HEBREW
Hebrew is the language Indigenous to the region of modern-day Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It is also the ancestral language of Jews and Samaritans. It is the only Canaanite language that survives to this day. Other long-extinct Canaanite languages include Phoenician, Ammonite, Moabite, and Punic.
Hebrew is among the oldest languages in the world, with a history dating back over 3000 years. The first records of written Hebrew — known as Paleo-Hebrew — date back to the 10th century BCE, though it’s likely that the language was spoken long before then.
Much of the Hebrew language reflects its Indigenous Canaanite origins. For example, one of the two most important gods in the Canaanite pantheon was “El.” To this day, the generic Hebrew word for god (as opposed to the God) is “el.” The name “Israel” itself — meaning “one who wrestles with God” — comes from “el.” Another one of many examples is “shamayim,” the Hebrew word for sky. Shamayim was the Canaanite “god of the heavens.”
The Tanakh (the “Hebrew Bible”) does not refer to the Hebrew language as “Hebrew,” but rather as “the language of Judah,” as in the Kingdom of Judah, or the “language of Canaan.” However, the Mishnah does call Hebrew “Ivrit” (i.e. Hebrew), and the Mishnah Megillah calls it “Ashurit” (Assyrian) due to the early use of the Assyrian alphabet.
Almost the entirety of the Tanakh is written in Hebrew. For this reason, since ancient times, Jews have called Hebrew “lashon ha-kodesh,” meaning “the holy/sacred language” or “the language of holiness/sacredness.”
COLONIALISM, INDIGENEITY, AND LANGUAGE
The Indigenous-led United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues defines Indigenous Peoples as the following: (1) self-identification as Indigenous Peoples; (2) historical continuity with pre-colonial and pre-settler societies; (3) strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources; (4) distinct social, economic, or political systems; (5) distinct language, culture, and beliefs; (6) non-dominant groups of society; (7) resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.
To reiterate: Indigenous Peoples have their own distinct ancestral languages. For Jews, who are the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrew tribes, Hebrew is our ancestral language. Samaritans, who are the only other group directly descended from the Hebrew tribes, spoke -- and still pray -- in the Samaritan dialect of Hebrew.
Speaking a distinct dialect of a language is not equivalent to speaking an Indigenous language. Americans speak a distinct dialect of English. Argentinians speak a distinct dialect of Spanish. Egyptians speak a distinct dialect of Arabic. That does not make all Americans, Argentinians, and Egyptians Indigenous Peoples. In fact, making such a claim is an erasure of the Indigenous Peoples of those regions, all of whom have their distinct ancestral languages (for example: the the Tewa language family is the ancestral language of the Tewa People of the American Southwest. Mapudungun is one of the ancestral languages of the Aónikenk People of Argentina and Chile. Coptic is the ancestral language of the Copts in Egypt).
Language is an easy way to spot colonization and imperialism. When a language spans entire countries and even continents, it’s a telltale sign that colonization and/or imperialism have taken place.
ARABIC AS AN IMPERIAL LANGUAGE
Arabic is a language that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. How did it become the dominant language in all these countries? Just as English became the dominant language in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand through colonialism, Arabic became the dominant language in the Middle East and North Africa through imperialism.
LINGUICIDE
“Language death” is a term in linguistics that describes when a language loses its last native speaker. “Language extinction” is when a language is no longer spoken by anyone, including second language speakers.
“Linguicide” refers to the extermination of a language; that is, language death that is caused by human intervention (e.g. colonialism, imperialism, language discrimination) as opposed to natural causes (e.g. natural disasters that decimate communities). It is considered a form of cultural genocide.
In the past, Hebrew experienced language death, but it never experienced language extinction. Like other Indigenous language deaths, the language death of Hebrew was caused by imperialism and colonialism; that is, it was caused by human intervention.
The first wave of decline came during the period of the Babylonian Captivity, when, in 587/6 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered and exiled about 25 percent of the citizens of the Kingdom of Judah. Jews then began adopting Aramaic — the language spoken among the Babylonians. However, Hebrew remained in use as a liturgical tongue.
By 200 BCE — around the time period of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire -- everyday colloquial Hebrew became almost fully extinct.
