Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

Hebrew Voices #202 – Death and Rebirth of Hebrew

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Elon: And it’s just beautiful. And it’s this mosaic, and the text in the Hebrew… and it’s clearly no question it’s a synagogue. But in the center of the mosaic, which is the floor, the center of the synagogue, there’s a zodiac, the twelve signs of the zodiac. And in the middle, there is a portrait of God stylized as the sun god on a chariot the way they, at the time, would draw sun gods.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Elon Gilad. He’s a writer for Ha’aretz, one of the major newspapers in Israel, specializing in Hebrew and Jewish history. And he’s the author of a book called The Secret History of Judaism. His research focuses on the interface between Biblical and Modern Hebrew, with a particular interest in uncovering the origins of traditions and words. Elon shares his linguistic insights through popular TikTok videos on Hebrew etymology. He has a BA from Tel Aviv University and is currently working on a master’s there. Shalom, Elon.

Elon: Hello. This is a very important thing because this often comes up. I see in the comments in my videos a lot of anti-Israel people: “It’s a made-up language,” blah, blah. So, it’s a little hard to conceptualize, but what we mean when we say that the Hebrew died; it was a living language, and it stopped being a living language, and then it was revived. So, it’s worth discussing what we mean by what happened.

Nehemia: Okay, yeah.

Elon: It’s a complicated process, but it’s worth understanding.

Nehemia: So, explain, please.

Elon: First of all, in ancient times, obviously people were speaking Hebrew. The people who wrote the Bible, the people in the Bible, they were speaking a language. This language was very, very, very similar to the languages of their neighbors, the Edomites, et cetera. They could have spoken… I don’t know if they had, really, the idea that they were speaking different languages. You can think of it as a dialect or accent; it’s very similar. But all those other peoples, they died out a lot sooner, and Jews persevered and existed also into Hellenistic times and Roman times, and they continued speaking Hebrew. To what extent? Well, there was a gradual shift away from Hebrew and into Aramaic.

Aramaic is now an arcane language spoken by very few people. People will study the Talmud, which is mostly written in Aramaic, but at the time, Aramaic was like English. So, the Arameans, these were the people who lived in what is today Syria, these wandering people, and they died out pretty early in antiquity. But somehow the Persian Empire adopted their language as the international language of communication. And what happened was, this was the language to speak if you wanted to do anything. This was like English. If you wanted to be somebody, you had to learn to read and write in Aramaic, because that’s what communication and business was done in. Slowly, Aramaic took over and people were speaking Aramaic. There’s good evidence that Jesus, for example, didn’t speak Hebrew, he spoke Aramaic.

Nehemia: Do you want to go into what some of that evidence is? Or maybe we’ll come back to that.

Elon: Well, there are little tidbits, but the best thing is, as he dies… there’s a quote of what Jesus says when he died, just before he died. And he’s quoting from the Bible saying, “God, why have you forsaken me?” Now, we don’t have the original. We don’t have the recording, obviously, but the way that the Greek translation appears, the Greek translation seems to be translating the Aramaic.

Nehemia: Not just that, it quotes it in Aramaic, in Matthew…

Elon: That’s right, it quotes it in Aramaic. That’s right. Everything is in Greek, but that is in Aramaic. So, if Jesus was using Aramaic to speak to God and from the Bible, which is obviously in Hebrew, it’s a good indication that this would be the language he was using. If you’re going to assume that anything from the New Testament has any relation to history, I would think that that part, if anything, would be remembered, because I don’t think that would be something early Christians would invent.

Nehemia: There’s something called argument from embarrassment, that, if you’re going to make up a figure in history, he’s going to raise up an army of supermen and defeat the Romans, not get crucified.

Elon: Yeah. Why would you invent that? Why would you say that Jesus had this moment where he’s asking God why he’s forsaken?

Nehemia: It almost doesn’t sound like something that would have been made up in the 4th century because, by then you had the Trinity Doctrine, and reconciling that particular scene with the Trinity, people have written whole books to do that. And if you believe in that, guys, fine. But if you’re starting out to invent something, you invent something that’s theologically consistent or easier to explain. Alright, so go on.

