From the fire of Sinai to the pulse of the 21st century: the rebirth of Hebrew

There are ancient peoples, like the Egyptians, who maintained a single language for some thirty centuries, and others who settled into multilingualism as a result of their nomadic and eventful lives. Jews consider Hebrew their sacred language , the one chosen by God to convey his message to humanity. With thirty-three centuries of history, it is one of the longest-lived . It was used in the writing of the Bible, the most translated book, the main text of Judaism and essential to Christianity.

The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham , originally from the city of Ur in Mesopotamia (southern Iraq), who moved to Canaan, present-day Israel and Palestine, by order of God according to the Holy Book. Isaac , his son, and Jacob , his grandson, were his successors. A famine forced Jacob and his twelve sons, the origin of the twelve tribes of Israel, to flee to Egypt, where they were enslaved by the pharaohs. They returned to their homeland in an event known as the Exodus , led by Moses in the 13th century BC. God gave him the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai - written, one might think, in Hebrew. This marked the birth of Israel as a religious nation. It should be added that there is no conclusive archaeological evidence of Hebrew slavery in Egypt, nor of the Exodus, according to the current consensus.

Around the 10th century BC, a monarchy was established that united the tribes to confront their enemies. King David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital. His son Solomon built the First Temple. The first writings in Hebrew date from this period. In 922 BC, upon Solomon's death, the kingdom was divided. Israel stood in the north, and Judah stood in the south, with its capital in Jerusalem.

Exile in Babylon

In 722 BC the Assyrians conquered Israel. Judah fell to the Babylonians in 586 BC . The Temple was destroyed and a significant portion of the population deported to Babylon , a monumental, planned city located along the Euphrates River (present-day Iraq), a center of wisdom, with libraries and academic tradition , wide streets, canals, temples, palaces, and colossal fortifications. Polytheism dominated. Marduk was the principal deity. Astronomy, astrology, and mathematics were practiced, and cuneiform writing was done on clay tablets. The deportation of conquered peoples, especially the elites, prevented future rebellions. By breaking their ties to their land, the deportees lost their capacity for organization and resistance, and their collective identity was diluted. The Jews could have disappeared, but they consolidated their identity around the Scriptures and the Synagogue.

During their exile they spoke Hebrew, a liturgical, religious and literary language that was used to copy sacred texts such as the Torah, although it was probably no longer a living language in everyday use among many exiles. They spoke, above all, Aramaic , in daily life, in administration and in commerce, the vehicular language of Babylon and later of the Persian Empire , which gradually became the mother tongue of many Jews, as evidenced by the writing of part of two biblical books, Daniel and Ezra . The official and scholarly language of Babylon was Akkadian , especially in administrative and religious contexts.

But a miracle occurred in 538 BC when King Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return and rebuild their Temple. Some did so and raised it. Others stayed and founded permanent communities outside of Israel.

In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great 's campaigns established Greek as the language of culture and administration. Its cultural heritage was already so vast that it was used for the writing of the life of Jesus in the Gospels and the New Testament in general. It was the most effective language for spreading the Christian message throughout the Greco-Roman world. Hebrew ceased to be transmitted as a mother tongue and in everyday use. But it did not disappear. It was limited to liturgical, written, and study purposes. It was read in the synagogue, written in commentaries and prayers, and in rabbinical letters.

The Romans conquered Judea in 63 BC . The territory became a client state of Rome , although it retained some autonomy under local rulers such as Herod the Great . In 6 AD the territory was incorporated directly into the Empire as a province, under the control of a Roman procurator. In 66 AD the Jews revolted. The Emperor Nero sent General Vespasian to put down the insurrection. Later, when Vespasian became emperor, he let his son Titus command an army to besiege Jerusalem, take the city, and destroy the Second Temple. Judaism began to delight in the Torah and the synagogues.

