Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  The language of Euskara, as the Basque people call it, is spoken today by around 600,000 people in seven traditional regions – four in Spain and three in France. While the Basque language in France has been subjected to the same fate as all the French regional languages and has no official status, the Spanish Basques have enjoyed a much greater degree of political and cultural autonomy. Euskara did suffer after the Spanish Civil War, when the language was outlawed under the dictatorship of General Franco. Chef Juan Arzak remembers being punished for speaking Euskara in school. A Basque nationalist movement grew under Franco; since his death, Spanish Basques have regained some self-rule powers, but the nationalist movement continues – in its most extreme form as the terrorist organization ETA.

  Today, Euskara has co-official status with Spanish in the region, and the number of speakers is growing. Children can choose to attend schools where all lessons are in Euskara and Spanish is taught as a second language. There’s a Euskara-language television and radio station, newspapers and books in Euskara. A Royal Academy of the Basque language is charged with watching over Euskara, protecting it and establishing standards of use. It’s a daunting task. The younger generation of Basques tends to speak euskañol, an informal mixture of Euskara and Spanish. But people like Chef Arzak aren’t worried. The Basque food he cooks is a mixture of the traditional and the avant-garde and draws on dishes and ingredients from other food cultures; in the same way, the Basque language is able to incorporate words and expressions from other languages. It’s a pungent metaphor for a unique language.

  The Story of Hebrew

  The Basques are fortunate in having mountains, rivers and the sea to define their borders and repel invaders. This has without doubt helped them to preserve their language when many other minority languages in Europe have withered. The Diaspora of the Jews could easily have resulted in the disappearance of their language, as they were absorbed into other cultures, but their resistance against anti-Semitism and the strength of their religious life meant that Hebrew was kept alive during centuries of exile until, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the state of Israel was created, and Hebrew was adopted as the national language.

  Samuel extracted from a fourteenth-century Hebrew Bible

  Whatever one thinks of Israel, its achievment in inculcating a sense of identity is without doubt one of the success stories of the postcolonial era. The country had a tricky birth, a difficult childhood and a tempestuous adolescence. It has been an extraordinary journey to nationhood, and language has been at the core of keeping it together.

  Dr Ghil’ad Zuckermann is a leading Israeli linguistician, as people who study linguistics are properly called to differentiate them from linguists. He tells a story of five Jews who influenced the world. It goes like this:

  Moses said, ‘The Law is everything.’

  Jesus said, ‘Love is everything.’

  Marx said, ‘Money is everything.’

  Freud said, ‘Sex is everything.’

  Einstein said, ‘Everything is relative.’

  He sees the punchline as a lesson on language, specifically modern Hebrew, which he calls Israeli. ‘Israeli is a very complex language,’ he says. Its revival has been a ‘relative success’, a mish-mash of old Hebrew and different bits of other languages, a hybrid affair – just like everything else in life.

  Not everyone’s laughing, though. Ghil’ad, who was born in Tel Aviv and is the Professor of Linguistics and Endangered Languages at Adelaide University in Australia, is a controversial figure in Israel. His line on Hebrew annoys a great many people: he argues that the Hebrew of the modern state of Israel is not, as most linguists believe, a revival of the ancient language which hadn’t been spoken for nearly 2,000 years. Israelis are not speaking like the prophet Isaiah, he insists. Neither does he accept the theory of relexification – that modern Hebrew is, in essence, Yiddish (the language most of the early settlers spoke) with Hebrew words. Not true either, he says. Ghil’ad argues that Hebrew is a synthesis, a language with more than one parent, a beautiful mongrel, a hybrid. It is genetically both Indo-European and Semitic. Ancient literary Hebrew and Yiddish are the primary contributors, and there is an array of secondary influences, like Arabic, Russian, Polish, German and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish), all languages spoken by the Hebrew revivalists.

