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Sunday, June 17, 2007

Violins and Velvet Elvises: The Challenges of Modern Hebrew

In the previous blog, we began to discuss the ideological (and sometimes agenda-driven) roots of Modern Hebrew.

I have always marveled at the fact that the Hebrew language was actually revived and implemented, to the extent that it is the official language of a country, used in all of its governmental and public institutions, and spoken by nearly every one of its citizens, who number over 7 million.  At the same time, I have always wondered what price was paid by the decision to use a language that, given the vast change in reality that had occurred since its usage, would have to be constructed, almost entirely.  Why did the Hebrew Revivalists win out, as opposed to people like Theodor Herzl, who felt that Jews should continue to speak and be educated in their native languages?  Granted, Herzl was generally flexible about the realization of the idea of the Jewish State, as evidenced by his willingness to consider alternate locations such as Uganda.  But at the drawing board, all ideas are legitimate.  Why Hebrew?

Maybe that sounds like an absurd question.  Indeed, I know a lot of people who would be really offended by it.  One may argue--primarily from an ideological aesthetic--what do you mean? Hebrew is the native language of the Jewish people!  But during Ben Yehuda’s time that was completely untrue, and it had been untrue since the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 138 CE.  Actually, it is more likely that Aramaic had replaced Hebrew as the Jewish language as early as the second century BCE.  There had not been a national language of the Jewish people since the defeat of Bar Kokhba and the onset of the Diaspora, although there have been many Jewish languages.  Most of these languages possess far more heritage than Modern Hebrew, which at this point is only around 120 years old.  Consider Yiddish, for example, which split off from German roughly at the same time as Dutch.  For over a thousand years, the Yiddish language bound together the entirety of Ashkenazi Jewry worldwide, with the exception of Western European Ashkenazim, and “Oberlandische” Hungarian Jews.  It is a language which is still used, and continues to evolve.  Although its primary speakers in this day and age are Chassidic and Yerushalmi Jews (the fastest-growing segment of world Jewry, BTW), at one point virtually all Ashkenazim spoke Yiddish. 

Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, was in use by Sephardim from the time of the Middle Ages and is still somewhat in use today, albeit to a much smaller extent than Hebrew.  Many of the Ladino-speaking communities were eradicated during the Holocaust, and there was little transmission of the language to the post-Holocaust generation.  Those who emigrated to Israel largely adopted Modern Hebrew and have not continued to use Ladino.

And in the land of Israel itself, the Jews have spoken Aramaic, Greek, Arabic and a host of other languages since the Bar Kokhba revolt--but almost never Hebrew. 

Israeli expatriate academicians Azzan Yadin and Gilh’ad Zuckermann co-authored an article entitled, “Blorít – Pagans’ Mohawk or Sabras’ Forelock?:Ideologically Manipulative Secularization of Hebrew Terms in Socialist Zionist Israeli”, which is extremely eye-opening.  The title is somewhat confusing to the uninitiated.  Permit me to explain.  The term blorit refers to a Mohawk-like hairstyle worn by idol worshipers in the past.  When the prohibition against imitating idol-worshipers is discussed in Jewish legal texts, the blorit is given as an example of what not to do.  However, in Modern Hebrew, the term blorit simply means “forelock”, a shock of hair in the front worn stylishly long, something you might find in a model fashion magazine.  The point of the article is to demonstrate how, like the term blorit, much of the Modern Hebrew language is comprised of terms derived from the lexicons of Biblical, Mishnaic, Midieval, Rabbinic and Maskillic Hebrew, sterilized of their original, often sacred meanings and re-used as mundane--and occasionally, even vulgar--words or expressions in Modern Hebrew. 

If I understand Yadin and Zuckermann’s thesis correctly, this “secularization” of the language has produced a language that Zuckermann believes should be called “Israeli"--not Hebrew--and its emergence parallels the emergence of a Jewish society that has been equally secularized, one where the State has replaced G-d as the central figure of the collective Jewish consciousness.  Bear in mind that these are not just unschooled expatriates who have an axe to grind against their native country; Yadin is a professor of Rabbinic Literature at Rutgers University and, in his own academic way, heavily involved in the study of Jewish texts.  Zuckermann is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Queensland, Australia. 

The pair make a fairly scathing assessment of the relationship between Israelis and the Hebrew language, namely that Israelis, having inherited the ideologically-manipulated “Israeli” language, are less connected to actual Hebrew than they realize.  One ramification of this is that, contrary to the popular notion that Israelis have an easier time going through Biblical literature because they speak Hebrew natively, Yadin and Zuckermann assert that Israelis experience a misunderstanding of both the language and mood of textual Hebrew, a disconnect that was built into the Israeli language by its secular architects.  Their final point is that the language seems to be the only uniting factor between the secular and the religious in Israeli society because of common usage, but also parallels the kulturkampf.

If they are correct, then every native “Israeli” speaker, religious or not, is subject to the same disconnect because of the nature of Modern Hebrew as an ideological construct.  I found that to be a harrowing idea.  Could it be true?  Then I thought about the violin.

What violin?

To explain that, I have to explain something else.  We all know how, when it comes to art, there are pieces that are inspired and executed by gifted visionaries, and then there is dreck that reminds you of the velvet Elvis paintings you used to be able to get at gas stations. 

Frum art is, unfortunately, not immune to this phenomenon, and, if you’re a snob like I am, I am sure that you have experienced the existential disillusionment that results from walking into someone’s home and confronting that picture of an enormous pair of dripping Shabbos candles standing next to the Western Wall.  Uch!  Well, another fairly ubiquitous masterpiece of banality is that picture of the Sefer Tehillim (Psalms) with a violin next to it.  I have often wondered, what is that Stradivarius doing there?

The answer is, King David, who composed the Tehillim, played an instrument called a kinor, which was a type of lyre, the predecessor of the modern harp.  King David’s had ten strings and a soundbox of some kind.  The Sea of Galilee is known in Hebrew as the Yam Kinneret (Numbers 34:11; Joshua 13:27), because of its harp- or lyre-like shape.  However, the word kinor is used in Modern Hebrew to mean “violin”.  Now, the violin is of Mongolian origin, and seems to have entered the European sphere in the 16th century, becoming a popular instrument whose form was modified somewhat two centuries later.  That’s what is sitting next to the Sefer Tehillim in those pictures, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with King David.

What can I tell you?