The great migrations that began at the end of the last century brought many foreign languages to these shores, but none lasted long in the new environment. While immigrants conversed in their own tongue in their homes and neighborhoods, their children, who grew up in the playgrounds and the public schools, adopted English as soon as they could. They were eager inductees into a process of Americanization in which English was the key to achievement and full participation.
Read one way, this is the story of a motley of peoples consolidated into a coherent civil society that could withstand the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II. Read another way, it is the story of a diversity of traditions folded into a single dominant culture. Yet however the story is read, the velocity with which it unfolded remains dizzying. Within the space of one generation, a polyphony of Italian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Armenian, and Norwegian voices had been absorbed into the American vernacular.
The Jews were little different in this regard. Their headlong rush to embrace America was as abandoned as any other group’s. The fond nostalgia that nowadays envelops the recollection of things Yiddish obscures the implacability of that language’s disappearance from the American scene. When all is said and done, the mother tongue of East European Jewish immigrants was yielded up by its speakers rather quickly. The mass-circulation newspapers, the musical theater, the lodges and landsmanschaften, the labor movements—the whole immense enterprise of Yiddish popular culture was largely a one-generational phenomenon. Yiddish today is spoken only by the elderly, by pockets of loyalists, and by the ultra-Orthodox, for whom it functions as a bulwark against the encroachments of modernity.
But the Jews brought with them to this country another Jewish tongue, Hebrew, and the career of this old-new language proceeded along lines very different from its rival sibling. Whereas Yiddish was a genuine mameh loshn, a mother tongue spoken unselfconsciously by the masses, Hebrew was a revived classical literary language that was programmatically made into a mother tongue and adopted by a small cultural elite. Yet despite this preciousness, Hebrew succeeded in America in ways Yiddish did not.
Both languages boasted their poets and novelists and critics and literary journals, but it was Hebrew that for a long time imprinted its spirit upon the practice of Jewish education. Afternoon Hebrew schools, which were the dominant form of Jewish schooling between the two world wars and for long after, were not merely Sunday schools or religious schools; in a fundamental sense, they were, like their name, Hebrew schools. While admittedly few students came out of these schools speaking the language, the Hebrew national ethos, about which I shall have more to say below, pervaded everything that was taught.
Even today, Hebrew in America lives. As the language spoken by hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have settled here, it has ironically become what it never was before: a true immigrant mother tongue. As such, it unfortunately shows few signs of eluding the fate of the immigrant languages that have preceded it. At the same time—and in a manner more indigenous to the American Jewish community—Hebrew has emerged as a sought-after subject of study on American campuses, being offered at over 90 colleges and universities.
Yet for those who hold the language in high esteem, the current situation gives little cause for celebration. Even as a language of liturgy and learning, traditionally its central role, the record of Hebrew in America has been equivocal. Reform Judaism jettisoned large chunks of the language from the synagogue service (although it has recently made something of a comeback). Conservative Judaism has held more steadfastly to the text of the prayerbook, but beyond the hallowed formulas of the liturgy, knowledge of Hebrew is virtually nil; rare indeed is the Conservative congregant who can read with understanding a simple Bible story or comprehend more than an isolated term in the Sabbath service.
The situation is better in the Orthodox community because of the great importance accorded to the study of sacred texts. Yet if we take as evidence the enormous spate of recent translations of traditional texts into English, then the knowledge of Hebrew is in eclipse there as well. When the modern-Orthodox movement was stronger in America, its commitment to religious Zionism was expressed in the centrality of Hebrew in many day schools and yeshivas. But since the turn to the Right in the Orthodox world, Hebrew has become a stepchild of the curriculum.
As a modern spoken language in America, the record of Hebrew is more painful still, especially in comparison to Israel. No one, of course, would seriously expect American Jews to chatter away in Hebrew, yet given the extraordinary involvement of American Jewish leaders with Israel—the study trips, the missions, the meetings, the joint ventures—it would be reasonable to look here for some echo of what Hebrew has become in the Jewish state, namely, a vital and supple communicative medium. The reality, however, is quite the opposite. Among lay leaders there are few indeed who can manage more than a handful of Hebrew words, and even those are often pronounced with an embarrassed awkwardness.