Elon: So, that part seems to me one of the most authentic parts in the Bible.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And assuming that whoever wrote this, actually recording something about Jesus, he seems to be speaking Aramaic.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: But also, when we find… and there’s hardly any inscriptions, but when we do, a lot of them are in Aramaic. So anyways, there are people speaking Hebrew, there are people speaking Aramaic, it’s a mishmash of languages. Even those people who do speak Aramaic, if they’re Jewish, they’re probably still reading the Bible in Hebrew, at least in earlier periods. No, also into later periods.

Nehemia: Well, until this very day you have Jews in Uzbekistan, up until 1991, that are still reading Hebrew. Go ahead.

Elon: Gradually, the people who speak Hebrew… everyone was praying in Hebrew, reading the Bible in Hebrew, but the people who raised their children in Hebrew and told them to do their homework in Hebrew and argue with people at the supermarket in Hebrew, those are fewer and fewer. And they’re probably the poorer, the uneducated, the lowliest people.

Nehemia: This is counterintuitive for a lot of people. Some people would assume that the more languages you speak, you have the money to afford an education, so you have a higher socioeconomic status. But what you’re saying is, that actually the poor people out in some village in Judea or in the Galilee, they might have preserved Hebrew longer than the intellectual elite in the big cities. That’s what you’re saying, right?

Elon: Possibly. Although maybe the very high people, at the highest levels, they would also speak Greek in addition to Aramaic. But yeah, it means your family made the switch earlier. If your family made the switch earlier to Aramaic, you already had a higher socioeconomic status. You were in the city and not in a town.

We have a bit of this in Rabbinic literature, of this process of dying. We have the story about the rabbis at the court of Rabbi Judah the Prince. They don’t know what mat’ate, “broom” means. But one of the maids of Rabbi Judah the Prince, she’s able to tell them what it means. They’re getting some lost language…

Nehemia: She actually doesn’t tell them what it means, they overhear her speaking to her subordinate. And they’re like, “Ah, okay. We hear it being used. That’s beautiful! We hear it being used in a practical sense.” So, that’s interesting, mat’ate, because that’s a verse in Isaiah.

What I find even more interesting is that they didn’t know what this other word meant, le’sirugin, which is a word that doesn’t appear in the Tanakh. It only appears in the Oral Law. They were reciting these traditions about certain laws, and it says, if you do something… it’s talking about reading the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, the sirugin, whatever that means. They didn’t know what that meant until they heard the maidservant use that word in speech, and they’re like, “Oh, it means intermittently,” or “switching back and forth.”

That’s really interesting, because that’s not them trying to interpret a verse from the Bible, it’s something that was authored… I don’t know when, but sometime before Rebbe Yehudah HaNasi. And they’re hearing a woman who still… she’s a maidservant. She’s, like you said, the lowest socioeconomic status, or one of the lowest, and she’s still using Hebrew as a living language. So, now we’re in the early 3rd century. How do we go from that to Hebrew being a dead language?

Elon: That’s the cusp of it. When languages die, languages die. Every year we have languages dying. It’s these old maids who still speak with their sister, and they grew up with this language, and they happen to be the last two people who speak it. So, we don’t know exactly when this happened, when the last native speaker died.

Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, actually wrote a long article about this. It appears in the introduction to his big dictionary. But somewhere around that period… we don’t know exactly where or when, the last person who spoke it as a native language died. So, in that sense, Hebrew died around the time of the Mishnah, say the 3rd century. It could be the 4th century; it could be earlier. Based on that story with the broom, it gives us the idea that, apparently, there were people still speaking there.

So, it’s not a day-to-day language, but it’s not that it died. There is diglossia; I think that’s how you say it in English. Use of two languages for different aspects of your life. This is… if you think about Medieval or Early Modern Europe with the use of Latin, some people were speaking German, French or whatever, but when you write a book or read a book, or appear in a court, or do something important, or not important, you do it in Latin. So, you use Latin. It’s an important aspect of your life. You read in Latin, you write in Latin, you write letters in Latin, but that’s not the language you speak with your wife or your servants. So, there’s a use of two languages, and this is very common to this day in the Arab world.

Nehemia: Tell us about that. I find that so fascinating.

Elon: So, there isn’t a language called Arabic. There’s no Arabic.

