Hebrew, the language of our identity

“Until I was eight and a half years old, my mother tongue was German. When I arrived in Israel, I no longer had anyone to talk with in it and as a kid started studying Hebrew. But the mother tongue is like mother’s milk. A man who is deprived of it is sick for his whole life: you don’t speak your mother tongue, it flows. When they take it away, a chasm is created inside you and you have to make every effort to fill it. So, I started studying Hebrew and Hebrew became my mother tongue. It was a great effort, a demanding effort”. So the Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld described in an interview with Pagine Ebraiche his relationship with the Hebrew language.
It was a language he conquered through effort and daily commitment, which he used to write about his unique life’s experience and thoughts, and through which he defined his identity. “If a Jew wants to be as such in a profound way he should know Hebrew, just as he should know the fundamental texts of our tradition, philosophy, mysticism”, remarked Appelfeld. His words came to mind as Israel celebrated last week the Day of the Hebrew Language, which this year fell on December 23. It was the occasion to remember the central role Hebrew has played in the history of Judaism and Israel as well as to promote its teaching. “Studying Hebrew is part of our identity”, reminded to Pagine Ebraiche Rabbi Giuseppe Momigliano, member of the Council of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities and Chief Rabbi of Genoa. “Often when we study a subject, we do not feel it fully. With Hebrew it’s different: we really have to feel it as part of us and as a way to express our strong bond with the state of Israel”.
Many initiatives were organized in Israel for this event, which coincides with the birth date of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, considered the father of Hebrew’s modern version. For Ben Yehuda, Hebrew represented both the continuity between generations and everyday life’s language.
At the time of Ben Yehuda, in the Yishuv, the foundation of the soon to be State of Israel, among Jewish residents the slogan was “Ivri, dabber ivrit!”, “Hebrew, speak Hebrew!”, as points out Anna Linda Callow in her book La lingua che visse due volte (The language that lived twice). For nascent Israel, as it is well known, the choice of the national language was not a foregone conclusion: Yiddish, spoken by millions of Jews, vied for the honor and burden of becoming the language of the Jewish state.
Hebrew won thanks to the cultural proposal of Ben Yehuda which was based on a very specific project, “the conquest of language without discounts and compromise”, stresses Callow, professor of Hebrew at the University of Milan. For him the choice for Israel had to be radical: “rak Ivrit”, only Hebrew.
It is a phrase that will resonate in several Israeli homes over the decades, as reminds Sarah Kaminski, professor of Hebrew at the University of Turin. “The first language I learned was Polish, the language of my parents, of their daily life. When I started school at the age of five, my classmates made fun of me for my Hebrew pronunciation. Especially for my non-Israeli r. And so, I remember that I went home and told my parents: enough, from now on we only speak Hebrew”. Rak Ivrit.
Like her, Kaminski explains, many of her classmates became a point of reference for parents in the use of the language. “It was a subject in which I excelled, perhaps also to compensate for a somewhat shaky situation at home. I used to help my father write official letters. He and my mother learned Hebrew with difficulty and great determination, arriving in Israel from Poland in the late 1950s. They were university students who rebuilt their lives in a different language, without much help”.
The experience of Rabbi Momigliano is very different. He recalls how for him the qualitative leap in Hebrew conversation came while spending a year in the kibbutz of Ein HaNetziv, in northern Israel. “Between studying in ULPAN and talking to other people, I remember that period as being important for me to learn the language”. Among the gratifications that came after months of study, the Rabbi remembers, starting to read and understand the articles of HaTzofe, the newspaper of the national-religious organization Mizrachi. “From a grammatical point of view, on the other hand, I learned a lot from one of my teachers at the rabbinic school in Turin, Rav Moshe Kurt Arndt z.l. With a very rigorous approach, he had taught us verbal forms, punctuation, and so on”. In the Turin period, he adds, the exchange with Israeli students also served as a training ground for the use of the language.
For reading, Kaminski’s suggestion for those who begin their journey through Hebrew is to start with the great authors of Israeli children’s literature: Ayn Hillel, Yehonatan Geffen, Anda Finkelfeld. “They are texts in which there is a mixture of high Hebrew, biblical terms, and more everyday Hebrew. Their musicality makes them more pleasant and facilitates the memorization of the terms: they are perfect for children and not only”.
For those who appreciate poetry, Anna Linda Callow suggests starting here. “At least I did that. Also because many poems are vocalized and translations are found by the great Israeli poets. In addition, we are talking about texts that end in a few sentences, which facilitates understanding”.
For those who are not taking their first steps in, Rav, Momigliano recommends reading the Sefer HaAggadah edited by Hayim Nahman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki. “It is a collection of midrashim of the Talmud rendered in simple and understandable Hebrew, it is also found vocalized. Often these are episodes that you know and this can make it easier to understand the meaning of the text and words”.