When Israel Comes Home

I have spoken of my astonishment before the colonization of Palestine-the most surprising and the boldest of the century-before this wave of Jews who keep returning to the land of their fathers, before the fertility that they tear from the rocky soil, before these factories whose busy hum awakes in the desert of Judah echoes never before heard.

That alone is a miracle.

But it was at Tel Aviv that I sensed most of the miracle of the Jews, the miracle born in the passionate will of a race bent toward an ideal of national resurrection.

For do you know what Tel Aviv was like in 1909?

Nothing but a dune on the coast of Palestine, over which the wind blew wildly in the silence.

And here begins a story that sounds like a fairy tale.

In this place, several men from Jaffa-the nearby city-came to pitch their tents in order to escape from the unhealthiness of the Moslem city. The action of these few was imitated by several others, so that within two years the inhabitants of the beach numbered five hundred. Five hundred Jews who perceived the happiness of living together without any foreign element to penetrate into their homes.

And this understanding gave birth to an idea: What if we built a Jewish city, only Jewish, built entirely by Jews; a city where we would really be at home, where we could escape from the eternal reproach of being parasites from abroad; a city which would be at the same time the symbol of the Jewish renaissance that the great Theodor Herzi preached to us.

Immediately, they became intoxicated with the idea. Without issuing a single order, without any official appeal, there came from all over the world the intellectuals, the engineers, the architects, the contractors, all the men who, in their wanderings on the face of the earth, had been initiated into the secrets of modern city-building.

Could they have been more ardent in the reconstructing of the Temple?

The fact remains that, twenty years later, the miracle was real. On the old dunes there rises today a proud white city, where 80,000 people-80,000 Jews-busy themselves contentedly.

Twenty years ago, the chief of the little band that established itself on the dunes was named M. Dizengoff. Today he is the very popular mayor of the astounding city which he himself baptized Tel Aviv-“The Hill of Springtime.”

With my old friend David, who was clucking contentedly into his beard, I walked around the city, over the wide asphalt boulevards, bordered by eucalyptus trees, and running into flowered squares. I saw the private homes, spaced regularly one after another, surrounded by little gardens with palm trees. I saw the concrete buildings, and the banks, and the palatial hotels with the marble walls, and the Opera House whose architectural daring seems to be the premature fruit of the style of tomorrow.

At the corner of Allenby and Benjamine avenues, both David and I were amused at the despair of the policeman in khaki (Jewish, of course) who, beneath his parasol-covered post, was dancing with rage because three magnificent camels refused to hurry up and let the traffic out of a jam.

Seeing the perspiring policeman made us, too, realize how hot it was.

“What if we go out for a little fresh air?” said David.

A taxi took us out on a circular boulevard beside the sea. Behind us, the white city spread its arms along the coast, as though he press to itself this blue transparent water. If I had been told at this moment that the taxi, like Aladdin’s rug, had dropped us on the waterfront boulevard of some San Francisco or some Havana, I swear I would have believed him.

But these men, these women around us were Jews, all Jews, nothing but Jews. These young people, their hair in the wind, dark and blond (yes, many of the sons of Jacob are blond!) had that brilliant, subtle, nervous look, that intellectual something that has always characterized the Jew to me.

And then, most important of all, there was this strange language that I had always been hearing since I came to Tel Aviv. This language I let you guess for yourselves…

I told you from whene came these people: the Ukraine, Hungary, Roumania, Lithuania, Poland…

The thirty-six languages of the tower of Babel, you think?

Not at all: Just one language, but the most unexpected, the most forgotten, the deadest in the memory of humanity…The mothertongue of the race: Hebrew!

and herein lies another extraordinary story.

About the year 1882, there lived in Odessa a little Jew, poor, sickly, a professor of oriental languages. His name was Eliezer Elianoff.

The Zionist idea had not yet been born. Of course, Hess had written his “Rome and Jerusalem,” and Pinsker had published his “Auto-Emancipation,” but these works were still little know. In reality, the notion of regrouping the Jews was only in the process of being porn in Jewish consciences. There were coincident ideas, unexplainable ideas among men who had never spoken to one another. Perhaps, just as we swallow microbes without knowing it, we receive psychic waves without knowing it. And then one day we shout, “Eureka!” Yet we have done nothing but fertilize the germs of an idea that was floating around us. And was this not the phenomena of Herzl who, having written his “Jewish State,” was shown Pinsker’s book, and shouted, “But I made up the same thing. If I had nown about this book, I would never have written mine.”

The fact remains that Elianoff, working obscurely to reunite his brothers in a common fatherland,decided that to this reunited people it was necessary to bring the bond of a common tongue. But what should this tongue be?

And here Elianoff rejoined the ranks of these dreamers, these idealists, these “fools,” whom no reality seems to stop, and whom we find at every step in the new history of Israel.

The Jews, he said, are Hebrews: they shall therefore speak the language of the Hebrews.

Yes, but this language of Moses was not adapted in any way to the needs of our time. It would be necessary to make it supple, to enrich it with a terminology responding to all the innovations of our life, to the progress of humanity in the past three thousand years. Had the Hebrews ever spoken of the automobile, or the telephone, or the airplane?

“What difference does that make?” thought Elianoff.

He went to live in Jerusalem, in a little apartment in the old city, and after having abandoned his Russian-sounding name for that of Ben Yehuda, he began his work.

He began a work so huge that we can hardly comprehend how it all could have come out of the mind of one man-out of the mind of this little man so frail, so sick that it seemed as though the least effort would be enough to lay him low. For it was nothing less than. Hebrew dictionary, in fifteen volumes, that came out of the mind of Ben Yehuda. It was a real linguistic monument in which the ancient tongue of Israel found itself enriched with all the new worlds and phrases called for by our modern life.

Sacrilege! To dare profane the sacred tongue of the psalms, the tongue of the prophets, by lowering it to the commonest uses of domestic life! To speak to your servant, to make the most vulgar kitchen purchases, in the language that Jehovah used in dictating the Ten Commandments to Moses! How impious! The old Jews of Jerusalem, the whole group of weepers who, their arms crossed before the Wall, awaited the arrival of the Messiah who must come, howled their indignation and wept anew.

And when old Ben Yehuda lost his wife, transported her to the cemetery, the exasperated mob dispersed the funeral procession and stoned the coffin which contained the remains of the “accomplice of the accursed.”

Today, the miracle has been accomplished. And perhaps that is the real Jewish miracle.

Today, the language of the ancient Hebrews, revivified by Ben Yehuda, serves as a spiritual cement for the whole spiritual cement for the whole neo-Jewish population of Palestine.

Does not succh a thing reveal a stupefying will in this people? Hebrew! Think of it! The forgotten language of the world, the “Lardest” language in the world-so hard that it is proverbial:

“That’s Hebrew to me; I understand nothing.”-Moliere.

And do not think that these Jews, because they recite their prayers, had kept alive their knowledge and familiarity with the dead language. As well say that if we can recite the Ave Maria we know Latin.

Of the 250 Jewish schools in Palestine, there is not one at this moment in which the studies are not in Hebrew. Of the thousands of colonists in the land, there is not one who does not speak the language of Moses, or is not learning to speak it if he has recently arrived.

And Hebrew is in the mouth of every inhabitant of Tel Aviv. In Hebrew appear the newspapers. In Hebrew are written the placards in the shop windows. In Hebrew you buy your bus ticket, or your cigarettes, or your food in the restaurants.

In Hebrew you make your bargains, you write your business letters.

And in Hebrew, too, you write your love letters.