In practice, Hebrew has long been eclipsed by English as the national—and the international—language of the Jewish people. Even Israelis acknowledge this fact. When David Levy, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, visited Washington several years ago and gave television press conferences in Hebrew with an English voice-over, it was an event remarkable for its novelty. Never in recent history had an Israeli official addressed the foreign press here—or in Israel, for that matter—in anything other than English.
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My Chronicle of the fallen fortunes of Hebrew might seem to be part of the common and tired complaint about the decline in standards in America—were it not for the fact that, in certain areas at least, the Jewish community is in the midst of something of a cultural boom. No observer of the scene over the past twenty years has missed the signs: the great number of Jewish books in stores; the vast expansion of Jewish-studies programs in universities as well as less formal adult courses in major communities; the growing number of non-Orthodox day schools in addition to the expanding pool of yeshiva students; the growing commitment of organized philanthropy to Jewish education and to cultural programming in general.
Just how deep these changes run is, to be sure, a matter of debate. Some argue that they presage the emergence of a genuine Jewish renaissance, the creative stirrings of a community finally coming into its own. Others say they are limited to a small elite and overshadowed by the grim fact that the main body of the community is being eroded by an increasingly shallow ethnicity and the greater ravages of intermarriage. Yet even the pessimists admit that, at least on some levels and in some sectors of the American Jewish community, there is an increased interest in Jewish culture, in both its religious and secular forms.
A crucial qualifier, however, must be added to these claims: whatever good things are happening, they are mostly happening in translation. Contemporary Hebrew novels and memoirs have been available in English for a long time, and they remain an important window onto the inner life of Israeli society. Less evident perhaps is the substantial energy being invested in translating the classic texts of the Jewish tradition into English. The proliferation of Jewish-studies courses on the campus would be unthinkable without anthologies made up of translated texts with introductions; rare indeed is the course in which a document is read in its original language.
This immense enterprise, which in quality and conception ranges from the august heights of the Yale Judaica Series to the hugely successful Art Scroll books with their idiosyncratically pious diction, involves not only translations of specific texts but the broader attempt to translate a culture as a whole into an American Jewish idiom. Most of the serious books that have appeared in recent years are, in one way or another, acts of popularization. They seek—at least the best of them do—to disentangle Jewish culture from its knotted rootedness in arcane documents written in difficult languages (not only Hebrew but Aramaic) and to present it as a system of ideas and practices that are intelligible in terms of how we experience the world in our own time and place. This is no less an instance of translation than taking an epistle by Maimonides and rendering it word-for-word into English.
Examples of popularization are everywhere: dictionaries of Jewish literacy; guides to religious observance; catalogues of Jewish books; introductions to the Talmud; surveys of Jewish history. Perhaps the most formidable is the new Jewish Publication Society commentary on the Torah, which, among other things, distills for the English reader what biblical scholarship (mostly in German) has learned from the study of ancient Near Eastern parallels (mostly in Akkadian and Ugaritic) to the Hebrew Scriptures. It is now possible for an intelligent layman to sit down with this commentary in hand (which includes the earlier JPS translation of the text proper), surround himself in addition with translations of the Torah commentaries of Rashi, Nachmanides, and many other more obscure exegetes, and engage in rather far-ranging study of the Bible—all without needing to know a word of Hebrew.
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Is this wonderful or is it deplorable? I would argue that it is some of both. Happily—and not entirely predictably—we are witnessing (again, at some levels and in some sectors) a counter-assimilatory turn in the spirit of American Jewry, a desire for knowledge that is being answered by this widespread and energetic enterprise of translation and popularization. At the same time, however, something deeply disturbing lies at the heart of the same development.
There is, to begin with, a remarkably complacent acceptance of the indirection and mediation necessarily involved in translating a culture. American Jews, like Americans generally, often believe that when a foreign-language document is rendered into English, it is liberated from its disagreeable alienness and given the gift of clarity and intelligibility. There is little awareness of loss. Quite the opposite: as Americans we feel that we are only being given our due. Yet the very large truth discovered by Jews who become seriously interested in their Jewishness is, precisely, the truth of otherness. Having been born long ago, having developed under changing and complex circumstances, and having been transmitted largely in non-Western languages, Judaism and its culture are not “naturalized” into English without something substantial being renounced. The awareness of this loss is notably absent from the current celebration of Judaism in translation.