Another wave of linguicide took place during the period of the Arab colonization of the Levant. Ancient Hebrew names for places (such as Jerusalem, or Yerushalayim in Hebrew) were replaced with Arabic names. By the ninth century, Arabic fully replaced Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew.
CONSEQUENCES
The death of an Indigenous language has dire implications for said Indigenous community. In fact, poor language health is often a reflection that an Indigenous community is in poor health, meaning that the community is struggling to survive as a result of colonialism and/or imperialism.
Language death has far-reaching implications beyond the loss of speech. For most Indigenous communities, their languages are deeply interwoven with their very identity, collective histories, customs and social traditions, and more.
Language death and other forms of cultural genocide often contribute to the collective intergenerational trauma of Indigenous communities.
For Jews, Hebrew is more than just our ancestral tongue; it is considered sacred, so much so that we know it as “lashon ha-kodesh,” or the “language of holiness/sacredness.” There are many factors within Hebrew that are not present in other languages, such as gematria, the Jewish practice of numerology, which assigns numerical value to names, phrases, or words. For example, the Hebrew word for life, חי (chai), is assigned the numerical value of 18, which subsequently makes 18 a spiritual number in Judaism.
Additionally, the etymology of Hebrew words is deeply important to Rabbinic Judaism. For thousands of years, Jewish scholars have made theological interpretations through the analysis of the root of Hebrew words used in the Torah.
In other words: linguicide does not just destroy speech; it destroys what is most sacred to many Indigenous cultures.
PRESERVATION
Throughout history, Jews have practiced Indigenous resistance in a multitude of ways. One major act of resistance was the preservation of the Hebrew language in the face of language death and linguicide.
This preservation happened in four main forms:
(1) the continued use of Hebrew as our liturgical language (i.e. for prayer).
(2) the incorporation of Hebrew in diasporic Jewish languages. For example, virtually all Jewish diasporic languages, from Yiddish to Ladino to Judeo-Arabic, use Hebrew words and the Hebrew alphabet.
(3) Jews from different parts of the diaspora continued to use Hebrew as the lingua franca when they interacted with each other, as that was the language that they had in common. For example, an Ashkenazi merchant arriving in North Africa would speak Hebrew to the local Sephardic Jews.
(4) The development of non-religious Hebrew literature across the centuries. For example, there is a rich collection of Medieval secular Hebrew poems.
DEMONIZATION OF HEBREW
The preservation of Hebrew, whether as a liturgical language or as part of Diasporic Jewish languages, has been a symbol of Jewish resilience in the face of persecution and oppression. For this reason, historically, many antisemites -- both outside and within the Jewish community -- have continued to demonize the Hebrew language.
In the Soviet Union, which criminalized Hebrew, the “Jewish branch” of the Soviet Communist Party, the Yevsektsiya, pursued a mission to “destroy traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture.” The Yevsektsiya, which published a Yiddish newspaper known as “Emes,” also dedicated itself to the destruction of the Hebrew language. They shut down all schools that taught Hebrew, no matter their political views, and harassed Hebrew-speaking artists. They established new Jewish schools that taught “Soviet Yiddish.” “Soviet Yiddish” changed the spellings of all Yiddish words that came from Hebrew.
The fact that the Yevsektsiya was “Jewish” was central to its purpose. After all, the Soviet regime couldn’t be accused of antisemitism when those shutting down all Jewish cultural and spiritual life were Jews themselves.
Another example? In one case in Iraq in the late 1940s, a man was sentenced to five years of forced labor for having a Biblical Hebrew inscription, which the accusers claimed was a “coded Zionist message.”
THE ISSUES WITH THIS
(1) The Hebrew language and Judaism are not independent of each other. Instead, Hebrew is an important component of Judaism. Jewish religious texts are in Hebrew for a reason. The fact that prayers are in Hebrew matters. When you demand that we pray in a different language, you are demanding that we change an important aspect of our religion.
(2) Hebrew is the ancestral language of the Jewish people. Arabic and English are not. Imposing two colonial languages on us in replacement of our actual ancestral language is, in fact, a form of cultural imperialism and supremacy.
