modern Hebrew¶

The construction of "modern Hebrew" is a fascinating case study in the deep understanding nationalism has of the direct pathway of language -> mutual intelligibility -> cultural insulation -> national identity -> hegemony -> colonial domination. https://t.co/IUV5tZi2vA The rise of nationalism was driven by liberals deliberately working to carve out cultural niches in which they could cobble together a unified identity that would simultaneously smooth out inter- and intra-class tensions among the proletarian and bourgeois populations. The previous feudal order had approached this problem in a number of other ways, particularly institutionalized (vs. folk) religion, aristocratic privilege, and a whole lot of monarchism and inter-kingdom warfare. For the liberals, the solution was the construction of the nation. And the cultural lines they drew upon for building their nations? Primarily language. They identified the "natural" boundaries of the nation-state according to mutually-intelligible dialects, then got to work ensuring that those dialects were unified through a "common tongue." Zionism is such an interesting case, because in order for it to have a chance as an ethnonationalist colonial construct, they needed massive buy-in. That meant building a de novo conception of a shared cultural identity among worldwide Jewry -- one centered on the Zionist entity. This was a tough prospect, because Jewish populations were so dispersed, enmeshed within diverse cultural spheres, each with their own languages, cultural practices, and religious traditions. The Zionists decided to "revive" the shared liturgical language of Hebrew to ease this. "Modern Hebrew" was a solution to the question of "How do you construct a nation where traditional bourgeois conceptions of it don't apply?" Namely, the fact that they could not draw upon an existing population to build a "nation-in-place." It had to be imported. The Zionists couldn't simply appropriate and expand on the existing Jewish culture within Palestine -- the Old Yishuv -- for a number of reasons. Through centuries of natural admixture with the surrounding Arabic population, Palestinian Jews spoke languages infused with Arabic. The "traditional" bourgeois nation-building project in Palestine would have created an Arabic-speaking Palestinian nation, emphasizing whatever cultural facets they could to distinguish themselves from surrounding Arabic-speaking nations as they emerged. This would necessarily have resulted in a nation that was categorically not Jewish (although certainly could have included a sizable cultural influence from Palestinian Jews), and certainly NOT European -- which was obviously not aligned with the purposes of European Zionists. To build their colony, they needed a novel kind of nation-building, one built on crafting a new people, with a new language, and especially a new allegiance to the new colonial ruling class. Thus, modern Hebrew was born.