Ilan Stavans places the importance of Hebrew in Israel in a sociological and historical perspective.
by Eric Herschthal Staff Writer
As the gunmetal cools in Israel and Gaza, legions of commentators have increasingly questioned the endgame that less than a decade ago seemed inevitable: a two-state solution. In the New York Times, Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi recently proposed a one-state “Isratine,” and columnist Thomas Friedman, perhaps more legitimately, has called for a “five-state solution.” Actually, Friedman, in his column last week, was just re-branding the conventional wisdom of the two-state solution. But that it’s even viewed as conventional — and implicitly, dull — suggests the deeper problem: time is running out before it becomes another dead idea. Enter the intellectuals, those shamans of thought resurrection. In the past year, two professors have published separate but related books arguing that, in order for Israel to
survive as a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one, it must call renewed attention to something out of left field: Hebrew. In both Bernard Avishai’s “The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last,” and Ilan Stavans’ “Resurrecting Hebrew,” the authors suggest the subtly provocative notion that, if Hebrew does not assume a more central role in Israeli culture, the Jewish state is in danger of losing the very core of its identity. Avishai, a former Duke University professor who now lives in Israel, makes the more explicitly political case. He argues that in light of Israel’s increasingly multicultural population — 40 percent of its population is either Arab or secular Russian immigrants — Israel cannot survive without fundamentally rethinking its two basic tenets: that it is both Jewish and democratic. The democratic aspect, he argues, must take precedence, with the Jewish part manifesting itself mainly through Israel’s common national language. “The privileged place for Hebrew would be a critical characteristic of this reformed state,” he writes, and should become Israel’s “one official language.” (Currently, Hebrew, Arabic and English share official status.) Why is language so important? Because, Avishai contends, a modern democracy that still clings to ethnicity as essential to its identity is “archaic.” That sounds a lot like the point made by Tony Judt, the New York University professor who caused an uproar when he wrote, back in 2003: “The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ is rooted in another time and place.” He went on in that much ballyhooed New York Review of Books essay: “Israel, in short, is an anachronism.” Avishai knows he’s beginning to sound like Judt here, so he takes up Judt’s argument and carefully critiques it. He argues that Judt got the problem right — a Jewish and democratic state is an oxymoron — but that he just placed his bet on the wrong solution: bi-nationalism. Avishai thinks the two-state solution is it. Judt, a British-born Jew and one-time kibbutznik, came to bi-nationalism from the reasonable place it once had among early Zionist intellectuals such as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes. Of course now it is mostly Arabs (e.g. Qaddafi’s “Isratine”) who champion bi-nationalism, which has led conservative Israel supporters to view the idea as code for the dissolution of the Jewish state. Commentary magazine made this point in its review of “The Hebrew Republic,” arguing that “to delegitimize the Jewish state, a little industry has sprung up among some Jewish intellectuals to question the need for the state’s existence.” It went on: “To the names of Noam Chomsky, Tony Judt, and others can be added that of Bernard Avishai.” But Avishai holds fast to his views. He argues that the only way to keep Israel both Jewish and democratic — without resorting to messy settler pullouts, land transfers and what he perceives as the continued bigoted policies towards Israel’s Arab population — it has to redefine what Jewish means. That’s a tall order, but the Hebrew language, he concludes, is the only medium Jewish enough, yet still inclusive and pliable, that can keep Israel “Jewish” in the face of its rapidly changing demographics. It is, in a word, Judaism’s least common denominator. There’s still plenty to disagree with. For one thing, giving special government status to only one language, as Avishai proposes, smacks of oppression by other means. That’s how Edward Said, the late Palestinian English professor at Columbia, might have once put it, but the notion is also raised in Stavans’ book, “Resurrecting Hebrew.” He discusses the opprobrium Hebrew-speaking Arabs face from their peers, and is told by Faruq Mawasi, who heads a program that teaches Israeli Arabs proper Arabic, that Hebrew “denotes acculturation.” And that’s a bad thing: “They are perceived as sellouts,” Stavans reports. But Jews might also suffer from Hebrew hegemony. “To revive one language, you have to sacrifice another,” Stavans writes, and that, after all, was what happened to Yiddish. Up until the Holocaust, most the world’s Jewry spoke that hybridized Germanic-Latin-Hebrew tongue. And a good portion of Stavans’ book recounts the efforts of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, modern Hebrew’s chief proponent, to resuscitate the biblical Jewish language spoken by just 10,000 Jews in his time (the late-19th century). Even Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s godfather, was against Ben-Yehuda’s idea: “Who amongst us has sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language?” he asked shortly before his death, in 1904. (For the record, Herzl thought German should be the language of his “Altneuland.”) That the issue of a national language once caused such spirited debate does suggest its importance, however. Yet that may be rooted in another time and place. Stavans gestures toward this criticism when mentioning Zionism’s outgrowth from 18th- and 19th-century notions of nationalism. The importance of language to national identity was born then, and stems from the scholar and early German nationalist Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who argued that language shaped culture. Herder’s ideas might seem vindicated by Germany or Italy’s formation, both products of 19th century nationalism, and each unified by its own language. But the breakaway of former European colonies complicates things: Peruvians, Colombians and Argentines seem just fine speaking Spanish, the language of their colonizers. Ditto us English-speaking Americans. This dissonance, in fact, brings into question Herder’s original notion, one still highly pertinent and lurking in the shadows of both these recent books: How much does language really shape a culture? No doubt language plays an important role within it — a culture without its poets, to be sure, is a very diminished thing. But languages are in constant flux, absorbing some, stealing from others, always being stretched and strained by their users. The point is that language is a refection of culture, one artful expression of it, but not its only essence. The centrality of language to a culture has a long history of seducing writers and readers, perhaps obviously so. Avishai in particular is keen on this, even if he himself succumbs to its soft purr and blown kisses. Avishai argues that even the great kabbalist Gershon Scholem, an early skeptic of Hebrew’s revival, feared the language and its attendant religious baggage too much. He paraphrases Scholem as having asked: “Can democracy even be grasped in Hebrew?” Avishai’s book raises an eyebrow, too. But the bigger point, both his and Stavans’, is that languages are adaptable enough to grasp ideas foreign to them. The broader issues both authors raise, however, seems acutely relevant now. Much ado is made of the attempted revival of Yiddish today — universities set up academic chairs, Folksbiene - The National Yiddish Theater is increasingly in vogue — and the project’s fate could suggest much. There’s a lot of nostalgia going on here, though, and when championed by the young, a healthy dose of chic appeal seems apparent, too. Without a driving force to necessitate the language’s revival, however the prospect looks dim. As Harold Bloom, the eminent scholar and a native-Yiddish speaker himself, wrote recently: “I wish them all the best of luck.” The same might be said for Hebrew. If, after all, Avishai’s project is to have the language be a renewed pillar of national Israeli identity, then that only puts the rest of the world’s diaspora Jews at a distance. And if, say, the similar logic of cultural renewal drives the attempt for things like a Hebrew Language Academy charter school, coming to Brooklyn this fall, then we should be skeptical. I can tell you that my own Hebrew school training — the Hebrew part, I mean — didn’t do much for my Jewish identity. I still use transliteration at shul, if not the lovely and poetic English translation. My Jewishness is no less in question. Anyway, where would Israeli-ness be without the word “hummus”— a word wholly foreign to the people, but a thing no less essential?
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