It is also surprising that the broad renewal of interest in things Jewish has not resulted in a greater number of people wishing to learn Hebrew. One might at least have expected that the close and often admiring involvement of many American Jews with Israel would have stimulated a desire for a firsthand acquaintance with the language in which that country’s culture is lived. And the same should hold true for Jews who become absorbed in studying the documents of the religious tradition. It is not easy to understand why they do not long to have the veil removed so that they can apprehend directly the texts they so deeply esteem.
Hebrew, in all fairness, is a difficult language to acquire, and even if a serious desire to learn it were stimulated, there would be few ways for a determined adult to master it short of repairing to a seminary or a university. But the fact is that the American Jewish community has devoted little thought and fewer resources to making Hebrew available to those who want to learn it.
The neglect of Hebrew in America is a grave problem—much graver than might at first appear. For, in my judgment, the quality of American Jewish life as it evolves into the future depends on Hebrew cultural literacy.
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The case for the centrality of Hebrew in modern Jewish culture was made most authoritatively at the end of the 19th century in Russia by the founder of cultural Zionism, Ahad Ha-am, the pen name of Asher Ginsberg. In his analysis, what faced the Jewish community was less a crisis of the Jews (anti-Semitism and the need to find a solution to the untenability of Jewish life in the Russian empire) than a crisis of Judaism (the breakdown of the system of traditional religious values in the face of modernity). The solutions that came from Western Europe—Reform Judaism and the “scientific” historical study of Judaism known as Wissenschaft des Judentums—represented, to Ahad Ha-am, the wholesale adoption of foreign ideals in foreign languages. Although he was less clear about what should be the authentic shape of a post-traditional Jewish culture, he was perfectly persuaded of one unshakable fact: the key lay in the particular properties of the Hebrew language.
With the revival of Hebrew as a modern language, Ahad Ha-am foresaw a chance to avert disaster. Like all languages, Hebrew was an inherently conservative medium which retained terms long after their meanings had fallen into disuse. Because of its long and unbroken history—after the Bible and the Mishnah, it remained a creative literary language throughout the medieval and early modern periods—Hebrew was a unique repository of past cultural meanings.
According to Ahad Ha-am, if Hebrew could be made into a flexible medium of literary exchange and intellectual communication, and if it could be thus used to express the new forms that Jewish life would take, then an extraordinary opportunity would present itself. Rather than suffering an utter break with the religious tradition, modern Jewish culture could maintain a vital and, in a very real sense, inescapable connection with the past. At a minimum, this meant that the products of the new culture would be fashioned in the same language as the old. But more significantly, the disused but latent meanings embedded in the language would be available to be drawn upon in future construction of the new forms of Jewish life. Herein lay the great advantage: Jewish culture created in German, French, or English could guarantee no inherent link to the Jewish past, and once the linguistic tether was severed there was no easy way back. Hebrew restored the chain.
The case for the superiority of Hebrew over Yiddish rested on a similar set of arguments. Like Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Aramaic in their times and places, Yiddish was a significant and honorable Jewish language with great expressive properties. But in Ahad Ha-am’s view, it was a poor candidate for the role of national Jewish language. It had arrived too late in the career of Jewish civilization to bear the full weight of the biblical and talmudic heritage, the body of classical verbal creativity that a resurgent Jewish people would have to look to for old terms that could be applied to new realities. Moreover, despite its millions of speakers, Yiddish was the tongue only of East European Jewry; it had little currency in the West (before the mass immigrations to America), and to Sephardim and Jews in Arab lands, Yiddish was entirely alien.
All this stood in sharp contrast to the potential, if not the reality, of Hebrew. Although in Ahad Ha-am’s day almost no one spoke it and only a small elite used it as a cultural medium, Hebrew was the one language that had the power not only to bring the Jewish people into the modern world as Jews, but also to buttress their common peoplehood at a time when they would be entering very different civil societies and cultural spheres.
Ahad Ha-am’s ideas about Hebrew were not directed solely at the new Jewish settlement then taking shape in Palestine, but it was certainly there that his prescriptions were ultimately validated. In becoming a genuine spoken language over the course of the 20th century, Hebrew succeeded by exploiting the resources embedded in its biblical and rabbinic strata not simply to name new things but to create a nuanced and synonym-rich instrument for the expression of complex ideas and feelings. It accomplished its greatest success as a force for national unity in the absorption of Jews from very different cultures (too much so, according to those who see its hegemony as having been achieved at the expense of other cultural traditions).
