Land and Desire in Early Zionism

6 Pioneer Language

150 6 PioneerLanguage The Conquest of Hebrew When the Second Aliya pioneers arrived in the Land, they heard almost no Hebrew being spoken in the moshavot or in the cities. There, the Jews spoke Russian or “jargon”—that is, Yiddish.1 For the halutzim, reviving the Hebrew language was part of their mission, and they saw its rebirth as one of their accomplishments.2 As the Second Aliya began, Shlomo Tzemach knew of only five families in which parents and children spoke Hebrew.3 According to Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, most Jewish farmers spoke Yiddish at this time. In the Old Yishuv, three major languages were spoken: Yiddish by the Ashkenazim; Spaniolit (Ladino, or JudeoSpanish ) by the Sephardim; and Arabic by the Middle Eastern Jews, for whom the “aristocratic” language had always been French. Most of the well-off Zionists who had come on aliya spoke Russian or German. Given this Babel of languages, Ben-Zvi wrote, it was difficult to find a foothold for Hebrew.4 In 1914, at the end of the Second Aliya, Yosef Aharonovich wrote that the number of Hebrew speakers had grown but only to a few hundred, while Yiddish remained the vernacular for thousands. He predicted, however, that this would change, because the Yiddish speakers were “devoid of consciousness and ideals,” whereas the Hebrew speakers were “militant idealists.”5 The arriving halutzim encountered Hebrew as a spoken language principally in the new Jewish settlements in the Galilee. They marveled at and exulted in the sound of it.6 Natan Hofshi and his friends were amazed to hear mothers using Hebrew to comfort their children, and even more awed by the children crying in Hebrew.7 Shulamit Hayyut described an encounter with a group of children speaking Hebrew on their way home from school. She knew there were Hebrewspeaking children in the Land, and the scene was a perfectly ordinary one. Yet she ended up walking with them for a long time. “It was hard for me to believe,” she wrote. “Are there really children in the world for whom Hebrew is their mother tongue? And will my own children speak Hebrew some day? Only Hebrew? And they will call me Ima [mother]? It sounds like a fantasy.”8 Pioneer Language 151 Hebrew in the Land The members of the First Aliya who spoke Hebrew used it only rarely, and even then their speech was not effortless. Hebrew was rarely taught in schools; in 1892, only nineteen Hebrew teachers operated in the entire Yishuv, and the language was taught, at best, as a second foreign language. Nevertheless, even during this period, enclaves of Hebrew speakers could be found, generally outside the schools. They consisted mostly of graduates of the Yishuv’s schools, Hebrew writers, and adults who had committed themselves to speak Hebrew. A Total Hebrew Environment One such committed adult was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a prime mover and an embodiment of the Hebrew revival, who created what might be called a “total Hebrew-language environment” around his eldest son, Itamar, born in 1882.9 (Itamar ’s original name was Ben-Zion. He changed it after the death of his mother, Devorah, who had told him that they originally wanted to name him “Itamar” but were deterred by a very traditional, conservative society that took exception to this untraditional name.) Ben-Yehuda made his wife vow never to speak to their son in any language other than Hebrew. A week after Itamar’s circumcision ceremony, Ben-Yehuda dismissed the woman who had been the midwife and the baby’s first caretaker, because she spoke to the child in Yiddish. Despite the hardship this imposed on Devorah, the parents agreed not to employ another nanny so that the child would not be exposed to languages other than Hebrew. “We feared the walls of our house,” BenYehuda wrote, “we feared the air in our room, lest [the boy] hear a foreign language from the maid, and the sound of voices impinge on the boy’s ears, foreign sounds blemish his hearing of Hebrew, and the Hebrew words not be absorbed as they should, to their fullest extent, so the child would not speak Hebrew.”10 At times, Ben-Yehuda demanded that Itamar be put to bed before the arrival of guests who did not know or make a practice of speaking Hebrew. He feared his son making friends with other children, lest they teach him Ashkenazi and Sephardi jargon and he forget his Hebrew. When he was...