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A Common Tongue: The Revival of Hebrew in Secular Literature
| Article
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10641 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
2,775 Words |
| Author
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Nechemia Meyers
Nechemia Meyers, affiliated with the Weizmann Institute of
Science in Rehovot, Israel, has previously published two
articles in The World & I: Israel and the Far East: Growing
Links Between Jews and Asians (January 1989) and Bar Kokhba: A
Two-Millennia Debate (July 1990). |
My recent visit to Ullapool, a picturesque fishing village on the northwest coast of Scotland, convinced me that modern Hebrew literature has gained a significant overseas audience. In Ullapool's single bookstore, I discovered a whole shelf of books by contemporary Israeli authors. They are there, the manager assured me, because local people show an increasing interest in them.
Yet the great demand for such books in Scotland cannot match that existing in the United States. In America, according to University of California literature professor Robert Alter, "Hebrew literature has become the most visible foreign literature after that of Latin America--actually more visible than French, German, Italian, Russian, or Third World literature."
This is remarkable, given the fact that until the middle of the nineteenth century Hebrew was virtually a dead language. It was the tongue in which Jews prayed, not one in which they conversed, told jokes, or wrote novels.
The revival of Hebrew as a secular language, after an interval of almost two millennia, began in eastern Europe before the formal establishment of the Zionist movement. Zionism spurred the revival of Hebrew, though it was by no means certain that Hebrew would become the "Zionist language." After all, the father of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl, wrote in Altneuland that residents of the Jewish state would go on speaking whatever tongue they spoke in their countries of origin, and at the First Zionist Congress in 1897, discussions were conducted not in Hebrew but in German.
Where day-to-day Hebrew is concerned, the real turning point came with the revolutionary decision of Jewish pioneers to establish Hebrew-language schools in Turkish-ruled Palestine at the turn of the century. Because the pioneers spoke two dozen tongues, only Hebrew--their common language of prayer--could provide the linguistic glue required to hold them together.
That much was clear. Less so was the method whereby an archaic language, shaped by the needs of the biblical and immediate post-biblical period, could be used in modern shops and schoolrooms. The task required a wholesale infusion of new words, for everything from tractors to telephones, pills to postcards. To some extent, biblical terms were adopted and given new meanings. Where this wasn't possible, words were borrowed from other languages or invented.
Israel
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