The Hebrew Language
THE Hebraists explain their work quietly and in a dignified way. They are not stirred from their quiet even when wild and unjust attacks begin to pour upon them from various quarters, because they know that historic truth is on their side, that the national hope is with them, that the real feelings of the people are in harmony with their feelings. On the slander, that they betray the Jewish people and disfigure their manner of speech and expression, they look down more in pity than in contempt, because, having studied the Bible and knowing the Jewish past surely better than ignorant demagogues, they know that the various dialects which the Jews have spoken in the lands of the Golus were normal products of the abnormal Golus life, and that none of the dialects survived the economic and political ne- This article cessity which brought Slouschz is of es them a temporary life. at this time in v
The examples are too prolific for us to be able to cite them here, but in order more clearly to illustrate our idea we can mention the history of several dialects which have played a great role in the history of Jewish culture: First comes the Jewish-Hellenic speech which was the first non-Semitic language spoken by the Jews (because Aramaic is really only a sort of Hebrew dialect). Millions of Jews in Egypt, Libya, and other lands east of the Mediterranean spoke Hellenic or Greek. At one time even the Bible was translated into Greek and so it came about that Hebrew was almost forgotten among the Hellenic Jews.
The sages foresaw that this translation would estrange the Jewish masses from their racial roots and from national thought and feeling, and they said, “The day on which the Bible was translated into Greek was as dark and dangerous as the day when the golden calf was made, because the Bible thereby became two different Bibles.”
History has proved that the sages were correct. The study of the Bible in a strange language, the adaptation of Hebrew ideas and conceptions to the Greek culture, brought about an intellectual assimilation. The Jewish masses became estranged from the original Jewish manner of feeling and were intellectually assimilated to the Hellenic philosophic conceptions. But as they remained Jews and monotheists they were led astray by the strange ideas into eccentric ways and the end of this was that because of assimila-
tion and ignorance the great mass of the Hellenists accepted the glittering tin of Christianity instead of the pure gold of Judaism and were absorbed among the first Christians, while a large part of them gave birth to various sects which stood far removed from traditional Judaism.
Altogether otherwise was the lot of the Jewish masses in Palestine and in Babylon. Although they spoke a kind of Jewish Aramaic (we call it Targum language) that dialect never played an independent role and should be considered a dialect of Hebrew; and in the second place, the whole traditional and cultural life of these Jews was founded on the Hebrew Torah and the culture of the land of
Israel. Therefore the Talmud survived the Aramaic and other dialects and remains to this day y Prof. Nahum one of the foundations of ecial significance Jewish national life, while ew of the recent all traces of the philosophy of the Hellenists has arisen in the are forgotten (including e national Jewish the great philosopher e the announce- Philo himself). made that the In recent generations on is planning the we have observed the a Hebrew Uni- same result in German Jewry on the one hand, lem, those who and in Russian Polish as the national Judaism on the other. rted a systematic When Moses Mendelssohn and his disciples bet this proposal. gan their Haskalah activi- hat Yiddish and ties most of the German actually the lan- Jews still spoke a kind of wish masses and Jewish German (even at ld therefore pre-the present day the Al- satian Jew speaks a pe- stine. culiar Yiddish because Alsace stood under French rule and was not influenced by German) — he also wrote his philosophical works in German and not in Yiddish—and even in his ideas he was led astray by the philosophy of the time which was foreign to the spirit of pure Judaism. This literary German was introduced into the School and into life. First, they ceased to speak Yiddish and then they neglected Hebrew studies.