Why Hebrew is Fundamental

By Alvin I. Schiff, Ph.D.
Irving I. Stone Distinguished Professor of Education
Azrieli Graduate School, Yeshiva University
President, National Center for the Hebrew Language

Excerpted from the Journal of Jewish Communal Service WINTER/SPRING 1999

The miracle of the continuity and revival of Hebrew as a living language has impressed people speaking endangered "minor" languages such as Basque, Irish, and Welsh. Linguistic delegations from Spain, Ireland, and Scotland have visited Israel to learn about the various methods of language instruction, particularly the Ulpan, the study institute for adults that stresses oral comprehension, conversation, and daily terminology, and the ivrit be-ivrit approach—the method of teaching other subjects in the Hebrew language. Both of these instructional techniques helped bring about the renaissance of Hebrew.

Hebrew was never a dead language in the accepted sense of the term. Yet, it was revived. It never ceased to be a medium of religious expression for the Jewish people. Yet, it was reborn. This is its mystique, the bipolar power of the Hebrew language. It is the vehicle of a sacred past, of eternal Jewish values. At the same time, it is a major expression of contemporary Jewish vitality.

Even though it was not used or was rarely used as a vernacular in the lands of Jewish dispersion, it was employed regularly during the last two millennia by the vast majority of Jews, wherever they resided, as a language of prayer, study, and ritual observance. And although it did not die, it was revived during the last century as a common, everyday spoken language. This revival in Palestine/Israel borders on the miraculous, since the immigrants who came to Israel from dozens of countries throughout the world and comprised the vast majority of the Jewish population brought with them such a large variety of linguistic baggage.

Hebrew was the common everyday language of the Israelite masses from the time they conquered the land of Canaan until the end of the First Commonwealth with the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. When the Jews returned to their homeland from Babylonia some 100 years later, Hebrew was revived, but not without difficulty. Nehemiah, the leader of the returnees, had to employ strong measures to guarantee the continued use of Hebrew for Bible study, for public reading of the Bible, and for daily conversation. Nehemiah waged the first war in Jewish history against the detractors of the Hebrew Language because he realized that Hebrew was a conditione sine qua non for the survival of the Jewish people, for its spiritual continuity, and for the reestablishment of the Jewish nation in the Land of Israel.

Similar challenges regarding the use of Hebrew by the Jewish people were faced in subsequent periods of Jewish history. During the days of Yehuda Ha-Nasi, Judah the Prince, patriarch of Judea and the redactor of the Mishnah—in 200 CE Hebrew was in danger of disappearing as a national language and being replaced by Aramaic, both as a vernacular and as a means of literary expression. Rabbi Judah warned the Jewish people about the neglect of Hebrew. He meticulously spoke Hebrew at home. The Talmud relates that even his maidservant had such a command of Hebrew that his students learned from her Hebrew words and terms that they had either forgotten or had never known.

Many religious leaders vigorously combated efforts to de-Hebraize Jewish life, to develop a Judaism in translation, to use the languages of the lands of Jewish residence as the vehicles of Bible study and Communion with the Almighty. These leaders helped transform Hebrew into a religious-national value of Jewish life in exile. As such Hebrew became the ethnic-national ingredient ingrained in the consciousness of the Jewish people, a sustaining feature of a landless nation.

For the disappearance of the Jewish community of Alexandria, a vibrant community of Jewish life several hundred thousand strong at the turn of the first century, was ever in their minds. The basis for Alexandrian Jewish culture was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible. The Jews of Alexandria became fully Hellenized as they studied the Bible and other Judaic sources in Greek translation. Philo, the leading Jewish philosopher of the first century CE in Alexandria, studied, wrote, and taught in Greek. It is doubtful whether he had a working knowledge of Hebrew.

And what happened to this formidable Jewish community? Its decline began with the process of Hellenization and de-Hebraization. Several centuries later, after other unfortunate events, the Jewish remnants of Alexandria were absorbed into Islamic culture.

