The Jewish and Irish Debates Over a "National Language"
by Norman Berdichevsky (April 2009)
Israel succeeded in reviving and modernizing an ancient language by linking it to its historic past, a goal sought, but not as well achieved, by the Irish national movement. In the State of Israel, independence was recreated along with a cultural rebirth in the face of great odds and massive doubts regarding the viability of both modern nationhood and the language. Even Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist vision that launched the political efforts to create a Jewish state, skeptically asked at the time of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, “Who among us can as much as ask for a train ticket in Hebrew?” His skepticism was shared by many European Jews who felt that reviving the language was an impossible task (or a profane or even a sacrilegious one). In Herzl’s romantic, utopian novel of a future idealized modern Jewish state, Altneuland (Old-New Land), Jews are pictured as cosmopolitan multilingual speakers of major European languages. Neither Yiddish nor Hebrew is mentioned.
One hundred and fifty years ago, there were no habitual, primary or native speakers of Hebrew who learned the language at home from their parents. For centuries, Hebrew had been used as a liturgical language of prayer and, on occasion, as the means of communication between educated Jews travelling abroad, whose native languages were mutually unintelligible.
The pioneer work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the individual most responsible for the revival of Hebrew and adapting it to modern needs in order to make it a spoken language, made its initial impact in Palestine in the late 19th century. His efforts were looked upon as eccentric by most ultra-Orthodox Jews living in the country for whom the language was reserved for the Word of God. Today, Hebrew is an everyday language by more than six million people including non-Jews (Arabs, Druze, Circassians) in the State of Israel, and it is understood or read by at least another million in the Diaspora.
For a time, a lively rivalry and debate existed between Hebrew and Yiddish that vied for the loyalty of several generations of literary figures, playwrights, writers, philosophers and Zionist inspired immigrants in Palestine. In 1908, a famous conference of Yiddishists in Czernowitz (Austria-Hungary) boldly proclaimed Yiddish as “A Jewish National Language.” They pointed to the undeniable fact that Yiddish was spoken by more than ten million Jews, whereas Hebrew was not a spoken vernacular but more an experiment to breathe life into a moribund tongue incapable of meeting the demands of 20th century life.
Hebrew’s Deep Connection with the Past
On the other hand, Hebraists, at their congress in 1913 in Vienna laid claim to Hebrew as THE Jewish National Language, and pointed out the superiority of its historical continuity, the immense prestige of the Bible, its influence upon much of European literature and its venerable age. Yiddish, they proclaimed as a “jargon” or “dialect.”
The growth of resistance to the British mandate encouraged the younger generation of Jews in Palestine to identify more with the ancient past and the use of a modernized and revitalized Hebrew to express nationalist sentiments in favor of independence along with the creation of a new vital culture rooted in its ancestral homeland.
As dissatisfaction with the British Mandate grew, a clandestine underground emerged and began to contest the official Zionist leadership. These movements made more and more use of the term “Hebrew” (Ivri) as an adjective to express their instinctive attachment to the soil and landscapes of the homeland, their creativity in music, song, literature, dance as nationally “Hebrew” rather than “Jewish.” The noted Israeli author, Amos Kenan, gave poetic expression to this link between the Hebrew language, the new nativist nationalist sentiment and Ancient Israel in an article that appeared in the Hebrew daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot (June 18, 1982). He wrote:
“I feel a closeness to all that was, is and will be on the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean which I am a part of, and which is a part of me. The Hebrew language which is my language today was 4,000 and 2,500 years ago the language spoken in Jerusalem and Tyre, in Shechem and Sidon, Jaffa and Ugarit…and in Carthage…. Why shouldn’t we feel a sense of pride in our proximity to that ancient contemporary of ours who stamped his image on the area and gave the world writing, and once sent his elephants across the Alps under Hannibal’s leadership and momentarily brought mighty Rome itself in danger of destruction.”
Visitors to Israel today can scarcely believe or appreciate the enormous difficulties that were involved in the restoration of Hebrew as a living language. The Hebrew-Yiddish conflict in Palestine took three generations to resolve. Hebrew’s triumph, that seems such a foregone conclusion today, was a tenacious struggle that on occasion resulted in pitched street battles by ardent supporters on both sides using their fists to settle the issue. It was greatly aided by the natural process of territorial concentration and emigration to Palestine by Jews who were already sympathetic to the Zionist cause but faced skepticism from critics. The latter labeled the language “artificial” until the first group of children could unconsciously play in Hebrew and express a full range of emotions without the assistance of adult guides.
