Revival of Hebrew Language Celebrated by British Jewry

Progress made during the past half century by the Hebrew language in reconstituting itself as a living tongue was cefebrated by Anglo Jewry during a period set aside as “Hebrew Week.”

Sermons at various synagogues and an address before a Hebrew teachers’ conference by Leon Simon, known as England’s foremost exponent of living Hebrew, took place during the week.

There was also a canvass of all known Jewish residents of London to find out the extent to which modern Hebrew has spread and to obtain recruits for the movement.

A Palestinian cabaret and ball, a play in Hebrew given by the Palestinian Students’ Union, gymnastic exhibitions by Habonim and the Maccabi, and lectures on the Hebrew theatre, Hebrew art and the use of Hebrew as an educational and cultural force, were other features of the celebration.

GENERAL REVIVAL SEEN

Writing in the Observer, Albert M. Hyamson has some interesting comments to make on the history of Hebrew and the manifestations of renascence in modern Jewish life.

“The revival of Hebrew as a spoken tongue is merely a matter of fifty years at the most,” he declares, “although it has survived throughout the centuries as a spoken language in little, forgotten pockets of Jewry hidden away in Central Asia, such as Daghestan, and it has always since Biblical days been the language of the synagogue and of Jewish prayer.

“Since the war, however, there has grown up a population to which Hebrew may be said to be the mother-tongue. In Palestine Hebrew is in thousands of cases the first language spoken by the Jewish infant when he begins to lisp. The kindergartens, the primary and secondary schools, the university, all use Hebrew as the vehicle of instruction.

OUTLINES USE OF TONGUE

“With one or two exceptions, all the periodicals, daily, weekly, monthly, are in Hebrew. There is a Hebrew opera, Hebrew theatrical companies—both of which have been seen and appreciated in England — and a Hebrew satirical cabaret. The business of all public meetings of every character in Palestine is conducted in Hebrew. Jewish lawyers plead in Hebrew in the courts, and Jewish judges give their decisions in the same language.

“As an official language Hebrew is accepted and used in all government business. All ordinances, regulations, proclamations and other government announcements are published in Hebrew as well as in the other two official languages—English and Arabic. The coinage, the currency notes, the postage stamps are all superscribed in the three languages. For fourteen years Hebrew has been formally accepted as one of the living languages of mankind.

MANY SCHOOLS AND CLASSES

“And outside of Palestine Hebrew is also coming back to its inheritance. A speaking and writing knowledge is considered essential to successful settlement in Palestine, the overwhelming ambition of half of Jewry. To help towards this end Hebrew schools and classes have been opened in all the centers of Jewry in Europe and America.

“Of course, the necessity for Hebrew as a living language in place of the babel of a score of tongues did not arise at once with the advent of the settlers in Palestine in the early eighties. For them the difficulties of babel did not arise, for they all spoke the one tongue, Yiddish.

“But with them came a reformer who did more than any other individual to create and firmly root Hebrew as a living tongue in his own lifetime. Eliezer ben Yehuda was a Russian Jew who had been trained as a teacher in Paris. He settled in Palestine in 1882. On the journey he taught his wife to speak Hebrew, and never from the day of his landing would he permit any language but Hebrew to be spoken in his family.

BEN YEHUDA’S STRUGGLE

“His children were born and brought up in a Hebrew atmosphere. Hebrew was the first language they heard and spoke. Like all reformers, ben Yehuda met with great opposition, and even hostility at first, but he lived to see—he died in 1922—modern Hebrew, largely his creation, firmly established. Only half his great lexicon of the Hebrew language had been published when he died, but he left behind much of the material for the remaining volumes, and his work is being continued by his widow assisted by a board of neo-Hebrew scholars.

“The Hebrew movement, once the creation of and rooted in the Dispersion, has, it may be said, by now been transplanted to Palestine. There in the national home of the Jewish people is the national center of the Hebrew language, where it can and does develop untrammelled, acquiring new forms and new phrases every day, introducing new ideas and clothing new thoughts almost every time a thinker or an artist in words takes up his pen.”