Eliezer ben Yehuda is considered the father of “Modern Hebrew”.
Ben
Yehuda left his native Lithuania
and sailed to Palestine in 1881 where he settled in
the Jewish quarter of old Jerusalem.
In 1890 he helped create the Hebrew Language Council (ועד הלשון העברית / va3ad halashon ha3ivrit)
whose stated purpose was to disseminate works in Hebrew and establish Hebrew as
the official language of the Yishuv.
Although Ben-Yehuda was not a religious Jew, he dressed as a traditional
Sephardic Jew, sported a long untrimmed beard and regularly attended the local
synagogue. It wasn’t long however until he managed to arouse the ire of the
Jerusalem Sephardic Rabbinate who responded with 3 separate bans against his and
his newspaper “Hatsvi”.
Ben-Yehuda particularly
disliked the Sephardic Chief Rabbi
Ya'akov Shaul Elyashar and considered him be from the old generation of Jews
who were hopelessly stuck in the “galut [exile] mentality”. He did however form
close ties with Elyashar’s successor, Rabbi Ya'akov Meir who was highly
sympathetic to Ben-Yehuda’s ambitions and the former was instrumental in
introducing the modern Hebrew language into the schools of the Sephardic
community in Jerusalem.
Ben-Yehuda, although displaying an attitude of contempt for the older generation
of traditional Sephardic Rabbis, harbored a strong admiration for the traditions
of Sephardic Jewry; the “golden age in Spain”, was especially cherished by
Ben-Yehuda who called it “this most fruitful period”.
As Jack Fellman put it:
"... the
Sephardim as a whole were less inclined to religious fanaticism and more
receptive to new ideas from the outside world. This fact can be attributed to
various sources. First, unlike the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim had never been
directly exposed to the new climate of thought as expressed in the ideas of the
enlightenment which were sweeping across Europe during the
19th century and therefore did not recognize as deeply the possible
anti-traditional, anti-religious consequences of these beliefs."
It is known from historical records and had also been clear to Ben Yehuda before
his arrival in Palestine that the various Jewish groups in the city, while
speaking their own languages among themselves, used Hebrew as a lingua franca
when it became necessary to meet together, for example in the market place, or
to work together, as in the collection of taxes for the government authorities.
This situation was particularly applicable to the 2 major sections of the
community- Ashkenazim and Sephardim- when they met together, but was also the
case when groups consisting only of Sephardic Jews gathered, as these people had
no other common means of communication but Hebrew, since Ladino was restricted
in use and Arabic was splintered into several dialects. As Ben-Yehuda observed:
“When for example a Sephardi from Aleppo would meet a Sephardi from Salonika or
a Sephardi from Morocco would come into the company of a Jew from Bukhara, they
were obliged to speak in the holy tongue… of all the centers of Jewish
population in the world only Jerusalem could boast a spoken Hebrew tradition
which had been preserved until Ben Yehuda’s time.
As Ben-Yehuda noted: “for me
the matter was a little easier, because the Sephardim who knew I was not a
Sephardi were already used to the fact that with an Ashkenazi they must speak in
Hebrew. As for the Ashkenazim, some of them did not know who I was, and the
question whether I might not be a Sephardi made it acceptable to them to speak
with me in Hebrew.
This Hebrew was not, of course, the Ashkenazic (European) Hebrew that Ben Yehuda
had learned in his youth. In the first place, it was a Hebrew spoken with the
Sephardic accent, inasmuch as the Sephardim were numerically and culturally
superior to the other groups in Jerusalem and had enjoyed this status for over
300 years and therefore their accent too had become dominant... It should also be
borne in mind as a factor initially aiding Ben Yehuda and his ideal that certain
groups of Jews in Palestine already spoke only Hebrew, in particular Kabbalists
and Hassidim especially in Safed, at least on Sabbaths, but also, it would seem,
on weekdays.
Adopting Hebrew as the Official
Language
After much discussion and debate, a meeting of the Hebrew Teachers Association
in 1895 adopted Hebrew as the language of instruction, with Sephardic
pronunciation to be used (but Ashkenazic pronunciation was allowed in the first
year in Ashkenazic schools, and for prayer and ritual). The next meeting of the
association was not until 1903, at the close of a major convention of Jews of
the Yishuv called in Zikhron Yaakov by Ussishkin, the Russian Zionist leader.
The 59 members present accepted Hebrew as the medium of instruction…and there
was general agreement also on the use of Ashkenazi script and Sephardic
pronunciation.
On the question of why Ben-Yehuda and the Language Council decided to adopt the
Sephardic pronunciation, Jack Follman quotes the noted linguist Dr. Haim Blanc:
“for various reasons, they decided to adopt the pronunciation in vogue among
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern (Sephardic) communities, but which one of the
several Sephardic varieties was actually used as a model is obscure…”
Blanc offered the following reasons among others for this
change:
1. The Sephardic
variety was already in use as the pronunciation of the Market Hebrew lingua
franca of Palestine,
and was used even by the Ashkenazim in their face to face dealings with the
Sephardim for almost 4 centuries prior to
Ben-Yehuda.
2. The Sephardic
variety was considered the more ancient of the two, as testified in particular
by various transliterations and translations of Hebrew into Latin and Greek, and
therefore was considered closer to the original ancient biblical Hebrew of the
homeland. A further point was the fact that the Sephardi variant was considered
closer to the historical dialect of Judah, the home of Judaism, whereas the
Ashkenazic form was thought to be similar to that of secessionist
Samaria.
3. The Ashkenazic
variety of Hebrew reminded the council too much of Yiddish, the despised
language of the exile in the opinion of most of the council’s members, which, in
particular contained the same set of vowel phonemes. Conversely, the Sephardic
form resembled the sound pattern of Arabic more closely and Arabic was the
sister language in the Semitic family which already existed in the
locale.
4. The Sephardic
variant reproduced the consonantal text of Hebrew more accurate that did the
Ashkenazic, as it included at least four more graphemic-phonemic renditions. Therefore it was considered the more correct of the two by the
council, who still conceived of Hebrew more in its written image than in its
spoken form.
5. It was the
council’s opinion that children who knew the Sephardic system would be equipped
to read and write Hebrew texts with greater facility since the Sephardic system
resembled the consonantal text more closely. Since children were to be the chief
carriers of the language revival, this was an important factor.
6. The Sephardic
system is closer to the internal grammatical structure (morpho phonemics) of
Hebrew than the Ashkenazic system, and had been the system already in use among
the European Hebraists as well as in Hebrew grammars. In this sense, it may be
said that the Sephardic variety had more codification and thus more prestige
than the Ashkenazi variety.
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