In his seminal essay, "Imitation and Assimilation," Ahad Ha’am (1893) posits that a minority culture in Western society must willy-nilly emulate the majority culture. However, there are two kinds of imitation, writes Ahad Ha’am—absorptive imitation and competitive imitation—and each has vastly different consequences. Absorptive imitation leads to assimilation. The family of Moses Mendelssohn, a founder of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) movement and the Reform movement, believed in the use of German as the language of study and prayer for the German Jewish masses. His family fell prey to absorptive assimilation. Four of his six sons intermarried, as did the children of his other sons.

Imitation will inevitably lead to total assimilation unless the minority culture learns to compete with majority. For Jews, that competition, Ahad Ha’am believed, was the daily use of their national language, which served as a barrier to assimilation.

Ahad Ha’am viewed the role of Hebrew as serving both as a unique expression of the Judaic heritage and as a key instrument of the creative survival of the Jewish people. Every nation, he noted, participates in the world scene in a special way via its national language. The Jewish people’s "national stock" lies in the Hebrew language that is the link between the dispersed Jewish communities of the Diaspora and the link between generations of Jews.

To be a normal language, Ahad Ha’am insisted, Hebrew’s use as a mother tongue or vernacular is not sufficient. The national must incorporate the spiritual and cultural wealth of the nation and its national ideals. As such, the combination of Jewish religion, literature, and language has been the Jewish people’s portable property after the exile began with the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. And when the Holy Land would become once again the physical center of the Jewish people, Ahad Ha’am opined, the Hebrew language would be the bridge between the Land and the Diaspora.

Although the initial steps towards the revival of Hebrew in modern times took place in Europe, its full-blown development occurred in the Jewish homeland. The revival of Hebrew as a modern spoken language began in Palestine in the later decades of the nineteenth century with the arrival from Eastern Europe of Zionist pioneers, chief among them Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

In retrospect, the mystique of Hebrew is its constancy—its uniformity. As Jews resided in countries all over the globe, their ancestral language was influenced in different times and places by Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Polish, and Russian languages. This led to regional differences in Hebrew language usage. Nevertheless, Hebrew maintained uniformity throughout; it retained its ancient structure and character. The essential uniformity of the Hebrew language in its various stages of development prompted the author of the essay on Hebrew in the Encyclopedia Judaica to make the bold claim that twentieth-century intelligent Hebrew speakers with a high-school background are able to read and understand literature written in Hebrew from the earliest times to the most modern. And conversely, according to Charles Berlitz, the prominent American language educator, "If the prophets who compiled the books of the Old Testament could return to present-day Israel, they would still be able to read the Israeli daily press." Both these claims might be somewhat exaggerated. However, they underscore the fact that the changes that took place over time in vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and pronunciation did not transform the fundamental nature of Hebrew.

Currently, Hebrew is used in different ways for different purposes by different people. Many secularists see Hebrew primarily as a vehicle of modern communication and modern literature. In contrast, most ultra-Orthodox Jews, a small minority in Israel, consider Hebrew to be a holy tongue to be used solely for Judaic learning and prayer.

From an historical, sociolinguistic perspective, the Hebrew language is a multifaceted linguistic vehicle of Jewish life from earliest times until the present. Hebrew, in all its uses, contributed significantly to Jewish survival throughout the ages. Therefore, one cannot appreciate the value of Hebrew via any single dimension of the language. Hebrew must be considered in all its forms and variety of usages, including biblical Hebrew, mishnaic Hebrew, rabbinic Hebrew, liturgical Hebrew, modern Hebrew, and Hebrew terminology associated with Judaic literacy and used in the Jewish internal languages such as Ladino and Yiddish. This means considering the use of Hebrew in the synagogue, educational settings, the home, business, the arts, culture, professions, and the street Hebrew’s multi-dimensionalism is its distinctiveness as a survival mechanism. Indeed, it demonstrates clearly that the survival of Hebrew as a Holy Tongue, the survival of the Jewish people in its homeland and in the Diaspora, and the continuity of Jewish nationalism are interdependent.