The Great Hebrew-Yiddish Rivalry
Detractors of Modern Hebrew ridiculed both the halting speech of their native Yiddish speaking colleagues unable to converse freely in Hebrew and what they regarded as the stilted character of Hebrew novels attempting to portray real conversations in a language that was not yet the vernacular of a community outside the struggling Zionist colonies in remote and backward Palestine. Yiddish speakers made a comparison of the artificial character of Modern Hebrew with Esperanto, when both languages were in their infancy and could not rely on the broad social base of national existence in a homeland embracing two or more generations.
Yiddish progressively lost strength through assimilation in Europe and America with continued emigration from Poland and Russia, while Hebrew grew in power and prestige, the British Mandate that recognized Hebrew as one of the three official languages of the country and ultimately through recognition as the primary official language of the new Jewish state (Arabic is the second official language of the country although Arab citizens contend that it is slighted).
Yiddish had reflected the folkways and religious life of the mass of European Jews but Zionists correctly foresaw that Yiddish could never achieve the status of a “National Language” linked to a specific territory or independent state anywhere and would suffer an inevitable decline even though it had met the requirements of sophisticated urban life and modern literature in Eastern Europe. As late as 1978, Yiddish could boast a Noble Prize winner in Literature (Isaac Bashevis Singer) but the Holocaust and assimilation had dealt it a death blow.
In Palestine, the rivalry of the two Jewish languages reached a fever pitch in the 1930s. The arrival of tens of thousands of German-speaking Jews from Germany and Austria radically changed the balance of the language controversy in Palestine. The new immigrants who had been proud of their fluency in German, a renowned European language, became enthusiastic converts to Hebrew. They had always looked down on Yiddish as the “jargon” of East European Jews and were determined to forge a new Zionist identity.
Today, the authorities and a large segment of the Hebrew speaking public have regained a sympathetic attitude and nostalgic appreciation of honoring the language of many of their parents and grandparents. Estimates denote Yiddish as a language of origin of at least 80% of the world’s Jewish population and nearly 50% of Israel’s Jewish population.
Israel’s broadcasting system “The Voice of Israel” (Kol Yisrael) maintains a full schedule of Yiddish programming. The Yiddish theater and Yiddish singers have a devoted audience and there is a host of degree granting programs offered by Israeli universities in Yiddish language, literature and linguistics. Today, Yiddish is an optional subject in Israeli secondary schools and is held in high regard by all segments of the Israeli cultural establishment. Even the famous Habimah Hebrew Theater now offers plays in Yiddish and subsidies for cultural and scholastic endeavors in the language have been made available by the government, local municipalities and institutions abroad, notably from Germany.
Countless Yiddish expressions have entered popular Israeli Hebrew speech and it may be said to have risen from the bottom of the social ladder of languages spoken in Israel. Nevertheless, a consequence of the great debate between Yiddish and Hebrew has been the growing gulf between the sense of Israeli nationhood and the traditions and values of the Diaspora that had been based on Yiddish and other Jewish hybrid languages.
Irish and the Glorious Celtic Past
The emotional hold of the Irish language over the Irish people is comparable only to the great place of Biblical Hebrew for Jews, The Iliad and The Odyssey for Greeks, the Kalevala for the Finns and the Koran among Arabs. The Book of Kells is revered as the most magnificent work of literature and art in medieval Europe at a time from the eighth to the eleventh century when Irish rivaled Latin as the greatest language of education, scholarship and piety.
To foster a sense of nationhood, the Irish republic severed all bonds with the Crown, encouraged the Celtic heritage of music and team sports, promoted the use of Irish-Gaelic as a compulsory language of instruction and official use, elevated the values of an arch-Conservative Catholic Church and a lifestyle of an idealized but declining rural peasantry. None of these measures, and least of all the attempt to resurrect Irish as a spoken language on a wide scale, succeeded. They held little attraction for many in the Republic and even less for the Irish still under British rule in Ulster or the great overseas communities in Australia, America and Canada.
No more than 30,000 people use Irish as their first or habitual language today and the great majority of them are concentrated in the Gaeltacht (the Westernmost fringe of Ireland, an essentially rural environment spread across the counties of Donegal, Mayo and Galway). For 97% of Irish schoolchildren, the Irish language is taught simply as a "foreign language" in all public schools much as French or German is. For the other 3%, some have grown up with it at home as a habitual or first language while the others have occasionally heard it on family visits or have resorted to speak to an older relative in it, but few have preferred it for literary purposes over English.
Irish Admiration for the Hebrew Revival
As early as 1927, the President of Ireland, Eamon de Valera, lamented to the head of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Sokolow, that the Irish, in spite of having all the tools available to a national government, had been incapable of imitating the successful revival of Hebrew that was already apparent in Palestine. The same view was repeated more than 30 years later by Arthur Webb, the long time editor of The Irish Times in Dublin, in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune (March 17th, 1960). Sean Cronin, writing in The Irish Times, repeated the accusation that the entire mass media of Ireland overwhelm a high school graduate with English language, cinema, theater, radio, TV and press in contrast to the Hebrew environment of the State of Israel (February 19th, 1955).