Less evident perhaps but more crucial has been the role of Hebrew in preventing secular Israeli culture from losing touch with Jewish history and religion. The fact that there is no Saturday in Israel but only Shabbat, the ability of educated Israelis to read the Bible in the original or to pick up a novel by Agnon—these are trite but powerful examples of how the use of Hebrew makes a certain intimacy with Jewishness inescapable. You can reject the claims of Jewishness, but, though many writers have tried, you cannot invent a Hebrew that is free of its associations.
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There is a pungent irony in the stunning success of Hebrew in Israel. Ahad Ha-am himself was not a great optimist when it came to the possibility, or even the advisability, of mass immigration to Palestine and the popularization of the Hebrew language. Both prospects were still open questions when he died in 1927, after having moved as a sick man from London to Tel Aviv five years earlier. Although he defined the Land of Israel as the spiritual center of the new Hebrew culture, he thought it imperative to spread knowledge of this culture in the Diaspora as well, because, in the absence of territory and autonomous institutions in a post-religious era, Hebrew would necessarily be the “glue” holding Jewish life together and connecting it to the past.
As it happens, not all the young men and women who were quickened by the idea of national renewal at the beginning of this century did settle in Palestine; numbers of them came to America instead. From the vantage point of the present it may seem quixotic and even a touch delusional to think that a great Hebrew culture could develop on these shores. But America had great cultural institutions, freedom, prosperity, and millions of Jews, whereas the yishuv (the new Zionist settlement in Palestine) was impoverished, sparsely settled, lacking in any ambient high culture, and clutched by an Ottoman empire careering into the cataclysm of the Great War.
The pioneer Hebraists who came to America in the years before World War I were energized by Ahad Ha-am’s conviction that, whatever the fortunes of the yishuv, the renewal of the Jewish spirit would have to take place in the Diaspora, too. In obedience to this imperative, they set about establishing the components of a literary culture: newspapers and journals, publishing houses, literary clubs and writers’ associations. Most of all, they wrote Hebrew literature: stories, novels, essays, and especially poems, thousands and thousands of Hebrew poems, about New York, about the changing seasons of the New England landscape, about American Indian legends and Negro spirituals, and, always, about the loneliness of being a Hebrew writer in America. This phenomenon—the strange but substantial career of American Hebraism during the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s—is a lost and largely unchronicled chapter in the cultural history of American Jewry.
On some aspects of the development of American Jewish life, the Hebraist movement had scant influence; on others, its influence was considerable. The principled choice to write in Hebrew consigned the works of Hebrew poets, novelists, and essayists to a dwindling pool of readers. But in the case of Jewish education, as I remarked above, Hebraism left a significant imprint.
Beginning around World War I, Jewish schooling in America was taken over by educators with a determined Hebraist bent. The characteristic institution of the time was the afternoon Hebrew school, whose curriculum, though adapted to the needs of immigrant parents, was a direct expression of Ahad Ha-am’s ideology. The emphasis was on Jewish peoplehood, modern Hebrew language, the Bible as read in Hebrew, an attachment to the Land of Israel and to the culture of the new yishuv, and synagogue skills and the holidays presented not as religious law and duty but rather as “customs and ceremonies.”
Hebrew was central to these schools not just as a subject but also as a pedagogy. The schools aspired to teach all subjects in Hebrew, according to what was called the natural method. In major cities there were Hebrew high schools as well, and a network of Hebrew colleges which served not only to prepare future teachers but to offer courses in advanced Jewish studies at a time when they were not yet being taught in the university. In the 40’s and 50’s, a network of summer camps put a new emphasis on Hebrew as a medium for the arts and recreation and the everyday life outside the classroom and the formal curriculum.
Today, these schools have largely disappeared or have been folded into congregational religious schools in which Hebrew is next to nonexistent. The Hebrew colleges have become community institutes of adult education, and genuine Hebrew-speaking summer camps simply are no more. The decline of these institutions is the result largely of far-ranging changes in postwar American Jewish life, especially the demographic shift from the city to the suburbs, but the afternoon Hebrew schools had additional problems of their own. The fact that they always played a “supplementary” role to the main action of the public schools severely limited their moral authority over their not-always-willing students. Hebraist ideology, furthermore, was not well equipped to respond to the search for religious and existential values that emerged with postwar prosperity. Anyone who taught or studied in these schools in the 50’s and 60’s knows just how faded by then were their clouds of glory.