Nehemia: I want to stop for a second. There’s no language called Arabic. That’s what you just said.

Elon: Yeah. So, we think, for us Westerners, or whatever Israelis are, there’s Arabic, English and French, and all those are equivalent. But there really isn’t an Arabic; there are lots of Arabics. In different countries in the Arab world there’s a different Arabic spoken. There’s Iraqi Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, which is very similar to Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, and then there’s Moroccan Arabic. And all these are different languages, very different languages. The difference between Moroccan Arabic and Iraqi Arabic is more than the difference between Portuguese and Italian, which we definitely think of as different languages. Now, Portuguese and Italian are similar. They’re both descendants of Latin and there’s a lot of similarities, but we don’t think of them as dialects; they’re different languages.

And the same is true about the different dialects of Arabic, different Arabic’s. You need a different vocabulary, different grammar in some senses. They are very different languages. But that’s the language that people speak to each other on the street, that people speak to their children. This is not the Regal Arabic. When they go to school and they learn grammar, they’re not learning about the language they speak. That’s a lowly language that there’s no point in even discussing, it’s just what they talk. The real Arabic, and this is what they learn in school because they don’t learn it from home, they have to learn Arabic in school. This is literary Arabic. And this is an international language. This is the language that, not only all the books are published in, but also when you’re listening to the radio, the people are speaking in this literary Arabic. Or when you’re watching a movie or a TV show, for the most part, they’re speaking this literary Arabic.

Nehemia: So, what you’re saying is, that most Arabs actually speak two languages; their local language Amiya, and then the official language Fusha. Is that fair to say?

Elon: That’s exactly it.

Nehemia: And that’s a mind-blowing concept to an American English speaker, until you think about African American English. If you grow up in certain poor neighborhoods, there’s a language you speak to your friends. And let’s say you go to university. You’re not going to speak that language at university, usually, you certainly won’t write your paper in that language that you speak to your friends back in the neighborhood. And there we’ve got to be really careful, because there’s some political incorrectness here. But the reality is that what they’re speaking in that neighborhood is a dialect unto itself, or maybe its own language with its own internal rules. And if I try to imitate it, I’m going to sound like an idiot because that’s not how they actually talk. Because I don’t know what the rules are. We think of it as, “they speak badly”, or “they speak poorly”, or “they’re uneducated”. No, they just speak a different language, and they have to learn a second language to go to university.

I remember, at Hebrew University I had a class in Arabic literature. We read about the Satanic Verses, among other things, and one of the students raised his hand and starts asking a question in his dialect of Amiya, of Palestinian Arabic. And the teacher says, “You can either ask in Hebrew or in Fusha.” And he said, “Why? What’s wrong with my language?” He said, “When they allow your language at the University in Riyadh, I’ll allow it here in my classroom.” Because you would not speak the local dialect of Arabic that you speak in the street of Riyadh. At the university, you’re going to speak the official language.

Alright, so Arabic has that. And what I think you’re saying is that, in ancient times, Jews knew Hebrew, and they knew whatever their local language was. That’s where we’re going with this.

Elon: Exactly. Their local language, and really… this depends on place and time but really what happened is that there were two languages in each community. There was the local language, a Jewish dialect of that area. So, there’s different Italians, there are different forms of Italian, Jewish-Italian, but the Jewish-Italian spoken in Venice, the Jewish Italian spoken… Only very recently is there an Italian. Italian also has many dialects.

Nehemia: Arguably there actually isn’t even an Italian now. So, if you go to southern Italy…

Elon: The Florence dialect to a certain extent became the standard Italian. And the other dialects, while they may exist, they…

Nehemia: But if you go to the market in Sicily, in Palermo, they’re still speaking something different than what’s spoken on the news that night, right?

Elon: Probably. This is all a matter of degrees, but the differences used to be probably much more significant than they are today. Once again, this is not my field of expertise. But what happened is, there’s different Jewish versions of the local language. People speak their local dialect and they speak s’fat Kodesh. Rather, they don’t speak it; they know how to read and talk in it and pray in it. And s’fat Kodesh, this is like the holy language; this is not Hebrew. This is Hebrew and Aramaic, unless you’re a child or an idiot. You’re not studying the Torah; a real Jewish man is studying the Talmud.

