Handbook of language and ethnic identity: Disciplinary and regional perspectives, vol. 1. 2nd edn. (review)

At the end of the Second World War, a Holocaust survivor boarded an illegal immigrant ship bound for Palestine. As she did so, she saw a sign written in large Hebrew letters, knisa 'entrance'. She was elated. Years later she remembered the sign as giving her the happiest moment of that time. Until then, Hebrew had been for her a private language—embarrassed, secret, and hidden. Now she was entering a life in which Hebrew could be used in the public square, a life in which she could be a Jew outside the home, a life in which she could finally be free. ¹

The emotion evoked by that sign, caused by the often intimate relationship between language and ethnicity (for Judaism is an ethnicity as well as a religion), has been exploited in recent times since at least the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Czech patriots persuaded Czech speakers that their ethnic identity was a national one and deserved political autonomy. The nineteenth-century European national revival movements defined national identity linguistically and employed language as a mobilizing symbol in their agitation for and justification of a state of their own. Similarly, the ethnic revival that began in the 1960s also rallied around language as a mobilizing symbol in demands for ethnic autonomy, as, for example, with the Sámi, the Maori, and the Berbers, minorities in Norway, New Zealand, and the Maghreb, respectively.

Language is the component of ethnic identity most amenable to manipulation and, because of its salience, most useful for political mobilization. While language might seem a primordial component of a perceived shared ancestry and history, whether mythical or real, it is not a necessary component. Irish Gaelic, for example, is spoken natively by a tiny minority; relatively few Jews outside of Israel are fluent in either Hebrew or Jewish diaspora languages, such as Yiddish or Ladino; and Basque is the mother tongue of only one quarter of those who identify themselves as Basque. Yet the Irish, the Jews, and the Basque have maintained their ethnic identities.

Ethnic identity itself proves to be changeable. Distinct groups may merge over time, lose their ancestral identities, and adopt new ones. Furthermore, one can have several ethnic identities at once, as, for example, with the Israeli majority, who are both Israelis and Jews, with the salience of each identity depending on the context of interaction.

This reviewer recently observed an example of a shift in ethnic identity at the Israeli Consulate in New York. An old man, speaking in English to an Israeli clerk in a room in which almost everyone else was speaking Hebrew, told her that he wanted to renounce his Israeli citizenship. His first language was not clear from his accent, but it was neither Hebrew nor English. Like the woman who saw knisa in large letters, he most probably had come from Europe, either before the Holocaust or as a survivor. He told the clerk that he had served in the Palmach, the pre-state Jewish fighting force, but that he had not lived in Israel for the past fifty years. Since Israel had been established for sixty-two years at the time of this incident, he had lived in Israel for twelve years after he left the Palmach. His military service, his subsequent residence in the new state, and his youth at the time meant that he had almost certainly learned Hebrew. Yet his use of English in his interaction with an Israeli clerk stated as clearly as if he had spoken the words, 'I am not one of you'.

The embrace of Hebrew by one person and its rejection by another reflect some of the issues in the relationship between language and ethnic identity. This relationship is the subject of the present collection of essays edited by Joshua Fishman and Ofelia García. It is...