In 1992, the exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide spoke to Jewish leaders in New York City. Having studied for three years in Jerusalem, he spoke to them in Hebrew as well as English. Aristide was slightly shocked to discover, after the talk, that he was not understood: Most of the American Jewish leaders did not speak Hebrew.
Although unmentioned in Lewis Glinert’s elegant book, that anecdote is emblematic of the paradoxes of modern Hebrew. Even after the establishment of Israel, being Jewish does not always entail speaking Hebrew. Before the establishment of the state, Hebrew was a language familiar primarily to the pious. As the secular Theodor Herzl asked in The Jewish State: “Who among us knows enough Hebrew to use it to buy a railway ticket?” Hebrew was not exactly a “dead” language, but lived only in sacred tomes and learned discourse. When the early Zionists began their push for statehood, the number of genuine Hebrew speakers could be counted on one hand.
The revival of modern Hebrew is only the latest chapter of the story. Glinert begins with the Bible, whose Hebrew shows a variety of levels and covers centuries of language development. The rabbinic texts following the Bible—the Mishnah, an austere and stately law code providing the foundation on which the mostly Aramaic discourse of the Talmud is based; the Hebrew of interpretation (midrash); and the proliferation of written legal decisions—sustained the thread of Hebrew. Yet as Glinert writes of the rabbinic age of Rome: “By any sociological yardstick, the prospects of native Hebrew’s survival were now minimal.”
After the destruction of the Temple in the first century, Jews were scattered among non-Hebrew-speaking populations. As the Aristide incident demonstrates, keeping linguistic proficiency in a foreign land is difficult.
Jews continued to pray in Hebrew, however, and a succession of adepts modified and clarified the workings of the language: The Masoretes standardized the text of the Torah, and the mystics and poets performed exegetical acrobatics with letters and numbers. (In Hebrew, letters have numerical values as well: aleph is 1, yod is 10, and so forth. So each word also has a numerical equivalent, giving rise to ingenious and often far-fetched connections.) Along the way, Hebrew benefited from the efforts of religious genius as well: In 11th-century France, the great commentator Rashi used a compact and elliptical Hebrew to illuminate the meaning of the Bible and Talmud. When, in the next century, Maimonides wrote his monumental law code, he fashioned a form of Hebrew that made the code both a linguistic as well as a legal landmark.
The poets of Spain’s golden age wrote beautiful odes to God, but also poetry about war and wine and women. Other medieval poets, living in a textual echo chamber, composed elaborate referential poem/prayers, called piyyutim. These were not only creative and pietistic exercises, but intellectual feats: Some were of great beauty, others as much puzzle boxes as poetry.
Glinert walks the reader through the phases of Hebrew with sufficient historical background to make the story clear but uncluttered. There are fascinating byways, such as the place of Hebrew in the revival of science during the Renaissance. The early story of our nation is also deeply affected by the centrality of Hebrew to the Pilgrims and their intellectual descendants. The first two presidents of Harvard were Hebrew scholars, as was the first president of Yale, Ezra Stiles, whose university seal still bears a Hebrew motto.
The capstone of the story is the miraculous revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. As Glinert writes: “It was not only necessary to invent words denoting locomotive, telegraph, or parliament; the language would also need to express such conceptual distinctions as people, nation, and state.” It was left to the collective creativity of a new movement, Zionism, and individual fanatics, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, to shape, update, and enforce the new language. (One of the many piquant details Glinert includes here is that the national poet laureate of modern Hebrew, Hayim Nahman Bialik, was forced to apologize in the press for speaking Russian in public!)
Ben-Yehuda would only allow Hebrew in his home, which condemned his wife Dvora to silence for a long time, as she knew no Hebrew. Their son Bentzion was probably the first child in thousands of years raised solely in Hebrew. In conversation with Bentzion’s surviving sister, in 1990, Glinert learns that Ben-Yehuda caught his wife singing a Russian lullaby to their child and flew into a rage. His response evoked the very first “native” Hebrew word: The frightened child said, “Abba, Abba!” (“Daddy, Daddy!”)
Now, an ancient tongue is the everyday language of a people living in their land. There are still debates about how much foreign influence should be permitted—when I’m stumped by a word in a Hebrew newspaper it invariably turns out to be a transliteration of something like “Twitter” or “computation”—and Glinert touches on these debates and others. But this is not so much a book for linguists or scholars: Deeper questions of Hebrew’s relation to other Semitic languages, and its morphology, are barely discussed. Yet The Story of Hebrew covers a great deal of ground in a readable style, studded with stories and quotations that make clear how astonishing it is that out of the fossil DNA of this sacred language, a new creation has arisen.
David J. Wolpe, rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, is the author, most recently, of Why Faith Matters.
