The Story of Hebrew by Lewis Glinert

A bargain book find at my favorite bookstore, The Story of Hebrew is a truly fascinating history of the language of Jews — a language that almost died many times, but managed to survive thousands of years of persecution due to the collective influence of a whole host of people across different time frames and religious denominations. Glinert, a professor of Hebrew studies at Dartmouth College, starts his tale at the beginning — quite literally — by theorizing that the Genesis story subtly implies that Adam spoke Hebrew, and that, also in the beginning, humanity might have spoke Hebrew as well. His book weaves through the ages, and tells the stories of how Hebrew opened the door to Greek and Arab science, served as textual sources for the Reformation, and worked it’s way through to Colonial America, where the original settlers saw themselves as latter day Israelites, and traces of Hebrew thought can still be found in the American political system today. Israel and the Middle East play a central role in this story, certainly, and Glinert does a nice job explaining how the Hebrew language was crucial in the founding and subsequent development of the Jewish State in Israel, and how the language served as a way to bridge the gap between different sects of Jews that flocked to the Holy Land from all over the world in the 20th century. Hebrew may be “dying” a bit in Diaspora settings nowadays, although amongst the holiest Jews, the Orthodox, the textual and spiritual exploration of the old language still holds as much sway as it did hundreds of years ago. The Story of Hebrew is a wonderful historical tool to understand the importance and power of a cohesive, cultural language, especially in this day and age when English is the ever dominant form of communication and assimilation knows no boundaries, even in the Hebrew-speaking Land of Israel.

• how Hebrew has been used in Jewish life
• Jews and Christians have conceived of Hebrew, invested it with a symbolic power far beyond normal languages
• what the Hebrew language has meant to the people who have possessed it
• Jews have taken for granted that they are a people as well as a religion
• Hebrew language and its literature have been critical elements in this national identity
• creativity has driven the Hebrew language and its literature to ever new vistas and forms
• Hebrew is a key element of Jewish identity
• Jewish belief that Hebrew is a key to their traditions and a warranty for the Jewish future
• Genesis is subtly implying that Adam spoke Hebrew
• seems to be implicitly and explicitly telling us that in the beginning, humanity spoke Hebrew
• Bible tells the history in Israel almost entirely in prose
• what people say and do far overshadows how they look or even what the author says about them
• rich in metaphor
• parallelism: organizing verses into two matching or contrasting halves through syntax, semantics, or some combination of these
• Biblical Hebrew is stunningly flexible
• coherent and comprehensible
• twenty four holy books the Tanakh
• Christians call it the Old Testament
• religiously more neutral term is the Hebrew or Jewish bible
• ancient Israelite archive has yet to be found
• 500 BCE to 500 CE, Hebrew found itself in unremitting competition with other languages and cultures
• Judea was the cradle of a reborn nation, newly revitalized form of Hebrew, and a great literary Hebrew canon that would define Judaism as we know it today
• Jewish Bible, world’s most influential body of literature, written almost entirely in Hebrew
• beginning of the Second Temple period, Hebrew education seems to have thrived
• “Find yourself a teacher”
• synagogue, shul; bet midrash, devote the day to study
• 67 CE, Temple destroyed, little was left of Judea
• prospects of native Hebrew’s survival were now minimal
• everyday spoken language commanded minimal respect
• what counted was whether a nation possessed a cultivated written language and a literary culture
• tenuous condition of Judaism
• Sages planned for refocused Judaism entirely on Torah and its study
• create a written record of their teachings and practices
• “Oral Torah”, written in Hebrew
• Hebrew name of God, yud, hey, vav, hey, Tetragrammaton
• “special” name, “unique” name, Hashem (the Name), pointing to the unknowable divine essence
• general term for these rabbinic interpretations of the Bible is midrash
• midrash, enriched the interpretation of Hebrew for centuries to come
• additional and unsuspected level of meaning
• Mishnah, prime code of rabbinic law
• rich lexical heritage that could be passed on to future generations and that Hebrew poetry and prose would draw upon long after Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language
