sometimes i remember that hebrew was literally a dead language. dead!! for two thousand years!!!! until this one guy in the 1880′s was like hey fuck german and russian and spanish and french We Are Jews we should speak The Language Of The Jews!! and everyone was like dude tf hebrew is DEAD it’s OLD it’s missing too many words, we can’t use it. so he was like ok. i’ll make up new ones. checkmate, atheists and he fuckninh did he stood up by his little desk (?) and invented so many new words and wrote a whole dictionary and then he had a child and only spoke hebrew to him and that child was the first person who’s first language was hebrew in two thousand years and…………………………… i’m sorry i’m so emotional over my man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. he singe-handedly revived a dead language. what a man
this is a very common myth about the revival of hebrew. it is also wrong. hebrew never died.
after the conquest of judea by the roman empire around the year 70 CE, hebrew stopped being most jews’ native language, but it did not disappear from speech or existence.
for 2000 years the jewish people continued writing and publishing texts in hebrew, including bible commentary, prayer books, poetry, literature, songs, memoirs, travel journals, newspaper articles, legal documents, theological debates, and greeting cards. it became the language of the religious literate, mostly upper class men and scholars, instead of daily speech.
eliezer ben yehuda was hugely influential in reviving hebrew for the common people in the modern era, but he did NOT do this single-handedly. that would have been impossible. he built on literally 2000 years of scholarship to publish his dictionary, and he also frankly traumatized his son in the process by refusing to teach him a language his peers spoke.
cutesy posts like this are damaging, because they not only teach false history, they imply to people in other cultures with dying languages, esp indigenous folks, that all you need is One Language Superhero to save the day. that’s not how language revitalization works. it is wrong and you should feel bad.
I love how this cutesy little post leaves out the fact that modern Hebrew was developed as a specifically Zionist project as an alternative to “corrupted” and “impure” languages like Yiddish, ladino, buxaroi, judeo-Arabic, etc
The revival of Hebrew is also responsible for a homogenisation of the language too.
Everywhere you go you hear people using Israeli pronunciations which are based on but not identical to Sephardi ones. All these wonderful dialects of Hebrew are being squeezed out
like… my Hebrew teacher can remember when Ashki Hebrew was what came most naturally to him and now he never uses it at all been pushed out of him
the only time I hear anyone other than me use Ashkenazi Hebrew is old hassidim and the cantor from my city’s orthodox congregation.