Nehemia: That’s going to be quotable there. Unless you’re a child or an idiot… you mean you’re not just studying the Torah, you’re also studying the… what else are you studying? Tell the audience because they may not know.

Elon: Well, you start with the Torah. You go on to the Mishnah, and then you go to the Talmud. And the Talmud is a sea which you can swim in forever, and the size is huge. But also, even the text of the Talmud, which is massive in itself, is only a small part of it, because the Jewish bookshelf is all a commentary on the Talmud. There’s books and books and commentaries written on the Talmud itself, so when you’re studying the Talmud, you might not necessarily be studying the Talmud itself, but you’re studying a commentary on, or a commentary on a commentary on the Talmud, et cetera. So, that’s where Jewish study has gone. It’s mostly concerned with the revelation that’s hidden inside the Talmud. That’s where we get our laws.

Nehemia: The revelation hidden inside the Talmud. Wow, we have to unpack that. Let’s save that for the second half, if you have time.

Elon: Okay, sure.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying that the Jews, let’s say, in Tiberias in the 3rd or 4th century CE or AD, what are they speaking? Let’s ask that question.

Elon: In which century?

Nehemia: 4th century. Let’s say 4th century.

Elon: Okay, so in the 4th century they’re speaking Aramaic. That’s why the Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud in this case, is written in Aramaic. That’s their language. That’s also the language of their neighbors, unless they are speaking Greek. But their poorer neighbors, Jews and non-Jews are speaking Aramaic. And the well-to-do Romans, they are speaking Greek, and maybe some well-to-do Jews. But they are praying in Hebrew, probably. We have some difficulty understanding, we do not really know… when we find synagogues from that period, they do not conform with Rabbinic Judaism. In other words, it seems… this is off topic here with language that we’re talking about.

Nehemia: Go ahead.

Elon: I recently went to Sepphoris. Tzippori in Hebrew. This is a city near Nazareth, and it was an important city in the Galilee. Rabbi Judah the Prince lived there for a time, if I remember correctly. It was supposed to be good for his health. So, the rabbis are living in this city…

Nehemia: He’s the author of the Mishnah, for those who don’t know.

Elon: He’s the author of the Mishnah and the most important rabbi, according to my understanding. He is the first rabbi, the founder of Rabbinic Judaism.

Nehemia: Oh wow! We’ll get back to that later.

Elon: That’s arguable, but that’s what I write in my book.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And he’s called Rebbe, Rabbi, that’s simply Rabbi. So, you would say this was “grand central” of Rabbinic Judaism. Everyone must be Rabbinic Jews. But then we uncovered a synagogue there. It’s later, like 200, 300 years later, but we have the synagogue there and you can even have a bar–mitzvah there.

Nehemia: Oh, you can? Okay.

Elon: Even today, they set it up and they have bar-mitzvahs there, and it’s beautiful. And it’s just mosaic, and the text in the Hebrew, and there’s clearly no question it is a synagogue. But in the center of the mosaic, which is the floor, the center of the synagogue, there’s a zodiac, the twelve signs of the zodiac. And in the middle, there is a portrait of God stylized as the sun god on a chariot the way they at the time would draw sun gods.

Nehemia: I’m pulling up the photo to see. So, we have Helios riding a quadriga or something like this.

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh wow! Okay, there you go. We’ll throw that up on the screen there. And you can’t mistake that as the sun. It’s actually a sun with rays coming out of it. So, in the middle of a synagogue you have a sun god. So, there’s a disconnect between, what we think of as what should have been in Judaism 1,600 years ago, but at the same time I’m looking at this mosaic and we see Sagittarius is Keshet or kashat, and then we have Kislev. So, we have these Hebrew words…

Elon: There’s Hebrew words, there’s Hebrew text… these are Jews.

Nehemia: This is a Jewish place. There’s also some Greek writing, but okay.

Elon: So, these weren’t Rabbinic Judaism people. These were not the Judaism we know from the Mishnah and the Talmud.

Nehemia: Or maybe they were. Meaning, maybe… I don’t know, give me your position on this.