• definitive work of postbiblical Hebrew
• Hebrew prayer gradually became the norm
• blessing prayers also offered a way to address a transcendent and incorporeal God as atah (You), as if He were a family member or friend
• original liturgy poems, poet scholars known as paytanim, narratives into poetry for the cantor to chant in the synagogue while the congregants followed from scrolls
• Jews accepted that the prayers would be recited for feeling rather than sense, and developed a zest for the chanted sound
• Talmud, an interpretation of the Mishnah, Aggadah, a new narrative oriented type of midrashic interpretations of the Bible
• language of talmudic and halakhic discourse up to and including modern times
• Hebrew of the Bible, Hebrew of the Rabbis, between the years 800 and 1000, this comfortable cultural system began to come apart
• cores of what would later become Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewry emerged
• preservation of the written Torah
• Arab conquest of the Middle East, lasting effect on Hebrew
• Arabic of some sort rapidly eclipsed Aramaic becoming the prestige language
• historic project was launched to commit to writing every detail necessary to preserve the biblical text
• masorah or “transmission”
• Masoretic Bibles, Masoretic Notes, alerts of various kinds as well as linguistic and spelling statistics
• Masoretes preserved both the living sound and shape of the biblical Hebrew and biblical text itself, ensured that Jews across the Diaspora would study from mainly identical copies
• rabbinic consensus accepted the creeping inaccuracy of the text as long as it did not interfere with plain meaning or halakhic interpretation
• medieval Hebrew carried a strong symbolic charge
• embodied differences, changes, creativity
• Masoretes labors, sense of Jewish unity
• authoritative, hope that the Jewish exiles would adhere to their heritage and soon to be ingathered to the land of their fathers
• learned language, passed down from teacher to pupil
• eight and ninth centuries, introduction of the book
• early medieval religious scholarship, rested on memorization
• first siddurim (prayer books) were compiled in the ninth or tenth century by Babylonia’s geonim, leading rabbinic scholars to ensure rabbinically approved prayer and to respond to appeals for liturgical guidance
• from 900 to 1492, heart was Sephard, Spain
• increasing differentiation of Diaspora identity
• Arab conquest, new rulers of the Middle East and North Africa, Arab intellectuals adored Arabic
• Babylonia was then the seat of Arab power nerve center of the Jewish Diaspora
• elegant Arabic rendition of the Torah, Tafsir, that captured the plain meaning of the text in a manner in keeping with Jewish tradition
• remains a standard point of Jewish access to the Torah even today
• Maimonides goal, make talmudic law and Jewish doctrine accessible to anyone with just a basic Jewish education
• achieving brevity and simplicity in the web of complexities
• where did the study of Hebrew grammar come from?
• Rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash, intuitive sense of the system
• Hebrew words are built on a fame of three, occasionally four, consonants
• Hayyuj, how to apply the Arabic three consonant theory to Hebrew
• greatly narrowed the range of what was acceptable
• golden age of Anadalusian Jewry, lasted into the twelfth century, but poetry made the study of grammar possible
• Christian world, where Jews had an impetus to transform Hebrew into a language of science
• Hebrew’s greatest contribution to early medieval Italy: a scientific technical literature
• when medieval European kings and princes needed a doctor, Jewish physicians filled the gap, and most of their knowledge came in Hebrew
• Hebrew remained essential for Jewish physicians excluded from Latin or Greek
• twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked a high point of Hebrew technical literacy, spurred not just by scientific curiosity but also by a desire to compete
• Jews of northern and central Europe who later spread eastward to Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine
• for these Jews, broadly known as Ashkenazim, Hebrew was a language primarily intended for religious purposes, though also useful for correspondence, business transactions, and record keeping
• Ashkenazi Jewry for four centuries produced little religious poetry or other creative writing in Hebrew
• young men threw themselves into Talmud and law codes
• late 18th century, Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement
• minority of Jews comprised educated males
• they, the shoulds, were expected to be at home in Hebrew and religious literature
• less literate males, the have nots
• that left half the population: the should nots, women
