Development Site - Changes here will not affect the live (production) site.

The Three-Year-Old Child Who Became Hebrew’s First Native Speaker after a Two-Thousand-Year Hiatus

Sept. 7 2017

Hebrew ceased to be anyone’s native tongue around the 2nd century CE. In 19th-century Europe, Jews attempted to revive Hebrew as a modern language, but only as a literary one. It was the quixotic and determined Eliezer Ben-Yehudah who first envisioned bringing the language fully back to life. Lewis Glinert, author of the recently published The Story of Hebrew, explains what this entailed:

In a Jewish section of Jerusalem, in 1885, Ben-Yehudah and his wife Dvorah were fearful for their child: they were rearing him in Hebrew, an unheard-of idea. They had taken in a wet-nurse, a dog, and a cat; the nurse agreed to coo in Hebrew, while the dog and the cat—one male, the other female—would give the infant Itamar an opportunity to hear Hebrew adjectives and verbs inflected for gender. All other languages were to be silenced.

When Itamar turned three, however, he had still not uttered a word. Family friends protested. Surely this mother-tongue experiment would produce an imbecile. And then, the story goes, Itamar’s father marched in and upon finding the boy’s mother singing him a lullaby in Russian, flew into a rage. But then he fell silent, as the child was screaming: “Abba, Abba!” (Daddy, Daddy!). Frightened little Itamar had just begun the reawakening of Hebrew as a mother tongue. . . .

Speaking Hebrew was actually nothing new in itself; it had long been a lingua franca among Yiddish-, Ladino-, and Arabic-speaking Jewish traders (and refugees). The markets of the Holy Land had resonated with Hebrew for hundreds of years. But a pidgin is not a mother tongue. Ben-Yehudah was a born philologist; he plucked words from ancient texts and coined his own, hoping one day to launch Hebrew’s answer to the Oxford English Dictionary. The birth of Itamar gave him an opportunity to put his experiment with Hebrew to the test. Could they rear the boy in Hebrew? Could they shield him from hearing other tongues? And, just as critically, could the family be a model for others?

Read more at Aeon

More about: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Hebrew, History & Ideas, Modern Hebrew, Zionism

 

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic