Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language by Norman Berdichevsky Reviewed by Rael Jean Isaac
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/modern-hebrew-the-past-and-future-of-a-revitalized-language-by-norman-berdichevsky-reviewed-by-rael-jean-isaac.html
To the extent people know the amazing story of the rebirth of Hebrew as a modern language, they are apt to identify it with the single-handed efforts of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, famous for having refused to allow his infant son to hear a word of any other language in his first years.
While not disputing Ben Yehuda’s role, Berdichevsky gives us a wealth of fascinating information about what he calls “the epic transformation of the classic language of the Bible into modern ‘Ivrit’, the national language of the dynamic state of Israel, its everyday vernacular spoken by seven million people.” He describes Hebrew’s influence on English, the inspirational example of modern Hebrew for the revival of a host of “minor languages” including, among many others, Irish, Welsh, Basque, Catalan and Maltese, and the influence on Hebrew of the many languages that bear witness to the three thousand years of Jewish experience, among them Akkadian, Greek, Persian, Arabic, German and Yiddish. None of this is academic or difficult to follow: Berdichevsky never loses sight of his goal of keeping the interest of the lay reader.
In an interesting sidelight, we learn of the parallels between Ben Yehuda and Lazar Ludwig Zamenhof, who created Esperanto. Born within a year of one another in similar homes only 250 miles apart, both sought a career in medicine (although Ben Yehuda’s health forced him to drop out) and both saw their work as a means to enhance the standing of the Jews, in Zamenhof’s case through fostering international solidarity via a common language. (His last major project was translating the Old Testament into Esperanto). Berdichevsky, himself something of an expert on Esperanto, demonstrates how Zamenhof used the logical structure of Hebrew in creating it. Although Ben Yehuda would have to be counted far more successful in achieving the mission he set for himself, Berdichevsky offers the interesting factoid that, after Einstein, Zamenhof is the Jew whose portrait has appeared on the postage stamps of more countries than anyone else. As far as postage stamps go, Ben Yehuda is the loser.
There’s a chapter on Hebrew’s at times bitter rivalry with Yiddish to serve as the national language. And Hebrew’s victory was at times marred by harsh tactics. Berdichevsky writes that as late as 1951, for example, the government agency charged with approving the public showing of films and plays issued a directive banning presentation of a play in Yiddish in Tel Aviv and threatened fines for the actors. Similarly the Yiddish newspaper was allotted very limited access to the government’s control of the supply of paper and had to resort to the black market where the only paper obtainable was yellow, green and red, leading to comical multi-colored editions.
In the Soviet Union, where the heavy hand of government was no laughing matter, Hebrew was condemned as a “reactionary tool” and only Yiddish considered the legitimate tongue of the “toiling masses.” The result was an almost total prohibition of any expression of thought or cultural activity in Hebrew. Berdichevsky writes: “Nowhere else and against no other language (except Esperanto in Nazi-occupied Europe) was such a policy invoked by any regime to strangle a language into total silence.”
The book is unfortunately marred by Berdichevsky’s venture into “solving” the Arab-Israel conflict, a temptation he would have been wise to resist (as would the myriad peace processors of recent decades). Berdichevsky’s “solution” is for Israel to become a “Hebrew Republic” rather than a Jewish state, allowing its Arab citizens to identify with a secular Hebrew nationalism based on territory and language. This is a slimmed-down version of the old Canaanite ideology, advanced by a small group of intellectuals in the 1940s and 50s, which proposed to create a new Hebrew nation based on a union of the non-Arab minorities of the Middle East, all of whom would be united on the basis of a supposed ancient common Canaanite culture. And there was the rub. None of these peoples—including the Jews of Israel—felt they were Canaanites.
In his critique of another recently proposed “solution,” Martin Sherman quotes John Stuart Mill who cautions that without a bedrock of fellow feeling, “free institutions are next to impossible…the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.” The components of fellow feeling are identified by Mill as “identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.” As Sherman notes, this is the antithesis of the situation in Israel—one need only point to Israel’s War of Independence, Israel’s source of enormous pride, to the Arabs “the naqba,” the disaster, the time of their humiliation.
At least the Canaanites saw the need for a myth of common origin—Berdichevsky seems to think territory and language will do the trick if Israel abandons just some of the symbols, customs and laws that make it too “Jewish” for integration of the Arab population. The recent Israeli Arab response to the events in Gaza underscore the foolishness of Berdichevsky’s imagined “Hebrew Republic.” On Frontpage Charles Bybelezer reports that as IDF troops prepared to enter Gaza, Knesset Member Haneen Zoabi wrote an op-ed for a Hamas affiliated news site imploring Palestinians to “besiege” the Jewish state. Residents of Umm el-Fahm, one of Israel’s largest Arab cities, threw stones at police, called for additional hostage-taking and chanted “With spirit and blood, we will redeem you Palestine.” Steven Plaut writes that when injured soldiers arrived at a hospital in the Negev, the local Arab staff cheered –that the soldiers had been wounded. When (false) reports circulated that an Israeli soldier was kidnapped by Hamas, the streets of Nazareth broke out in celebration.
Skip the fantasies about the Hebrew Republic and there is much to enjoy and profit from in Bedichevsky’s Modern Hebrew, published by McFarland and available on Amazon.
Comments are closed.