  Ghil’ad’s thesis challenges the traditional linguistic wisdom that, with a bit of tinkering and adding of new words, modern Hebrew sprang directly out of the ashes of ancient liturgical and literary Hebrew, which had once been spoken all over the Jewish world. It also annoys politicians and scholars, who accuse him of pushing a political, post-Zionist agenda. The early Zionists emphatically linked the revival of Hebrew to their claim of an ancient birthright in the land of Israel, so the modern state doesn’t appreciate a linguistician who says that Israelis aren’t actually speaking the language of the prophets.

  These arguments matter because the story of Hebrew is not just the story of a language. It’s about history and nationhood and identity – and the battle for survival.

  For centuries Hebrew was the language in what is now Israel-Palestine, generations before a man called Jesus ever walked the streets of Jerusalem. But after the Diaspora, when the Jews scattered throughout Europe following the revolts against the Romans in the first and second centuries AD, Hebrew died out as a spoken language. It became a linguistic Sleeping Beauty, read, recited and remembered only in the Torah, the rabbinical tradition and Friday-night suppers in Jewish homes. In the nineteenth century, the movement for a Jewish homeland, a return to Zion after 2,000 years of persecution, began to take hold. And with it came the dream of reviving the language of the ancients.

  Rishon LeZion is a bustling suburb of Tel Aviv. It was founded in 1882, one of the first Zionist settlements, and in 1886 the first Hebrew school was created there. This was the brainchild of the prime mover behind the revival of Hebrew, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a Jewish lexicographer and newspaper editor. He had learned written Hebrew as part of his religious upbringing, and at one time thought of becoming a rabbi, but instead he became increasingly interested in the nationalist movements in Europe and ideas of self-determination. He believed that, if Jews returned to their ancient land and began to speak their own language, they could once again become a nation. For him, Hebrew and Zionism were one: ‘The Hebrew language can live only if we revive the nation and return it to the fatherland,’ he wrote. So, in 1881, he moved with his family to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

  He was the original Man with a Mission, writing newspaper articles about reviving Hebrew and speaking only Hebrew with every Jew he met, despite the lack of current vocabulary. The Hebrew he used was the language of the synagogue, of psalms and prayers and the Torah, and a flowery literary tradition which was heavily mixed with Aramaic. But Eliezer was passionate in his conviction that, with training and practice and the necessary creation of new words, Hebrew could and should be resurrected as a spoken language. He was a bit of a tyrant and insisted his family speak only Hebrew, not Yiddish or their native Russian. His son, Ben-Zion, was not allowed to come into contact with any other language, and Eliezer boasted that, as a result, his son was the first native speaker of Hebrew. Ben-Zion wrote later in his autobiography that he was sent to bed if foreign visitors came to the house, and that when Eliezer came home one day and found his wife absent-mindedly singing a Russian lullaby to Ben-Zion, there was a furious shouting match.

  Members of the Hebrew Language Council in 1912

  Eventually, it was the successive waves of Jewish immigrants from all over the world which secured the revival of spoken Hebrew. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and early ones of the twentieth, thousands of Jews flooded into Palestine, mainly from Eastern Europe and Russia, and Hebrew schools were set up, where the medium of teaching for everything was Hebrew.

  Of course, the teachers weren’t native Hebrew-speakers either. They were mostly Ashkenazi Jews, and their language was Yiddish. They tried to
teach the best Hebrew that was available to them, but it was very difficult. ‘In a heavy atmosphere, without books, expressions, words, verbs and hundreds of nouns, we had to begin teaching,’ wrote one teacher from the 1920s. ‘We were half-mute, stuttering, we spoke with our hands and eyes.’ When it came to making new words, ‘everyone, of course, used his own creations’.

