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Learning Hebrew has given me a better read on my Jewishness

Simply learning enough Hebrew to watch a news programme can transform how you understand Israel

August 9, 2023 17:49
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An Israeli schoolgirl writing in Hebrew the saying: "Back to school" on a whiteboard.
3 min read

Everyone has a pandemic habit that stuck. Maybe it’s jogging, or a little more extravagantly, home cocktail making. But for me it’s learning Hebrew. Twice a week, I study Ivrit. Now, three years on, I wouldn’t call myself fluent, but I am proficient. And it has been a journey that has deepened my sense of being a Jew far more than I expected.

I’d never shown much interest in Hebrew before. Nor had the British Jewish community ever shown much interest in teaching me more than my Aleph-Bet. And, in this, my five-expression Hebrew — stretching from “mazal tov all the way through “Shabbat shalom” to a mighty “shana tova” — I was truly average for a millennial Western Jew. Awkwardly mumbling along to the prayers. Failing to read even the most basic words written without vowels. Writing off even contemplating holding Hebrew conversations with Israelis or listening to their evening news as something impossible.   

This sat awkwardly with me. It just felt wrong. Not having a Jewish language I could speak. But the more I studied, the more I realised why. This is a historical anomaly. For most of our history Jews not only spoke Jewish languages — Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic — written, of course, in Hebrew script, but their elites had a deep grasp of literary Hebrew. It’s only with modernity that Western Jews have come to lack their own language or, beyond the rabbis, any real Hebrew skills. Britain and America, the old joke goes, are two people divided by a common language. Israel and the diaspora, it sadly feels, are the same people divided by not having their own language in common. 

This is an inversion of the way it used to be. Hebrew, as I explore in a 60-page study for The Jewish Quarterly published this month on why the language matters, for most of Jewish history — long after the spoken language died out in the third century CE — is something that tied the diaspora together. The language never really died. The Cairo Genizah, where centuries of Jewish texts were preserved, is full of not only responsa but literary letters in Hebrew from the Middle Ages. Wandering travellers such as the travel writer Israel Joseph Benjamin were using it as a lingua franca between Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi communities as late as the mid-19th Century.

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