Elon: I can’t see any of the rabbis mentioned in the Talmud saying that this is okay. I mean, the Bible is pretty explicit. Also, there’s no Rabbinic texts here. In Rechov, we find Rabbinic texts. So, the people in that synagogue that was found near Rechov, near Beit Shean, those apparently were rabbis whose traditions are related to the Talmud, and the Mishnah, and the kind of Judaism we are descended from. But Judaism was huge in Hellenistic times and Roman times. There were apparently millions of Jews. And they were Hellenistic Judaism, the Judaism which is similar to what we find in Philo of Alexandria.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And that has nothing to do with what we think of as Judaism, and we only have a tiny window into that Judaism because we only have the writing of Philo. There’s millions of these people, and we find synagogues throughout the Roman world. And these are completely different forms of Judaism that might have been completely disparate from one another. We don’t know; they probably read the Bible in its Greek form, the Septuagint. It’s completely different from all we know, and they just died out. There’s nothing left of that Judaism.

Nehemia: Did they die out? Or were they assimilated into Rabbinical Judaism?

Elon: It’s probably a combination of both.

Nehemia: Or maybe they converted to Christianity or Islam. We don’t know, I guess, right?

Elon: It’s likely a combination of all those things. In late antiquity there were serious disasters… most of the people in the Mediterranean world died. A bulk of them died in those disasters. There was probably a volcano eruption, the arrival of the Black Death, the sun was blotted out, crop failure…

Nehemia: Alright. I want to go back to the language thing. I think what you’re saying with all this, correct me if I’m wrong, that they had deglossia, you called it. They’re speaking Greek, or Aramaic, or some other language, but Hebrew was continued to be used as a liturgical language. And what is that different from? Let’s say cuneiform, which is a language that really died, and nobody spoke even then. And it wasn’t deciphered until the 19th century, and that was indirectly based on the whole chain of… they had Modern Persian, which was used to decipher Old Persian, which was then used in a triliteral inscription to decipher the ancient cuneiform.

But Hebrew was never like that, that it completely died out. It wasn’t a native language, but it was still used.

Elon: It was alive in the day-to-day life of at least men, Jewish men, for generations, because they used it in their prayer, and in their study, and when writing letters, and when writing books. In other words, it existed as, like, an intellectual language but not a day-to-day language. But even more than that, the words in Hebrew remained alive inside the local languages, the Jewish languages.

Nehemia: Ah, okay.

Elon: For example… and this is the most important Jewish language, Yiddish. Which means Jewish, the Jewish language, which was the language of the Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Eastern Europe. We can talk about why those people are important. Other people are obviously important too, but for historical purposes they are the most important group to understand Modern Judaism.

Nehemia: That’s quite a statement. But alright, let’s leave that for a different discussion.

Elon: Okay. I need to clarify this because I’m going to get crucified here. So, it’s not that these are more important people, but at the turn of the 20th century, when the Modern Period began, nine out of ten Jews in the world were Ashkenazi Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, or Ukraine, Poland. Or they had already migrated to America. Or they were from there and migrated to France and Germany. But nearly all the Jews in the world were Yiddish-speaking or descendants of Yiddish-speaking Jews.

Nearly all the Jews who settled in Palestine and founded the State of Israel, nearly all of them came from there. Zionism happened there. It didn’t happen in Morocco, which had a substantial number of Jews. But it’s only because there were so many of them, there were millions there, and there were a few thousand in other communities.

Nehemia: So, today I think over 50% of the population of Israel is said to be of Mizrachi or Sephardic.

Elon: Yes.

Nehemia: So, how did that happen that you go from 90% to 50%?

Elon: Now it’s not so significant.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: That happened because there was a systematic murder of those Jews in the Holocaust, and the ones that didn’t migrate to Israel and didn’t migrate to America… most of American Jews are Ashkenazi. I think it is around 90% there.

Nehemia: It’s less now because of all the people who have left Israel. But when I was growing up in Chicago it was rare to encounter a Sephardic Jew. It was a noteworthy event, like, “Oh, there’s 30 kids in my class and one of them is a Sephardi, and they do this different thing.”

Elon: In Montreal, where my family comes from, my mother’s side, it’s more common because it’s a French-speaking country.

Nehemia: So, they came from North Africa.