  It’s a key point in Ghil’ad Zuckermann’s argument for the hybridization of Hebrew. The early settlers and teachers – what he calls ‘the founder population’ – spoke Yiddish or Polish or Russian and, he says, they could not rid themselves of their native grammatical structures. And a Yiddish-speaker pronounced Hebrew differently from, say, a Sephardic Jew from Yemen. Ghil’ad argues that this early influence of Yiddish-speakers on Hebrew left an indelible trace on its structure and word order. ‘Yiddish speaks itself beneath Israeli,’ he says. ‘Had the language revivalists been Arabic-speaking Jews [from Morocco, for example], Israeli Hebrew would have been a totally different language – both genetically and typologically, much more Semitic.’

  By the end of the First World War, Hebrew was consolidating its position as the national language-to-be. There was a movement in favour of Yiddish, the lingua franca of the middle European Jew, but it could not throw off the taint of the shtetl, the pogroms and the poverty. The Zionists wanted to re-establish the link to the older story, the ancient Jewish history and the centuries of nationhood, and Yiddish was despised as second-class and polluted.

  In 1909, the first Hebrew city, Tel Aviv, was established. The entire administration of the city was carried out in Hebrew, and people were forced to speak Hebrew. Street signs and public announcements were written in Hebrew. Hebrew was so dominant in Tel Aviv that, in 1913, one writer announced that ‘Yiddish is more treif [non- kosher] than pork. To speak it a person needs great courage.’ Yiddish-speakers were shouted at in the street – ‘Jew, speak Hebrew’ – or even beaten up by gangs of men from the creepy-sounding Defenders of the Language Brigade.

  In 1921, Hebrew became one of three official languages in British-ruled Palestine (along with English and Arabic), and then in 1948, with the founding of the state of Israel, it was made an official language along with Arabic. Today it is the most widely spoken language in Israel.

  But what if Israel had chosen Arabic as its main national language? Would it have been a means of reconciliation between Jew and Arab? Ghil’ad Zuckermann wonders, if Israelis and Palestinians had literally been able to understand each other, whether it could have changed the political story and prevented the cumulative violence and antagonism of the years after 1948. The two languages are so close, Hebrew and Arabic (although Ghil’ad says Arabic has far better curses and swear words), but not close enough to overcome what are essentially ancient tribal differences and conflicts which go all the way back to the story of the separation of Isaac and Ishmael. To this day the word in Hebrew for Arab is Ishmael.

  The reason for Hebrew’s success is the other side of the same coin: it had a fervent, strong ideology of a national movement. People wanted a common language to unify them, all these Jews coming from all over the world and speaking different languages. Hebrew succeeded through political will, and a strong identity which both secular and religious Jews have used for their own purposes.

  Yiddish: Not Just for Schmucks

  Yiddish has been called, variously, the language of the ghetto and the shtetl, a barrier to assimilation, a mutilated and unintelligible language without rules, the mother tongue, the true language of the Jewish people – and a dozen other things, some complimentary, some not. At its height before the Second World War, it was understood and spoken by an estimated 11 million Jews, but it lost the battle with Hebrew to become the national language of Israel, and the number of Yiddish-speakers has dwindled rapidly since. And yet it survives, albeit spoken principally in the United States and by the ultra-orthodox in Israel. As the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer said, ‘Yiddish has not yet said its last word.’

  In fact, Yiddish has borrowed and assimilated so many words from other languages, and given so many in return, especially to English (think schmalz, chutzpah, schmutz, bagel, shmooze), it’s easy to forget it’s not a sort of Jewish-American form of English. It’s a proper language, a hybrid of medieval German and Hebrew, using the Hebrew alphabet, with dashes of Aramaic and Slavic languages thrown in. It developed among the Ashkenazi Jews living along the Rhineland around the tenth century, and then spread through central and eastern Europe. The ancient tongue of the Jews in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Hebrew, had been in decline as a spoken language since the Jews were defeated by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC, and well before the time of Jesus it had been replaced by Aramaic as the Jewish vernacular. But Hebrew remained the written language of religion, of the liturgy, the Torah and the scholars.