There are considerable objective difficulties encountered by adults in acquiring Irish as a second language, a fact recognized by the European Union. Although Irish is styled the “first official language of Ireland,” this is universally regarded as a polite legal fiction. Considerable problems arise in finding qualified translators from most European languages into Irish. A number of studies sponsored by the EU, comparing the length of time required to reach levels of adequacy in learning a European foreign language, rank Irish as the most difficult by a considerable margin.
Even within the Republic’s elementary school system, the number of qualified teachers of Irish is in short supply. Older works are written in traditional Gaelic script, a form of medieval writing much like gothic letters that requires some training to be able to read. Its vocabulary contains few words immediately recognizable to speakers of English, French or German, and its grammar and syntax appear unwieldy to speakers of other major languages outside the Celtic family.
A 1980 government white paper acknowledged the failure of Irish teaching in the schools. The Irish language is not an essential ingredient for Irish national identity or of any practical importance for a career. Its use is primarily symbolic and ceremonial, although the Irish parliament has repeatedly called for its promotion as “a living language in daily use.”
The most embarrassing incident that devastated supporters of the hope for a revival of the language was reported in The New York Times on October 13, 1961. Peggy O'Donnel, a 16-year-old Irish girl from the island of Aran off the West coast of Ireland, was in Dublin on a visit. She was a native Irish speaker, with almost no knowledge of English, and got lost. It took her six hours of pleading with passersby in the streets of Ireland's largest city before she finally encountered someone who was able to help her by responding in Irish she could understand to direct her to an Irish speaking policeman.
When the Zionist pioneers came to Israel, they did not have a common language on which they could fall back. Not everyone spoke Yiddish or Russian or French. Some sort of other language was not just desperately desired, it was vitally needed for the purposes of communication.
The Sub-Conscious Heart Throb of the Race
Although almost all Irish would like to see the language preserved, there are few today who foresee any possibility of its being more than a fond memory or embodying the role described by Sean O’Faolain in 1947.
It has gone underground. It is so to speak, been forgotten consciously. It nevertheless beats like a great heart throb in the subconscious of the race. The Irish language is thus become the runic language of modern Ireland. Even though only a dwindling few think overtly in it, all of us can, through it, touch, however dimly, a buried part of ourselves of which we are normally unaware. Through Gaelic, we remember ancestrally.
Nuala Ni Dhomnaill, the best-known and most colorful woman poet writing in Irish today is a major cultural personality who has won wide acclaim in her native Kerry, all of Ireland and throughout the Irish Diaspora. Nevertheless, much of her work is read in English translation in spite of her assertion that it thereby loses its effectiveness. She has made direct reference to the comparison of her native Irish with Hebrew today asserting that it is now too late to impose Irish as a national language as was done with Hebrew in Israel.
The cultural and political identity of Israel was tied to the success of Hebrew. Irish independence was not so tied to the cultural success of the Irish language. As Ireland came to shake off British oppression after hundreds of years, it had many ways of expressing its nationhood. Many Irishmen--including some revolutionary heroes felt that the nation did not need the Irish language and that Ireland would be culturally and politically strong without Irish (and so it is). A minority disagreed with this, saying that there could be no whole Ireland without the lifeline of its thousand-year-old language. For the IRA, the issue of language had no appeal and its rhetoric and nationalist calls for the unification of Ireland avoided the language issue entirely.
The Challenge Ahead for Israel
In Israel’s unique case, Hebrew played a major role in establishing a sense of unity for millions of immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds. The success of Hebrew has indeed been a role model for the revival of Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, New Norwegian, Basque and Maltese, whose spokesmen never tire of pointing to Hebrew and what can be achieved with enough effort, willpower, dedication and patriotism. Both Ireland and Israel do, however, face a major challenge in maintaining their sense of national identity in a global environment and economy dominated by English.
The hard facts of life support a practical approach to learning languages that value the benefits of careers in business, education, science, travel and communication across borders. For the Irish, English is THE vehicle of their national identity today, but it does not make them any more English than the Americans. When David Levy, Israel’s Foreign Minister was appointed to attend the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, much concern was expressed in the Israeli press that, not knowing English, he would speak either in Hebrew or French and therefore lose important international sympathy for Israel’s cause. He was ultimately replaced by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir whose Yiddish accented English was felt to be a more effective tool to maintain close links with the Diaspora. Hebrew educators in Israel are therefore not complacent. They realize that their hard won victory is no longer a foregone conclusion and that the enormous appeal of the English language and American culture must be counterbalanced with renewed love and devotion towards Hebrew.
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