Revival of ancient tongue a miracle of our times

I learned the Hebrew alphabet when I was three years old in kindergarten. By Grade 1, at my Jewish day school, I was taking classes in how to read, write and speak modern Hebrew. What perhaps I didn’t realise at the time was that I was part of something much bigger: the modern revival of an ancient language.

Hebrew, the language of the Bible, was the mother tongue of the Jewish people for centuries. But after our exile from the land of Israel nearly two thousand years ago, Hebrew gradually stopped being used for everyday speech. It became a sacred language that was preserved for prayer, Torah study and religious rituals, while Jews around the world spoke the languages of their host countries. Sometimes these evolved into hybrid dialects, like Ladino (a Judeo-Spanish mix) or Judeo-Arabic.

Scholars and rabbis continued to read and write in Hebrew, but Jewish life also demanded literacy in many other languages, including Aramaic, the language of the Babylonian Talmud and of Jewish exile from around 500 CE.

For centuries, the main spoken Jewish language was Yiddish, a Germanic tongue written in Hebrew letters. Hebrew remained off-limits for mundane things; no one would ask for a snack or toilet paper in the holy tongue of scripture.

Then, in the late 19th century, a revolutionary idea took root. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a Zionist thinker and linguist living in Ottoman Palestine, believed that Hebrew could and should be reborn as a living, spoken language. It was a radical notion and deeply controversial.

Some Orthodox Jews were horrified by the “secularisation” of lashon hakodesh, the holy tongue. Others, particularly Westernised Jews, dismissed it as unrealistic. But Ben-Yehuda persisted, and his son Itamar became the first modern Hebrew-speaking child in nearly two millennia.

Modern Hebrew might have remained a fringe experiment were it not for the Holocaust. The genocide of six million Jews, many of them Yiddish speakers, severed a deep linguistic thread. In the aftermath, Hebrew offered something powerful, a shared language unburdened by the pain of exile.

Ulpanim – Hebrew language schools – emerged across the Jewish world to teach this updated ancient language, which symbolised renewal, unity and national rebirth.

Ben-Yehuda looked through Jewish history to find words that were not in the original scriptural Hebrew. He borrowed the modern Hebrew word for pineapple, ananas, from French, German and Russian. The modern Hebrew word for bellybutton, pupik, he borrowed from Yiddish and the word for telephone, Ben-Yehuda took directly from English.