Yoram Kaniuk: Hebrew is the homeland

Hebrew is the Homeland

by Yoram Kaniuk

Read in HaAretz

The Phoenicians may have bequeathed us the Hebrew alphabet, but no one knows anymore how to pronounce their language, and the few people who can write it are students of ancient languages. There are no speakers of Hittite. There are no speakers of Assyrian or Babylonian or Akkadian. There is Hebrew. And Chinese.

How is it that of all the ancient languages in which great works of literature, or in the case of the Phoenicians, tombstone inscriptions, were written, and of all the Punic descendants of the Phoenicians, the greatest of whom was Hannibal - so little has survived? True, many thousands of languages have disappeared. Even Geoffrey Chaucer's English is now a foreign language. But Hebrew lives. As does Chinese, as I mentioned, although the only thing I know about it is that it has survived.

Our ancestors during the time of the Second Temple were not proud of their language. They replaced the wonderful biblical Hebrew with Aramaic, which was a lingua franca of the ancient world. But, wonder of wonders, when a Polish Jew met a Moroccan Jew in later generations, they did not speak the Aramaic they read every day, but rather Hebrew. When they wrote to one another from the ends of the earth, they used Hebrew and not Aramaic, which was closer to the language of their prayers. Perhaps they were angry about the "fall" of Hebrew in the Gemara and in a large part of the Mishnah.

Hebrew survived because it was what glued people together. The great Armenian-American author William Saroyan once wrote: "I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."

Hebrew was little spoken but much read for many generations. Changes have occurred in it, and linguistic experts claim that since the contemporary language is not ancient Hebrew, today's children will not understand the Song of Deborah. Perhaps they will not know all the words, and the grammar has changed, but Hebrew is the homeland, the foundation stone of this nation. More than the Temple Mount, it is the rock of Jewish existence - a language people have lived for more than 3,000 years.

Eliezer Ben Yehuda did indeed contribute a great deal to the new Hebrew, but he did not "discover" it, as people sometimes say: He as well as others invented and hebraicized words. We have in Hebrew words from Greek, Aramaic and other languages, but what was "imported" has become an integral part of the language and has entered into usage. Anything that is unsuitable has been pushed out. Every language in the world has been influenced by others; Hebrew, then, has remained a single language with several incarnations.

There are Scandinavian words in the languages of places the Vikings reached; even the word "Russia" (from rus) was originally Old Norse. Why, one may ask, is Finnish so unrelated to the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian languages? Some say it resembles Hungarian. How did that happen? What was forgotten along the way?

Hittite was the language of a vast empire that arose from a historical void, conquered many lands and defeated the mighty Egyptian army. How did it become an Indo-European language in the midst of a Semitic region?

Ancient Egyptian has been forgotten. Ancient Greek is no longer in use and in its place there is a completely different language. It's true that biblical Hebrew has also changed quite a lot, but what we use today is still the same language. Could it be because for 1,700 years it was a written, and not a spoken language? Maybe, maybe not. Of all the ancient languages, Hebrew has survived - perhaps because the wanderings of the Hebrews gave rise to a language that is the homeland of the Hebrew people.

Sardinia, Corsica, Crete and Malta are sizable islands that are quite close to each other, but they have different histories. In Corsica, for example, there are two dialects, northern and southern; the northern dialect is close to Italian and the southern is influenced by the Arabic of North Africa.

What keeps a language alive? Power? Apparently not. The language of a small nation like the Hebrews, which did not exist for many years, and never constituted a powerful empire, has survived. Moreover, the language has served to reconstitute generation after generation of the Hebrew people, which had been weakened since the days of the Israelite and Judean kings. It even led to the establishment of the "Hebrew state" (as per the wording of Israel's Declaration of Independence).

Perhaps the will to live, among peoples who are annihilated in wars, is borne of their wanderings. And what preserved ancient languages was not the religion of their speakers, but rather their wanderings, as if they were saying: How will I be able to know what has befallen my brother who disappeared?

Jews invented the connection between people across the globe, because from Jerusalem, for centuries, letters were sent out and also received, which constituted a kind of responsa. A Polish rabbi wanted to know what to do about a certain woman whose husband had abandoned her - and only a Moroccan rabbi knew the answer. And the sole language they had in common, after Aramaic had disappeared, was Hebrew.

There is a hypothesis that the international mail service was invented by Jews in order to find other Jews, to get answers, to exist. Therefore the language, which was supposed to have disappeared, was the connection. The glue of the nation.

Why so many mighty Semitic languages disappeared I don't know, but perhaps they lacked some sort of loss: Maybe wandering was not the basis of their speakers' existence? Maybe they had no longings for something that had once been, but now existed only in words?

The poor Hebrew our sages neglected took its revenge on teachers and rabbis, for they too had to read the Bible and not just the Gemara and thus had to know Hebrew. Maimonides, the greatest of them all, spoke and wrote in Arabic - although he did write one book in Hebrew: the Mishneh Torah. He wrote wonderful Hebrew and perhaps chose to write the latter in that language because, deep in his heart, he sought to create a nomadic, temporary, transient, peripatetic alternative to the Gemara, one that comes and goes. Perhaps he thought his book would fill the need for a chronicle for the Jews, for whom the Gemara and its commentaries were difficult to grasp.