  Yiddish – which means ‘Jewish’ – takes about three-quarters of its vocabulary from medieval German, but it has borrowed liberally from Hebrew and from many other lands and cultures where the middle European Jews lived. It has tremendous richness of expression, and the vigour and subtlety of a mongrel creation, like English, which amasses words from all over the place.

  It developed a rich vocabulary to express the human condition, often using humour to rail against suffering and the absurdities of life, which was a useful antidote to the pogroms, persecution and expulsions. Many of the terms have found their way into English, because there is no equivalent English word which can convey the depth and precision of the Yiddish. There’s a tremendous humanity and irony in the sheer range of words to describe the human character in all its failings and strengths. For example, what other language would distinguish between a schlemiel (someone who suffers through his own actions), a schlimazl (a person who suffers through no fault of his own) and a nebach (a person who suffers because he makes other people’s problems his own)? There’s an old joke which explains the distinction: the schlemiel spills his soup, it falls on the schlimazl, and the nebach cleans it up.

  Yiddish has been a potent force in Jewish identity and the struggle for survival. But as Jews became assimilated into the local culture, particularly in Germany from the late 1700s and into the 1900s, Yiddish began to decline. It was criticized by Jews, particularly those most influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment, as a barbarous ghetto jargon, a barrier to Jewish acceptance in German society.

  In 1908, the first Yiddish Language Conference was held in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine). It was supposed to be about standardizing the language and promoting and celebrating its thriving literature and drama, but it became a fierce argument about the status of Yiddish relative to Hebrew, and which could truly lay claim to being the national Jewish language. Politics, history, tradition and the future all got mixed up with debates about language, and there was a great deal of passionate speech-making, including a keynote address from the writer I. L. Peretz. ‘There is one people – Jews,’ he declared, ‘and its language is – Yiddish. And in this language we want to amass our cultural treasures, create our culture, rouse our spirits and souls and unite culturally with all countries and all times.’

  Ticket to the first Yiddish Language Conference, 1908

  It’s interesting that the creator of Esperanto, Ludovic Zamenhof, was also part of the debate about Yiddish and Hebrew, but he took a different and independent view. He had created Esperanto to be a uniting force for good in a disparate world. He believed that a new, international language could bring people of different cultures and nations together; everyone would have their own languages, but Esperanto would be the vehicle for equality and understanding and peace among everyone. Later in life, he took his vision even further; he dismissed Yiddish and Hebrew, and a physical Jewish state in Palestine, and argued that Esperanto was the language to promote a broader spirituality, and bring together Jews the world over in a new kind of mystical humanism.

  As the Zionist movement gathered momentum, more and more Jews from around the world, spea
king many different languages, began to return to Palestine, and, in the end, Yiddish lost out to a revived and modernized Hebrew. After the Second World War it was even more tainted with the memories of the Holocaust, and the modern state of Israel turned its back on it. The once thriving language of middle Europe survives mainly amongst the elderly Jewish communities in New York, Florida and California and, of course, in the world of comedy and entertainment.

  The Friar’s Club in midtown Manhattan looks like a medieval castle inside, but it’s a castle owned and controlled by the court jesters. Founded as a private members’ club in 1904, it has been a bastion for entertainers, and especially comics, for over a century. Will Rogers, Jack Benny, Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal – well pretty much every major and minor American entertainer – have graced the oak-panelled rooms. And, of course, this being New York, it is the Jewish comedians who have dominated the scene. Stewie Stone is a veteran of the so-called ‘Borscht Belt’. Also known as the Jewish Alps, the Borscht Belt was like a mini Las Vegas that flourished between the 1930s and the 1960s in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. It was a place where the predominantly Jewish population of NYC would go for their summer vacations and listen to the quickfire repartee of stand-up comedians, many of whom would become household names – Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, George Burns, Jackie Mason, Phil Silvers and Joan Rivers, to name just a few, and, of course, the irrepressible Stewie Stone, whose Yiddish humour is rooted in the fertile comic soil of Flatbush in Brooklyn, where he grew up.