• almost everywhere, women were generally precluded from studying the Torah in depth
• gap between the sexes can be overstated
• Middle Ages and as late as the 18th and 19th century, Jewish literacy served to emphasize the gulf between Jew and Gentile, affording many Jews a sene of empowerment in their powerlessness, while providing anti-Semites with yet another cause for envy and suspicion
• Renaissance and Enlightenment, Christian Europe suddenly developed a passion for Jewish culture
• early 19th century, this precipitously wanted
• Jews had little part in the Christian engagement with the Jewish bible
• twelfth century, rare meeting of the Christian and Jewish minds
• burgeoning cities, growth of commerce, and improved transportation hand in hand with ecclesiastical reforms and founding of urban colleges and libraries
• twelfth century renaissance, interactions between Christians and Jews seem to have been relatively easy
• by the close of the century, Christian perceptions of Judaism were shifting ominously
• 1168, canon law authority Rufinus condemned the Hebrew text as less reliable than Jerome’s Latin
• knowing Hebrew could help Christians convert the Jews
• those campaigns failed, few Jews were swayed by Christian arguments
• what did the Jews have that Christians did not? the Talmud
• in 1239, Pope Gregory IX ordered that all Jewish books in western Europe be confiscated and, if found un Christian, burned
• European culture during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can be summarized into humanism, renaissance, and reformation
• desire to reach back to a simpler, more spiritual past
• kabbalistic tets
• Reuchlin set out to prove the truths of Christianity were encoded in the Hebrew bible
• linguistic alchemy, transforming Jewish texts into Christian ones
• pressed into service of converting the Jews
• mystical enlightenment and the limitless powers that gnosis or esoteric knowledge could grant to man
• Christian Kabbalism could be said to have supplied much of the intellectual confidence that underwrote early modern science
• increasingly, Christian kabbalists dismissed Hebrew altogether, looking instead to the magical and theosophical power of numbers
• Renaissance loved language as other ages have loved wealth and power
• interest in Kabbalah or in the Hebrew language, of course, did not necessarily translate into positive attitudes towards Jews
• thousands of Jewish books that burned in Rome’s Campo and soon in scores of Italian cities reflected the hysteria spread by printed Hebrew books and by the ever growing interest in Protestant Hebraists in the works of the Rabbis
• great protestant bible translations based themselves on the Hebrew original
• Puritans and colonial Americans embraced biblical Hebrew
• some of Europe’s greatest jurists began to appeal to rabbinic civil law and governance as the basis of a free society
• Hebrew scholarship provoked charges of “Judaizing”, especially in the heresy sensitive climate of 17th century Europe
• Tyndale, first ever English translation from the Hebrew, English translation of the Pentateuch fabric for the 1611 King James Bible
• English jurists and political theorists turned to Judaism and the Hebrew bible as a source of wisdom
• the settlers who built New England saw themselves s latter day Israelites
• New England public schools and meetinghouses, a reading knowledge of biblical Hebrew was for a time widely imparted, the only such attempt in the history of Christianity
• Harvard’s first two presidents were Hebrew scholars
• traces of an orientation to Hebrew and Hebrew sources in European thought, the English language, and the American political system can still be seen today
• German Jews opted en masse to turn outward, abandoning tradition and assimilating linguistically
• more and more Jews abandoned their Jewish vernaculars
• Hasidism grew and evolved, placed a special emphasis on the relationship between charismatic rabbinic masters and their followers
• Hasidism did more than create its own style, it fundamentally altered the Jewish philosophy of language
• a spiritual and cultural chasm between western and eastern Jews opened in the first half of the nineteenth century
• western Jews, knowledge of Hebrew declined rapidly
• Jews of Eastern Europe and the Muslim world, separate traditional communities up to the late 19th century or beyond
• heder, one room school often inside the teacher’s home
• beys medrash (house of study)
• formal language teaching
• hevrot (study groups)
• in the modern era, every national language had to undergo a process of modernization
• Hebrew’s, spread of hasidic populism, advent of newspapers, new spirit of realism in the European arts, rise of anti-Semitism, Jewish political response, Zionism