Around 132, Emperor Hadrian banned circumcision, considered bodily mutilation and a barbaric practice. The order was an attack on a symbolic commandment of the covenant with God. The Jews revolted, led by Bar Kokhba , whom many respected as the Messiah. Rome reacted harshly and crushed the revolt. The year was 135. He prohibited practicing the Torah, celebrating the Sabbath, teaching Judaism, and, of course, circumcision. He renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina (Hadrian's surname, Aelius, and Rome's sacred hill, Hadrian's Capitoline City) and banned the entry of Jews. He renamed Judea Syria Palestine to erase any Jewish identity. Ancient sources speak of some 500,000 deaths. Other Jews were enslaved or exiled, mainly to North Africa, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor. The Jewish diaspora intensified and lasted for almost two thousand years , until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

The sacred and liturgical language of the diaspora, used in prayers, religious studies, and biblical texts, was Hebrew, which remained the official written language . Aramaic, which had been the common language of the Jews since the Babylonian exile, spread with the diaspora but disappeared, absorbed by the host languages. Greek, which was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean regions such as Alexandria , Syria, and Asia Minor, began to be spoken by many Jews. For this reason, it was the language that received the first translation of the Bible, known as the Septuagint, meaning seventy, the number of scholars involved (believed to have been 72). It was carried out in Alexandria for use by the Egyptian Jews.

In the western regions of the Roman Empire, such as Italy and Hispania, they adopted medieval Latin. They also incorporated local languages, to which they added Hebrew vocabulary and other peculiarities. Thus , Judeo-Arabic was born in the 7th century in the Islamic world. From the 10th century onwards, Yiddish developed, medieval German with Hebrew and Slavic vocabulary. From the 15th century onwards, Judeo-Spanish developed. The Jews of Provence (southern France) developed Judeo-Provençal around the same time, based on Occitan. And the Italian Jews developed Italo-Hebrew , based on Tuscan, Venetian and Neapolitan. All these languages were sometimes written with the Hebrew alphabet or alefbet.

The sacred language of the diaspora used in prayers, studies and biblical texts was Hebrew.

But that wasn't the end of the journey. Jews were expelled from Paris and France in general in 1182 (Philip II Augustus), in 1306 (Philip IV the Fair), in 1322 (Charles IV), and in 1394 (Charles VI), this time their presence was banned for several centuries. They were expelled from England in 1290 (Edward I), from Spain in 1492 (Catholic Monarchs) , from Portugal in 1496 (Manuel I), and from several German principalities and Italian cities in the 14th to 16th centuries. Sometimes the accusations were justified with unusual accusations such as desecrating hosts or causing the plague, other times it was clear that they intended to confiscate their property . Even in the Modern and Contemporary Age, Tsarist Russia imposed restrictions, pogroms, and partial expulsions. And in Nazi Germany (1933–1945), although without formal expulsion, they were forced to emigrate and then exterminated – several million – during the Holocaust . The last expulsion took place after the creation of the State of Israel when some 850,000 had to flee countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria or Libya, among others.

The resurrection of the Hebrew

It is not surprising that, as a people rising from the ashes, Hebrew was reborn as a family language in the modern age . An exceptional resurrection in the evolution of languages that hardly conceive of the transition from liturgical and literary to maternal status with generational transmission. However, it was able to reverse natural history. This revival occurred mainly in the 19th century , was consolidated in the early 20th century, and is closely linked to the Zionist movement , which aimed to establish and support a Jewish national home in Israel, its historic homeland. The point is to consider that Jews, as a nation, have the right to their own state and self-determination.

