s revival process was his work on the first Hebrew dictionary and his establishment of the Language Council. With an increasing number of people speaking Hebrew, the lexicon grew from 7,000 to 50,000 words (Rabin, 1963). Ben Yehuda tried to regulate some of this rapid change and to standardize the language through his thesaurus, Totius Hebriatatis. This enormous project resulted in sixteen volumes of Hebrew definitions. However, it became obsolete when it was replaced by a dictionary compiled by the Hebrew Academy (Kaufman, 2005). This Hebrew Academy was founded by Ben Yehuda in 1903, and its most basic function was to create Hebrew words. The Academy received many requests from teachers who wanted a specific term provided so they could give more precise instruction in their subjects. Members of the Academy first searched literary sources for a possible equivalent, but if that proved fruitless (which in most cases it did), a new word had to be created. There is no exact record of how many different words they coined, but it is estimated to be around twenty to thirty thousand (Rabin, 1963). Most of these terms, however, did not become part of normal usage. Because the council was a committee, their process was excruciatingly slow. By the time they had agreed on a new word, people had already started to use their own terms, rendering the council redundant in this area (Kaufman, 2005). The council later acted as an arbiter, settling disputes over new words. They tried to standardize the language by deliberating on the “best” word and its pronunciation. They took into account the various uses of each term and the source of the word, as they determined how well it would fit into the Hebrew vernacular. Some Jews were understandably offended by what they considered to be the corruption of their sacred language. However, because of the complexity of the situation, it was impossible to appease and to please everyone.
Modern Hebrew started to emerge as a unique language from its beginnings as an awkward hybrid of many different types of Hebrew. There was a resurrection of certain Biblical Hebrew terms, which were redefined so that they suited the new environment (Rabin, 1963). In fact, many words no longer carried the religious connotations they originally had had. Those who created new words tended to base them on Hebrew and Semitic roots and stems (Fellman, 1973). This pattern persisted, as international words were continually rejected in an effort to keep Hebrew as pure as possible. It is also difficult to insert English words, for example, into the patterned Hebrew language, so creation was easier than adoption (Rabin, 1963). Yet this process is not normal, as most modern languages regularly incorporate English cognates into daily usage. In addition to these difficulties, Biblical Hebrew was notoriously poor in formative elements, such as prefixes and suffixes (Rabin, 1963). This issue had to be addressed to bring Hebrew into the modern age. As people started to speak Modern Hebrew regularly, a large slang vocabulary of almost 2,000 words started to emerge (Rabin, 1963). In addition, due to the mixed resurrection of the language, it contained inconsistent grammatical patterns, even when spoken by the educated elite. The younger generation identified with and adopted this new type of speech and so resisted efforts to “correct” it, resulting in this odd mix of a language.
The new version of Hebrew goes beyond being a pure resurrection of ancient Hebrew. Instead, it is an outstanding example of how a language evolves and continually changes to adapt to new environments and uses. The main difference is that Hebrew developed in a much more rapid and artificial process than other languages (Kutshcer, 1957). What usually happens over centuries was compressed into decades for Hebrew. Yet, in the final analysis, the sound of spoken Hebrew was heard in Palestine again.
Why the Hebrew Revival Was Unique
By 1923, the British Mandate of September 29 dictated that the three national languages of Palestine would be Arabic, English, and Hebrew (Rabin, 1963). This was the first official verification that the Hebrew language was again a legitimate form of communication. It is because of this remarkably rapid process that other groups look at the resurrection of Hebrew as a model for their own language. However, the Hebrew language revival took place under unique circumstances that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. Because of these unusual factors, no other attempt to revive a language has been nearly as successful.
First, the Hebrew language is fundamentally connected to the Jewish faith. It has always been necessary for anyone who wished to be a bar or bat mitzvah to have at least a limited knowledge of Hebrew. Therefore, many Jews had had some exposure to the language, even though it was only the Biblical version, before the spoken revival occurred.
In addition, the massive numbers of immigrants who formed the first and second alyiot to Palestine greatly helped the revival (Kaufman, 2005). The alyiot consisted of people from many backgrounds and cultures, so they had no common language or mode of communication. These newcomers needed to be able to speak to each other, making them immediately amenable to the idea of a unifying language. They were willing to work together to bring back the Hebrew language for the sake of the Jewish state (Kaufman, 2005). The act of leaving their homes and all that was familiar to come to Palestine demonstrated their willingness to undertake a new way of life. And adopting a new language was merely one step in that process. The revival of Hebrew fortuitously coincided with this wave of immigration. These immigrants were also favorably disposed to allowing their children to be taught exclusively in this new language. The alyiot were thus an idealistic and committed population, and their love for Palestine and their openness to learning a new language provided the perfect setting for the revival of Hebrew to succeed.
The younger generation was also instrumental in establishing Hebrew as a spoken language. Because they were the demographic targeted through the schools, they quickly embraced Hebrew as their own private language (Kaufman, 2005). It became a method for the youth to communicate with each other without their parents fully understanding everything they said. In a sense, Hebrew was the perfect vehicle for the expression of mild teenage rebellion. It became “cool” to speak this new language. Thus, a new generation adopted Hebrew as its own means of communication. And as they matured, they passed on their language to their children, bringing the revival full circle.
This revival was successful because the necessary conditions were present simultaneously in Palestine in the early 20th century. The dedicated leader Ben Yehuda had the vision of Hebrew as a unifying language and worked tirelessly to standardize and modernize it, making it accessible, and the alyiot enthusiastically learned it as part of their new life in Palestine. In this setting, later Jewish settlers arriving in Israel found a new national identity, as they too learned Hebrew as their national language.
