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CHAPTER 2 Ahad Ha-j\m's Role in the Revival and Development of Hebrew TUDOR PARFITT If, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish life in Europe was "at the crossroads," the same can be said of the Hebrew language. While the position of Hebrew in orthodox life in Central and Eastern Europe was unchanged, orthodoxy itself was assailed by the twin forces of secularization and assimilation and was on the wane. The Hebrew Haskalah had patently failed in its objectives and by the time Ahad Ha-Arn began his publicistic career, was a spent force. Judah Leib Gordon, perhaps the best Hebrew poet of the Haskalah, could well ask in his poem "Le-mi ani amel" (For whom do I toil) if there was any point or future in writing in Hebrew, for during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Hebrew reading public seemed to be on the decrease. In a letter of 1898, Ahad Ha-Am complained: In order to give you some idea of the state of the Hebrew language today, it is enough to let you know what I have been told from our colleagues at Ahi'asaf.! They published two pamphlets on the Zionist Congress, one by Herzl himself, in Hebrew, and the other by Shalom Aleichem in Yiddish: the former sold 3,000 copies, the latter 27,000.2 Research carried out at the time, unsatisfactory as it is by modern standards, suggests none the less that no more than a tiny proportion of European Jewry was in the habit of reading secular Hebrew books.3 In "Riv leshonot" (Language controversy) (1910), Ahad Ha-Am wrote: "The old threefold basis of our national life is disintegrating. . . . Religion is a spent force, the Hebrew language is being forgotten, 12 AHAD HA-AM'S ROLE IN THE REVIVAL Hebrew literature abandoned."4 It is against this somber background that Ahad Ha-Am's relationship to Hebrew must be examined. At the turn of the century, a wide variety of views existed on the subject of the Hebrew language. In 1897 at the First Zionist Congress, Marcus Ehrenpreis proposed the establishment of an organization devoted to the study and propagation of Hebrew.5 But, none the less, during its first years, the Zionist movement had little interest in either the Hebrew language or in Hebrew culture in the wider sense. Indeed, in his scathing review of Herzl's novel Altneuland, Ahad Ha-Am complained bitterly that nowhere in the book do we find a clearcut answer to the "language question" and it is impossible to say what the dominant language of Altneuland is. But from various incidental clues one can deduce that the masses . . . use jargon which they had brought with them from the Diaspora and the educated classes [use] European languages, especially German which is the language of the ruling class.6 Non-Zionist Jewish groups in Central and Eastern Europe such as the Bund, espoused the cause of Yiddish as a national language and had no interest in a Hebrew revival or, indeed, were anxious for the Jewish masses to adopt Russian as the most convenient vehicle for enlightenment.7 The orthodox, or recently orthodox, masses had little interest in any discussion of what constituted a national language but were, in any case, closer to Yiddish and Aramaic than to Hebrew.8 In Western Europe complete assimilation to the host language was the order of the day. However, Hebrew still had the support of a relatively small number of intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe who considered it the appropriate language for Jews to be writing and reading. A still smaller number, loosely followers of Eliezer BenYehuda espoused the cause of the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language. Ahad Ha-Am wanted Hebrew to serve as the medium for the regeneration of a Jewish national consciousness. In this he followed Peretz Smolenskin, who argued that Hebrew should be revived and should be intensively used by Jews as a written medium to provide a linguistic bond for the creation of national feeling.9 Ahad Ha-Am denied that he was influenced by Smolenskin and dismissed much of his work as batlanut (trivial}.l0 None the less, their ideas have much in common and the two men must both be viewed as agents in the historical process that led to the revival of Hebrew. It should be stressed that Ahad Ha-Am did not view the use of Hebrew merely as a...

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