(3) Some Palestinians may very well be triggered by Hebrew. But some Jews may also be triggered by Arabic! Or German! Or a myriad of other languages. Would you ask Germans to stop praying in German because of the Holocaust? Would you ask Muslims to stop praying in Arabic because of Islamic imperialism or fundamentalist terrorism? Would you tell people that they can’t pray in Spanish because of the Spanish Inquisition? In fact, why would you ask anyone to pray in English, given the crimes committed across the world by English-speakers?
It’s an absurd thing to ask. Your trauma is valid, but managing it is your responsibility.
(4) You cannot simultaneously claim to have a problem with Zionism, not Judaism, while at the same time trying to chip away at all the characteristics that make Judaism distinct (like Hebrew!). Judaism predates the conflict by 2900 years. If your problem is with Zionism, why is it Judaism that you’re trying to change?
DE AND RE-HEBRAIZATION OF JEWISH NAMES
Since ancient times, Jews have used the patronymic suffix “son/daughter [ben/bat] of [father’s name]” in place of a surname. While we were later forced to take on foreign names by our colonizers and oppressors, we continued to use our Hebrew names for liturgical purposes. For instance, when a Jewish person is called up to read the Torah, they are called by their Hebrew name, including their patronymic.
During and after the Inquisition, Sephardic Jews who were forced or coerced into converting to Christianity were baptized with “New Christian” names, which were indistinguishable from other Christian names.
Ashkenazi Jews were the last group in Europe to adopt surnames — and it was not by choice. With the creation of modern nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews in Europe were forced to adopt non-Hebrew surnames. Jews resisted these laws, as they (understandably) distrusted the European authorities. However, by 1844, the Jews in Europe had all adopted official surnames.
In the Middle East and North Africa, Jews had to adopt “civic” Arabic names in place of their traditional, sacred Hebrew names in order to participate in trade and other professions. In Iran, Jews did not adopt surnames until they were forced to under the rule of Reza Shah (1921-1941).
Exile was a deeply traumatic experience for Jews, especially for Jews whose Diasporic experience took place in Europe, where we were relentlessly persecuted for thousands of years. As such, in the early days of the State of Israel, many Jews — particularly Ashkenazi Jews — chose to discard their forcefully imposed Diasporic/exilic surnames in favor of Hebrew names. Rabbinic authorities largely encourage the Hebraization of Diasporic surnames, as spiritually it is considered a return to our ancestral roots.
REVITALIZATION
Language revitalization is an attempt to reverse or slow down language death. According to Israeli linguist and language revivalist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, “Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian benefits of language revival—for example, historical justice, diversity, and employability, respectively.”
Language revitalization projects are common across the world, particularly as it pertains to Indigenous cultures. That said, the only language in the world to be successfully revived as an everyday tongue is the Hebrew language. Other revitalization efforts, such as those for Hawaiian, Welsh, Irish, Cherokee, and Navajo, have enjoyed smaller degrees of success.
There have been efforts to revitalized Hebrew going back 2000 years. During the Bar Kokhba Revolt, Simon Bar Kokhba attempted to revive Hebrew as the Jewish people’s lingua franca. However, the successful revival of Hebrew as an everyday language took place over the 19th and 20th centuries, as Jewish refugees arrived to Palestine from Europe, elsewhere in Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Central Asia. By the time the British took control of Palestine in 1920, Hebrew became one of the two official languages.
Some argue that “the revival of a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists' mother tongue(s).” In that vein, modern Hebrew does borrow from diasporic Jewish languages, as well as other similar languages, such as Aramaic and Akkadian.
HEBREW AS A MODEL FOR LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION
Though numerous Indigenous nations are interested in reviving their ancestral languages, the only language in the world to be successfully revived as an everyday tongue is the Hebrew language. For this reason, Israeli Jews have long assisted other Indigenous nations from across the world in their own language revitalization efforts, using the successful Zionist revival of Hebrew as a framework.
For example, Israeli linguist and language revivalist Ghil'ad Zuckermann is deeply involved with Aboriginal language revivalist projects in Australia, such as with the Barngarla People. In 2012, the Sámi People, Indigenous to the Nordic countries, sent a delegation to Israel to study language revitalization. In 2019, a delegation of Assyrians met in Jerusalem for the Committee for the Resurrection of the Aramaic Language, inspired by the revival of Hebrew.
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