The effective revival of the language was initiated by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1881 with the intention of reviving Hebrew as the national language of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. He spoke only Hebrew with his family. His son was the first native speaker of modern Hebrew. He coined new words for technological concepts and everyday objects, such as גלגל (galgal, wheel), רכבת (rakevet, train), חשמל (ḥashmal, electricity), עיתון (iton, newspaper), עיפרון (iparon, pencil), and for education: בית ספר (beit sefer, school), תלמיד (talmid, student)… He also compiled a historical dictionary of Modern Hebrew. He founded schools and promoted their use in teaching. He founded newspapers and normalized their use in public spaces. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of Jews emigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe. Revitalization was an essential part of the Zionist project , that of a common language for a people dispersed around the world with many of their own languages, such as Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, Arabic, and so on. Hebrew became the language of education, the press, administration, and daily life in the Jewish settlements of what was to become Israel. In 1948, with the founding of the State of Israel, it was declared an official language alongside Arabic . Since then, it has evolved into a fully-fledged modern language, spoken by some nine million people , with colloquial variants and formal registers.

Hebrew has undergone various processes of change over such a long life that distance its remote uses from modern ones , but specialists consider that, despite the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, we can consider that we are dealing with the same language.

Current situation

The ideal for a language's security is an abundance of monolingual speakers and the strength of generational transmission, but Hebrew is almost devoid of the former and therefore transmission is not guaranteed . It coexists with other languages, sometimes in an ambilingual situation, other times in functional bilingualism , or in a situation of diglossia and even conflict. As a national language, it is the mother tongue of the majority of Israeli Jewish citizens, and also the language of government, the media, education, and everyday life, where it enjoys prestige, identity, and institutional power. It is used for drafting laws, contracts, and school curricula... In this sense, its recovery is admirable. No other language has such an exceptional trajectory.

Many Israelis switch languages depending on the context: Hebrew at work, Russian or Arabic at home, English at university.

But the reality is not so rosy. English, required in education from an early age and learned at a high level, is used as a native language by a multitude of Israelis. Much internet content, software, video games, and higher education are only in English, which functions, as in so many other countries, as a bridge language to the globalized world. Many Israelis switch languages depending on the context: Hebrew at work, Russian or Arabic at home, English at university, and English is frequently used in contexts that require it, such as "אני עובד בגוגל עם machine learning" (I work at Google with machine learning ). In the real world, English remains the first language, although generational transmission is preferred in Hebrew, which often overshadows the language of parents.

The country's other two languages are Arabic and Russian. The former is a secondary official language, spoken as a mother tongue by 20% of the population, who are Israeli Arabs, whether Muslim, Christian, or Druze, generally ambilingual because they know Hebrew. The other is Russian , which is particularly important because more than a million Jews emigrated from the former USSR in the 1990s. Russian is spoken at home, in neighborhoods, and in some media outlets. Many of these immigrants learned Hebrew as adults, but retained Russian as a home or cultural language and a language passed on within the family. Russian is present on signs, in supermarkets, in translated literature, and so on.

Judeo-Spanish, or Sephardic, is the family language of some 100,000 members of the Sephardic communities who retain the variety spoken in 1492. They are joined by some 130,000 immigrants of Spanish or Latin American origin, primarily Argentinian, most of whom are Ashkenazi (Ashkenaz is Germany in Hebrew, just as Spain is Sepharad). Other common languages are French and Amharic.

Israel, therefore, is a multilingual country where speakers are at least ambilingual because they use two languages in their daily lives: Hebrew and English. Those who inherit Arabic, Russian, Sephardic, Spanish, French, or Amharic are necessarily trilingual. A true mosaic of languages . One language, Hebrew, the language of Yahweh, and a multitude of other languages for daily life: Egyptian in the past, Aramaic and Akkadian in exile, Greek and Latin in the diaspora, and then Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, Russian, Sephardic, Spanish, and, finally, English, which, curiously, far from being the last language, is the first, and perhaps the most necessary. A multilingual and stubbornly religious history.

In any case, Hebrew, once a liturgical whisper among the ruins of history, has risen again as a living, everyday language , a testament to a people who refused to disappear from time. In the melting pot of languages that has marked the history of Judaism, the reborn language is not only memory but also future: a voice from the past that continues to be spoken in the present. In addition to being an unprecedented linguistic feat, Hebrew is the symbol of an identity that, in the face of exile, persecution, and diaspora, chose to continue speaking its voice.