• newspapers, for Hebrew, mere presence demonstrated to the Jewish masses that Hebrew could be a modern language
• 1881, Tsar Alexander shot dead, years of anti-Semitism followed
• Jewish national, political revival, or Tehiyah
• revolt against both assimilation and traditional religiosity
• modernization, part of the Hebrew revival
• all Zionists were not Hebraists, Herzl, assumed German would be the new language of the new Jewish state
• Ben Yehuda, Jews resettled the Holy Land and spoke Hebrew, literature might be saved and in turn the Jewish people might be saved
• neither could survive a Gentile environment in a modern world
• Yehuda got to Israel, only spoke Hebrew in the home
• “first Hebrew child” was his, child for Zionism, Hebrew revival
• Hebrew as a language of instruction
• deep schism, religious and linguistic, between Ashkenazim and Sephardim plagued the country’s Jews
• “Speak Hebrew” movement pointed a way out
• symbol of modernity that could bridge the divide
• Hebrew was romantic and revolutionary
• improvisation and individualism
• mix of the biblical and rabbinic styles
• pronunciation soon emerged that Ashkenazim called Sephardi but to Sephardi ears, had an Ashkenazi ring — stable compromise
• Ben Yehuda, “Father of Modern Hebrew”
• creation of modern written Hebrew was the work of others
• 1917 tsar fell, Jewish renaissance in Russia
• Bolsheviks seized power, Judaism and Zionism then deemed subversive
• heartland of Hebrew culture quickly crumbled
• British in Mandatory Palestine promote literacy and stability by providing recognition and institutional support for the local languages
• recognized Hebrew as an official language — for Zionism, dream come true
• by 1930s, Zionist Hebrew culture was flowering in Morocco
• after the mass exodus of the 1950’s, Arabic speaking Jews were able to adopt Hebrew with ease
• U.S., culture blossomed overnight
• Jewish society took shape 1918–1948
• collective identity emerged, ivri, Hebrew
• adoption of the term meant to evoke biblical Israel rather than Diaspora Jewry
• speaking the new Hebrew (ivrit) being a Hebrew, acting in Hebrew way
• 1930 indisputable literary capital of the Hebrew world was Tel Aviv
• perhaps Hebrew’s finest hour
• mounting Arab and British hostility, horrific reports coming from Europe
• threats served to unite the Jewish population around the Hebrew language
• language and culture were to be the beating heart of this newborn society of Jews
• Ben Gurion, Hebrew the Jewish language of the new state
• Yiddish vanished, die quietly as speakers aged
• hebraize both their given and family names
• certain mode of speech was expected: blunt, simple, talking straight, tough hardened version of farmers and soldiers
• new immigrants were placed in immersion schools staffed by teachers indoctrinated in the belief that they were still reviving the language
• late 1970s, attitudes towards Hebrew changed
• curriculum began to shrink
• Hebrew, Zionism, crisis of confidence
• 80s and 90s Russian immigrants were allowed and encouraged to now find their own way
• hebraization of the Russians and suppression of Yiddish and other Jewish Diaspora languages in the 50s was found to have been unnecessary and even heartless
• 70s, out went biblical names and in came a generation of newly minted names crafted to sound intimate, unpretentious, occasionally strong
• quantity of English words rapid cultural Americanization do worry some Israelis
• Israelis society has been overshadowed by a deep and often painful ethnic cultural divide between Ashkenazim and Sephardi or Mizrahim, a term accentuating Middle Eastern ethnicity and social divisions
• Israeli Hebrew bears the marks of this divide
• Yiddish is becoming a secondary sacred tongue, much like Aramaic
• for many, Orthodox studying the ancient texts and reciting prayers is part of upbringing and daily life
• secular Israelis all but lost contact with the traditional sources
• Diaspora Jews have overwhelmingly jettisoned their Jewish languages
• linguistically, two American Jewish groups most at odds, Reform and Haredim, drifting in convergent directions
• language is a game of chess, the pieces keep moving and the battle lines keep shifting, goals of conflict are largely unchanged
• Hebrew of Jewish life demonstrates what a nation is capable of doing to preserve its linguistic and cultural heritage
• “ethnolinguistic vitality”
• Hebrew as a language and spirit of Holy Writ
• Hebrew as a practical language
• Jews in Israel will effortlessly be speaking and reading a Hebrew ever more disconnected from its Jewish and early Zionist root
• more crowded with English
• Diaspora, bar mitzvahs and High Holy Days for a shrinking number of Jews
• meanwhile, the Orthodox will be perusing the Torah and the Talmud as they have always done