Present Immigrants’ Experience in Ulpanim
The Hebrew language continues to be a unifying force in Israel, as it is fundamental to understanding and participating in Israeli culture. Today, Hebrew is at the heart of the Israeli national consciousness. Because Israel is a country composed of immigrants from all over the world, learning Hebrew is the bond that ties new immigrants to each other and to their new home. Israel has forged a national identity by integrating citizens from Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America. Each immigrant brings aspects of his culture to Israel, and as they all speak Hebrew, the diversity has been consolidated into a cohesive nation (Kutshcer, 1957). Thus, the Hebrew language has provided a synthesizing force that has kept Israel united in the face of world opposition.
Ninety percent of Israel’s Jewish population consists of immigrants or children of immigrants. Therefore, this large population needed (and continues to need) some way of being acculturated into the Israeli way of life (Katz, 1982). Understanding the cultural identity of a nation is an integral part of feeling fully accepted into a new home nation. Therefore, the Israeli government provides Absorption Centers and Hebrew Language classes (ulpanim) to teach immigrants their new national language and to transfer their loyalties to Israel. These language classes are intimately connected with the immigrants’ initiation into Israeli culture. The Hebrew Language Department of the Ministry of Education and Culture supervises the entire process of the ulpanim, from the selection of the teachers to their training, development, and even the choice of textbooks (Golden, 2001). All adult newcomers to Israel are entitled to free language classes at the ulpanim. Normally, the classes consist of five month periods of instruction lasting four to five hours per day. Between the years 1990-1995, there were an estimated 65,000 – 80,000 adult immigrants who attended ulpanim (Golden, 2001). This large section of the population was extremely open to learning about its new country. Therefore, the government took advantage of this impressionability by combining language classes with acculturation. Both education and acculturation involve the transmission of knowledge, cultural ideas, norms, and values.
Israel’s survival amidst its hostile neighbors depends in some measure on its citizens’ commitment to the religious-political ideology of Zionism. Because some immigrants may not fully understand or may not be fully committed to these ideas, the Absorption centers stress the importance of this philosophy. The government of Israel wants immigrants to become knowledgeable about Zionism and to develop a commitment it and to their new country, and then to start to identify themselves as Israelis in an Israeli society. Learning Hebrew provides the ideal opportunity for teaching and reinforcing Zionist ideology among Jews new to Israel.
In Israel, learning Hebrew unifies the country in two ways. First, it allows immigrants to understand and to communicate with each other. Second, it facilitates the vital acculturation process. While these processes can happen independently, the Israeli government recognized the effects of education and so created a hybrid of acculturation and language classes. Children who immigrate absorb Israeli culture through school and through their terms spent in the Israeli national army (L. Federman, Personal Communication, June 1, 2010). For adult immigrants, however, the ulpanim are their only exposure to the Hebrew language in such intensive settings. The lessons are structured around the history of the Jewish population, the religious and historical justification for the make-up of the government, the significance of Jewish holidays, and the values of Israeli society. The content of the curriculum emphasizes national unity, national holidays, national songs, national heroes, national values, and national ideology (Katz, 1982).
These Hebrew classes border on presenting propaganda. The government is intentionally influencing how these adults will think because their introduction to the Hebrew language is biased. For example, the teachers emphasize certain phrases and thoughts in Hebrew and shy away from controversial subjects (Golden, 2001). In this way, the new population is being trained on how to think and on how to be good citizens. The state’s goal is to convince immigrants that the Israeli system works in an effort to minimize dissent and chaos, making it an effective tool for creating a sense of unity, if not for inviting a broad discussion of issues. Past experiences are meant to be forgotten, as teachers rarely elicit conversation about former loyalties (Golden, 2001). Instead, immigrants are supposed to subordinate their backgrounds so that their transformation into Israeli citizens can be complete. Thus, these teachers may take advantage of their power as they teach Hebrew. They assume that if they do not allow immigrants to talk about their old lives, then their national loyalties will shift into the collective consciousness of Israel. Instead of promoting diversity in the population, the ulpanim classes create a homogeneous and well-indoctrinated category of immigrant. Teachers emphasize words such as “rebirth” and “born anew” to give immigration to Israel the most positive connotation possible (Katz, 1982). In fact, one does not “immigrate” to Israel, as the word for immigration is “aliyah,” meaning ascent and connoting both physical and moral upward movement (Golden, 2001).
The Jewish government has done an excellent job of building national unity in the immigrant population through the ulpanim classes. They foster a sense of national pride in a way that educational systems in most other countries do not stress. And for a country like Israel, often isolated in the international community, it is important to have a unified population base. The assimilation process promotes homogeneity and discourages diversity as it unifies the population, demonstrating the power the Hebrew language gives the Israeli government.
Concluding Remarks
Israel is one of the most complicated and controversial countries in the world today. Therefore, it is appropriate that its national language was revived through an unusual process. The circumstances, opportunities, and individuals that all joined together to make the revitalization of Hebrew possible were unique in history and are extremely unlikely ever to occur for any other group. Hebrew would not be spoken today if not for the hard work of Jews like Ben Yehuda and the willingness to adapt and to embrace a new language displayed by the immigrants of the alyiot. Hebrew has helped define Israel as a nation and unify its immigrant populations from around the world. Israel might not be the cohesive, nationalistic nation it is today without Hebrew as its national language. The Jewish population is fiercely loyal to Israel and understandably proud of its sacred language, which transcends simple communication as it reaches into the spiritual spheres.
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