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The heyday of American Hebraism has indeed passed. Yet in the climate of translation and popularization that currently envelops the American Jewish community, the ideas of the movement deserve a serious second look.
The main idea is very simple: Jewish experience can be adequately understood only through Jewish language. In this conception, the relation of Hebrew to Jewish culture is not merely that of a key or a gateway or a path—or any other instrumental image one might suggest. Rather, Jewish culture is embodied by Hebrew and embedded in it. This is not just a semantic point but a point about semantics, and it can best be conveyed through several very common examples.
Take the concept of philanthropy. The English term charity, deriving from the Latin-Christian term caritas, designates an act of benevolence toward the needy, motivated by an abundance of love for God’s creatures. In contrast, the Hebrew term tsedakah, related to tsedek (justice), emphasizes both the legal obligation to help and the deservingness (hence the dignity) of those who receive the help. Or take the Hebrew word for law, halakhah; in contrast to the English word, which is based on the Latin lex and implies decrees from above that limit personal freedom, halakhah is taken from the verb to walk or go, which suggests a way of life and a path to walk on. And then there is shalom for peace, which comes from the adjective meaning whole or hale, and designates a condition which is not merely the cessation of hostilities but a state of harmony and connectedness.
These small examples, and there are hundreds like them, are not merely etymological curiosities or bits of gratuitous erudition but real windows onto the nuances of cultural difference. As they branch out and intersect, these terms create both the cultural system of Judaism and its unique texture. Each term represents a cluster of value concepts and a particular way of viewing the world. To use such terms with understanding means to think differently about, say, philanthropy, law, or peace. Yes, the terms can be translated and explained, but a culture is a culture precisely because of what does not need to be translated. At a certain level, translation is an unnatural act, severing cultural content from the language that embodies it.
Knowing Hebrew presents a different, and, I would argue, an ultimately more useful model of what it means to possess literacy in Jewish culture. If one knows Hebrew—and by this I mean only a basic competence which enables one to work through simple texts with the aid of dictionaries, glosses, and even translations—then with this single attainment one is in a position to read a rather extraordinary range of documents: the story of God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis, or the principles of jurisprudence in the Mishnah, or Maimonides’s discussion of the laws of repentance, or a hasidic tale by Nahman of Bratslav, or the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, or a love poem by Yehuda Amichai, or a newspaper account of Knesset debates, or many, many other differing expressions of Jewish culture and experience. It matters little whether one accepts Ahad Ha-am’s premise of a deep-running Hebraic national spirit that unites all these cultural expressions. The crucial practical fact is that a single “ticket” purchases admission to a vast gallery spanning the centuries of multifarious Jewish creativity.
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Jewish society down through the ages has offered an extraordinarily sustained instance of what we today call cultural literacy: although only a limited number of Jews in any generation were scholars, almost all males possessed a familiarity with the basic texts of the tradition as well as a capacity to parse them in the original Hebrew. Just such a common store of basic knowledge and skills is what the cultural-literacy movement in America has advocated as a bulwark against the crumbling standards of our schools. And it is precisely what American Jews are in the process of losing or discarding.
If even a fraction of the intellectual resources currently being devoted to the task of translating and popularizing the Jewish experience into the American idiom were to be diverted instead toward the task of making it easier to attain a basic Hebrew literacy, the gain would be substantial. It would simultaneously permit access to the sources of Jewish tradition, on the one hand, and to the dynamics of modern Jewish culture and Israeli society, on the other. Moreover, at a time when the world Jewish community is being riven by cleavages, Hebrew remains a rare example of common ground. It is used by both the religious and the secular communities in Israel, and it stands as a potential bridge as well between the diverging fates of American and Israeli Jewry.
As Ahad Ha-am observed, the Hebrew language, at some latent level, keeps all these diverse possibilities in play. An American Jewish culture that fully participated in the continuity of Jewish civilization would be one in which the norm of Hebrew literacy were once again restored to its formerly normal state.
