Modern Hebrew

The exact dawn of Modern Hebrew is often attributed to Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but Hebrew language and literature entered modernity significantly earlier. The first Hebrew-language dramatic play debuted in 1550 in Italy: Ẓaḥut Bediḥuta de-Kiddushin ("An Eloquent Marriage Farce") by Judah Sommo, written in the style of Biblical Hebrew (Saenz-Badillos 1996, Jewish Virtual Library n.d.). For decades afterward Hebrew began being published in newspapers, culminating in the first Hebrew-language periodical, Ha-Me’asef (‘The Collector’), published out of Königsberg in Prussia from 1783 to 1811 (Glinert 2017).

With Moses Mendelssohn rising in the Jewish cultural world began the Haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment (Glinert 2017). Mendelssohn and other figures of the Haskalah believed that “given the vocabulary, Hebrew could express everything as well as [any] European language” they were already familiar with. Newspapers like Ha-Magid, Ha-Levanon, and others covering both Jewish and secular topics, were published in Hebrew in Europe throughout the mid-1800s. Algerian maskilim, or Jewish intelligentsia, frequently submitted Hebrew articles of their own to these newspapers, widely read in North African urban centers (Tirosh-Becker 2013). In order to put together longer texts like these, writers coined or redefined new terminology that could express topics that were not discussed in the Biblical, Rabbinic, or Medieval era - like ‘train’, רכבת rakevet; ‘nation’ עם am, and ‘parliament’, כנסת knesset. New styles of writing were based on that of famed Medieval writers Rashi and Rambam, as well as other rabbinic sages (Glinert 2017). Many consider the first Hebrew novel to be Avraham Mapu's Ahavat Ziyyon (Love of Zion), published in 1853, though this text plays heavily off of Biblical Hebrew patterns (Glinert 2017). This book made it to Algerian Judeo-Arabic after translation by a local rabbi, signifying its importance to the budding Hebrew scene (Tirosh-Becker 2013).

This first experimentation with mass-produced Hebrew literature in Europe was short-lived. Jews largely prioritized assimilation into German culture and peoplehood over tradition and “expanding their intellectual horizons” (Glinert 2017, 170), which sent Hebrew back to the synagogue as its exclusive realm. One exception to this was the Hebrew style employed by the Hasidic movement, born in eastern Europe in the mid-18th century. Hasidic writers adopted the ancient Hebrew practice of oral transmission of text but maintained close ties with their spoken Yiddish, such that Yiddishisms began to pervade Loshn Koydesh (Yiddish term referencing Hebrew/Aramaic, lit. ‘holy tongue’, from Hebrew לשון הקודש lashon ha-kodesh; Glinert 2017). 

At the close of the 19th century, many Jews in Europe turned their backs on the goal of assimilation into broader society and began rekindling the political movement of Zionism (Saenz-Badillos 1996). But in the decades preceding the Jewish state's establishment, many influential and iconic works of Modern Hebrew literature came to the fore, including literary works by Haim Nahman Bialik and journalism by Ahad Ha’Am in the late 19th century (Alter 1988). This crucial period of Hebrew revival was known as the Tehiya generation. Later, giants of Modern Hebrew poetry in the 20th century would include figures like Nathan Alterman, Yona Wollach, and Yehudah Amichai. Each poet drew upon their own combinations of Biblical, Rabbinic, and Modern Hebrew sources, and some were known to combine styles within poems (Saenz-Badillos 1996), just as other writers did with prose, scientific, and journalistic work (Doron 2015). Many of these writers now have streets named after them in Israeli cities, evidencing writers' centrality to the new Jewish collective and the idea of a unified Hebrew culture.

The philosophy of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, “the reviver of the Hebrew language,” was that Hebrew was absolutely crucial to the success of the Zionist project and the development of settlements in Palestine (Saenz-Badillos 1996). Based in Jerusalem from 1881, Ben Yehuda set about creating a language that would suit the modern Jewish people, especially those in what would become the State of Israel. In fact, Jewish leaders in Algeria considered Ben-Yehuda as much a pillar of Zionism as Theodore Herzl (Tirosh-Becker 2013). The effort to nationalize the Hebrew language met opposition by Yiddishists who advocated for the centrality of Yiddish to the Jewish people and its use as a national language. The riv haleshonot (language quarrel) pitted passionate adherents of Yiddish against advocates of the revived Hebrew language in the early 20th century, leading to demonstrations, offensive essays, and even physical confrontations (Pressman 2014). 