Elon: So, North African Jews could immigrate there, and they spoke French, so it was more convenient. But even there…

Nehemia: You have to figure; what kind of Jew wants to go to a cold place like Chicago? Someone who comes from a northern climate anyway, so maybe it was a self-selecting group.

Alright, so Israel today is something like 50% non-Ashkenazi, but you say that was mostly because of the Holocaust.

Elon: So, the people who immigrated early to Israel, the founders of the State of Israel, the people involved in the reviving of the Hebrew language, the people founding the kibbutzim in Tel Aviv, the chalutzim, what you think of as Zionists…

Nehemia: The “pioneers”.

Elon: The pioneers, yeah, the chalutzim. The founding fathers, not only the leaders of the country, but also the people working in the factories, and working in the farms, and fighting in the early IDF, that was before the IDF. Those are by far Ashkenazi Jews coming from Eastern Europe.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: That’s where Zionism happened. That’s where most Jews lived. Why is this the case? A: There were much more Jews there. Most Jews weren’t Zionists. Most Jews either stayed there or were part of the Bund, or they migrated to America. A small minority… there were so many Jews there that even when a tiny minority are crazy enough to think they can go and live in Palestine and start their own country, that was enough to actually succeed in doing that.

There were smaller numbers in other places, say Morocco, which had one of the biggest communities outside of Ashkenaz. But they didn’t really have nationalism develop there. The ideas of nationalism, and Zionism is a form of nationalism, a Jewish nationalism, were later to appear there. And it just didn’t happen there. That’s not where it happened.

That Jewish community did migrate to Israel, but they migrated 10, 20 years later during the 50’s and even the 60’s. So, that’s why, when we talk about the effect, the Arabic that they spoke, Jewish Moroccan Arabic, if they would have been the people that had revived the Hebrew language, then we would see a lot of effect of that form of Arabic on the Hebrew language.

Nehemia: It just so happens that the current head of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, if I’m not mistaken… isn’t it Aharon Maman, who is a Moroccan Jew?

Elon: And the one before that.

Nehemia: Moshe Bar-Asher was Moroccan as well.

Elon: Moshe Bar-Asher. So, this is not to say… and they were significant and very important in the group of Ben Yehuda, who was Ashkenazi, there were very important non-Ashkenazi leaders in that group. So, I don’t want to exclude anyone, but it is historical fact that these are the people who did it. That’s why there’s an enormous effect of Yiddish on Modern Hebrew.

Nehemia: This brings us to Yiddish. We were talking about the directions, north, south, east and west.

Elon: Exactly. So, why do we use these particular words? Tzafon, darom, mizrach and ma’arav? And not yama, tayman, and all these other options that we could have used from the Bible? Because those were the words in Yiddish, and Yiddish is full of Hebrew words.

Nehemia: I don’t know Yiddish. What percentage of Hebrew words…

Elon: I know some. I don’t know. It’s impossible to speak in percentages of words.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: I’ve been trying to do that with Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, of dictionaries. It’s very difficult to…

Nehemia: So, let me ask this. When my great-grandfather was speaking Yiddish in Lithuania, in Vilna, in 1905, he probably couldn’t go through a day… and I’m asking this as a question, really. Could he go through a day going to the market, or whatever he was doing, without speaking Hebrew words?

Elon: No, he couldn’t carry a conversation. Maybe a few sentences, but Yiddish is full of Hebrew words, and very basic words. Maybe I’ll give an example. I’m not fluent in Yiddish or anything, but… We were just talking about north, south, east and west, so you would use the Hebrew words, tzafon, daron, mizrach, ma’arav.

Nehemia: So, in other words, Hebrew had a bunch of different words for north, but the word that Modern Hebrew chose was with the influence of Yiddish, that Yiddish had preserved this Hebrew word. Is that what you’re saying?

Elon: The way to see it is really, Modern Hebrew adopted the Yiddish word for north, south, east and west.

Nehemia: Which happened to be a Hebrew word.

Elon: This happened to be a Hebrew word.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: Now, the people revived the Hebrew language, they were aware of this and maybe a little bit embarrassed of this. But what they were really doing, they were not exactly reviving the Hebrew language from scratch, because that is something impossible to do. What they were doing really is they were taking Yiddish, and whenever there was a non-Hebrew word in Yiddish, they looked and replaced it with a Hebrew word. So, they were going through this process of cleaning Yiddish of the non-Hebrew words in it.

