Studies in Modern Jewish Literature (JPS Scholar of Distinction Series)

Our “She’ela Nikhbada:” Whose Hebrew Is It?

 Our “She’ela Nikhbada”:Whose Hebrew Is It? The obvious reference to Eliezer Ben-Yehudah’s famous article of 1879 in my title is, of course, a self-referential rhetorical ploy. And yet, precisely because it is so obvious, you must realize that I am not interested in celebrating once again Ben-Yehudah’s signal contribution to the revival of Hebrew. His article shall serve as a foil for my remarks, for the situating of the “she’elah” I want to discuss. Like many other famous articles—more often cited than read—the Ben-Yehudah article does not say what all the text books claim it says. (And I am not the first to make this point; cf. George Mandel, et. al.) It does not propose a program for the revival of spoken Hebrew; it really doesn’t focus upon the question of language use or renewal. It is a brief essay on nationalism (called here “le’umut”), replete with ideas mostly culled from Smolenskin, and in it the young author berates contemporary Hebrew authors for failing to deal with and propagate the “she’elot”—let’s call them issues—that concern him. Language, to be sure, is one of the aspects of nationalism, but it gets less attention than settling Eretz Yisrael or the cultivation of the soil. The meager reference to Hebrew is eloquent: Ben-Yehudah didn’t have to dwell upon the importance of Hebrew since he was writing in Hebrew to a very specialized, elitist Hebrew-reading audience. The article presumes an indissoluble bonding between language and culture, perhaps even a type of linguistic determinism, a doctrine that BenYehudah probably learned from Herder, or one of his many explicators, and which has found its most articulate expositor in this century in Benjamin Whorf. This doctrine holds that the relationship between 353 language and culture is not only implemental or symbolical, but is actually causal, that languages shape persons and cultures. It maintains that the authentic richness of any culture throughout history can be attributed to the specific language which the classical expositors of the culture used. Ben-Yehudah’s article therefore implies that only in the ancestral homeland could the language, the literature, and “hokhmat Yisrael” flourish. This implication obviously troubled Smolenskin who published the article with a personal disclaimer about the aggressive, rash tone of the young ideologue and activist who demanded the clarification of issues and urgent action. Much, of course, has happened in the world of the Hebrew language during the 111 years since the first publication of this article and it is hard to imagine any century in the long history of the language that has witnessed such exciting development. I will not recount these here. The manifest issues which motivated Ben-Yehudah need not interest us now, but the latent matter of the association of language with culture which we all take for granted, cries for re-examination and, at least, refinement. I will argue that many of our problems in the world of Hebrew in the American university stem from our reluctance to rethink this question. While discussion of methodology is always valuable, it is time that we turned our attention to issues of ideology—and this I intend to do this evening, however briefly. To focus the issue, I ask the bold and bald question: Whose Hebrew is it? The interrogative “whose”—I hasten to note—does not refer to ownership, to a possessive, chauvinistic hold on the language which excludes somebody else. I mean here not ownership, but cultural association . The questions I ask are those of the socio-linguist: What specific group of users is associated with this language? What are their cultural characteristics which qualify and shape their attitude to the language? An illuminating example is at hand. Today, as in the past, Hebrew is used by a community of pious Jews primarily, but not exclusively, as the holy tongue of Jewish tradition. On the other hand, most of us in this conference hall are not pious Jews and our usage of Hebrew is generated by and entails other associations. Are we really using the same language? Or are we using two dialects of the same language? And what, if anything , happens to the user when he or she shifts from prayer to the reading of an Amichai poem, which often uses the same phraseology for ironic purposes? Are you the same person? Is it the same culture? These are not merely playful, Alice in Wonderland...