At the same time, Hebrew was also undergoing a revival in North Africa. Ben-Yehuda had spent some time in Algeria before permanently settling in Israel, and made strong connections with Algerian Jewish leadership, which had been previously involved in some Hebrew revival work based in Europe. According to Ben-Yehuda’s own journals, his first encounter with a living Sephardic pronunciation of the Torah was in Algiers. He also notes that in Libya was the first time he had to speak in Hebrew out of necessity rather than desire and ideology (Tirosh-Becker 2015). Hebrew had in fact been spoken during special occasions and as a lingua franca throughout the Middle East and North Africa since before Ben-Yehuda’s arrival, countering the assertion that it was only a literary language until then. A trilingual Hebrew-French-Arabic dictionary was published out of Constantine, Algeria, in 1930, comprising over 11,000 entries across various eras of Hebrew, including Biblical, Rabbinic, and terms from the Haskalah.

Upon the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Modern Hebrew became, for the first time, a national language. This status afforded it not only a governing body for its standardization among the new hundreds of thousands of Jews immigrating to the country, but also an air of prestige and unification among scattered world Jewry and their various vernaculars. Hebrew was being taught in schools, spoken at home to children, and serving as the names of national institutes of higher education (Zerubavel 1995, Glinert 2017). The emphasis on one language for the Jewish state reflected a broad ideological emphasis on the good of the Israeli collective; Hebrew was considered the foundation of a homogeneous society that valued the collective over the individual, Israel over Diaspora, and Hebrew over the Jewish vernaculars spoken around the world (Zerubavel 1995).

After Ben Yehuda’s stay in North Africa, organizations called BenYehuda Societies sprung up in Algeria, Libya, and Morocco, with the goal of exposing local Jewish communities, including both children and adults, to Hebrew texts. One journal, Ḥaienu, was founded in Tripoli in 1949, “to prepare the Libyan Jewish community for immigration to the newly formed State of Israel” (Tirosh-Becker, 2013). The periodical published a “Corner for Teaching Hebrew” to Jews (who currently spoke North-African varieties of Judeo-Arabic) interested in learning the language as it was growing in the contemporary Jewish state.

Modern Hebrew, sometimes also called Spoken Hebrew, Contemporary Hebrew, Modern Israeli Hebrew, or Israelit (Zuckermann 2008), is considered a “fusion language” (Kutscher 1982), or a koiné, owing to the eclectic combination of all of its sources. Among the changes that the language underwent to become standardized Modern/Israeli Hebrew:

• Hebrew adopted or invented thousands of new words using different approaches, such as (Saenz-Badillos 1996, Kutscher 1982):

  • New inflections of existing Biblical or Rabbinic roots or hapax legomena, e.g.: ‘passport’ דרכון darkon (Yemini 2019), ‘placed sg.m.’ מיקם mikem, (Morag 1959), ‘ladder’ סולם, sulam.

  • Neologisms, like גלידה glida ‘ice cream,’ from the rabbinic root ג-ל-ד g-l-d referring to the process of freezing (Gilad 2013), and תפוז tapuz ‘orange’ from תפוח זהב tapuah zahav ‘golden apple’)

  • Acronymizations in specialized fields such as the new military (e.g., רמטכ”ל RaMatKal from ראש המטה הכללי ‘chief of general staff’ and מכ”ם MaKaM ‘radar’ from מגלה כיוון מרחק ‘distance and direction detector’ (Morag 1959, Hemmingby 2011)

• Hebrew rejected the Biblical Hebrew syntactic word order VSO and opted instead for a majority SVO structure. However, word order is not particularly rigid in Modern Hebrew, and VSO and SOV structures are also considered acceptable in certain cases (Doron 2000).

• Hebrew did away with the distinctions between the contrasting vowels tzere/segol and kamatz/patah (Saenz-Badillos 1996).

Because of the strong influence of Yiddish, the native language of many of the language’s revitalizers, and other languages, some experts argue that Modern Hebrew, or Israeli, is more of a hybrid, Semitic-Indo-European language than a direct descendant of Hebrew (Zuckermann 2006). Zuckermann’s claim that Yiddish and Hebrew equally influenced ‘Israelit’ in its revival process has led to controversy, with some researchers endorsing his position, while others reject it as politically motivated (Philologos 2004, Williams 2007).​