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6 SHOFAR OUR "SHE'ELA NIKHBADA": WHOSE HEBREW IS IT?1 Arnold 1. Band Arnold Band is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has published widely in scholarly journals and is the author of Nightmare and Nostalgia: A Study in the Fiction of s. Y. Agnon (1968), and the editor and translator ofNahman ofBratzlav: The Tales (1978). 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, the reader 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 BenYehudah article does not say what all the textbooks claim it says. 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 Peretz 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 -which 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 meagre reference to Hebrew is eloquent: Ben-Yehudah didn't have to dwell upon the importance of Hebrew since he was writ~ng 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 1The present version of this paper was delivered at the Annual Meeting on University Teaching of Hebrew Language and Literature, National Association of Professors of Hebrew, at Yeshiva University in June 1990, and will be published in the proceedings of that conference. A different version was delivered at the conference on Hebrew in America held at the University of Maryland in March 1989. Volume 9, No.3 Spring 1991 7 linguistic determinism, a doctrine that Ben-Yehudah 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 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 which has witnessed such exciting developments. 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 here, 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...

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