Secularizing the Holy Tongue and the Orthodox Outlook on the Modernization of Hebrew

A common historical notion claims that Jewish Orthodoxy tended to oppose the modernization of Hebrew as a language and culture since it saw it as a desecration of leshon ha-kodesh. However, a thorough look at the linguistic discourse about Hebrew will show that orthodox speakers did not raise this kind of argument. In fact, orthodox voices were rarely heard in the vivid nineteenth- and twentieth-century public discourse about the meaning and goals of Hebrew for modern Jewish life. What troubled Rabbis, educators, and publicists in the orthodox press, was the introduction of modern Hebrew education, which threatened to secularize not the language, rather the next generation.

By examining a vast collection of texts from the multilingual Jewish press of Germany, Eastern Europe, and the old Yishuv, this lecture traces the formation of the orthodox view of modernized Hebrew, particularly in the educational domain. It shows how the Orthodoxy struggled to settle the historical significance of Hebrew with its rejection of modern, national education that promoted its use. The renewed importance the Hebraists granted the language, far above its traditional place as a medium of learning and praying, implied a dramatic change in the Jewish value system that was clearly inspired by neighboring, non-Jewish languages. The lecture argues that beyond the secular, daily use of Hebrew, this new view of the language was at the root of the orthodox recoiling from modern Hebrew.