Nehemia: Wow.

Elon: So, if the word was Hebrew, we can keep that.

Nehemia: I’ve never heard it described that way. What’s an example of a Yiddish word that’s Germanic or Slavic that’s used in Modern Hebrew?

Elon: They’re exceedingly rare.

Nehemia: Really? Wow.

Elon: Because what they were trying to do was squash those words. If there was a word like that, they would get rid of it. There’s an exception… and we have these discussions, they’re written down. If the word is international… in other words, they don’t really talk about the language they’re speaking. They’re speaking amongst each other in Yiddish, but the protocol’s written in Hebrew, and they’re not acknowledging… because they’re embarrassed about the fact that they’re speaking Yiddish.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, they say international words we don’t have to replace. Now what do they mean by that?

Nehemia: Yeah, what’s an international word?

Elon: If Yiddish uses a word, it’s international if also the other languages are using it. So that’s an okay word. So, say…

Nehemia: I don’t know, chimiah or something like that. Would that be an example?

Elon: Chimiah, chemistry, okay?

Nehemia: Okay, alright.

Elon: So, you would have to replace a word like that. But they use it also in Russian, so that’s an okay international word.

Nehemia: Okay. It’s also something that’s inherently modern. In other words, they didn’t have chemistry in the time of the Talmud.

Elon: That doesn’t matter, because also other modern things… they replaced “electricity” with chashmal, which is a biblical word.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, they replaced everything. But if it was an international word, they would say, “Okay, that’s okay.”

Nehemia: Or universita, maybe…

Elon: Universita. Ben Yehuda actually… michlalah. That was supposed to replace universita, but now it’s a college. Now it’s used for college, but it was supposed to be for university. But there’s thousands of them, all these words that end with “tiah”, “iah,”, like where we have in English “tion”, it’s “tiah” in Hebrew. Those are just the Yiddish words. Now, the reason those made the cut is because they said, “Okay, those are international words. They use them in English and also in French. So those are okay, it’s proper.” Also, telephon, telephone, telegraph, stuff like that.

Nehemia: Not for lack of trying, right? Ben Yehuda made a word for telephone, just nobody uses it.

Elon: I don’t think it’s him actually, but someone made up a word and it just never really caught on.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: But other things… many other modern inventions, planes, cars, they have Hebrew words. Now, I said there’s very few, but I think it’s worth hammering home. There’s this word davka. This is another word that Hebrew borrowed from Yiddish, and once again, it stayed because there was no problem in keeping it because it wasn’t a Hebrew word. It was a lashon kodesh word. It was from Aramaic. So davka is a technical term in the Talmud, it means that it’s not only particular to one subject, but also applicable to other forms, like other subjects, and also in cases where we’re talking about a thing. So, we’re talking about the thing literally, davka, or not literally. For example, there’s a part in the Talmud they were discussing, and it says in the Bible that they’re going to Sukkotah, and the rabbi… this is actually not in the Talmud. I think it’s in one of the Midrashim. And the rabbis are saying, “The Sukkot that they are in,” the children of Israel, Sukkot are these temporary huts…

Nehemia: From the Feast of Booths.

Elon: Yeah. The children of Israel, where it says in the Bible, in this particular verse, that they are in booths, are we talking about “booths” like in Sukkot? Or is it really a metaphor for the spirit of God taking them through something, like something kind of fanciful, supernatural kind of booths, and then it’s like booth, but not a real booth? So, then you can use the word davka, and they use the word davka. When you say “davka sukkot” it’s the literal, actual sukkot.

Nehemia: So, the rough translation is “specifically”, right?

Elon: I would use “literally”.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh, wow.

Elon: Like literally a sukkah.

Nehemia: It’s mamash literally… see what I did there?

Elon: Yeah. Mamash is another good example.

Nehemia: We’ll talk about that next.

Elon: What’s important is that it’s a technical term used in the Talmud. Now, since all these are Ashkenazi Jews, and not only Ashkenazi Jews, but we’re talking about Yiddish, where studying the Talmud it’s a common term. This word entered into Yiddish, and it has a different meaning, somewhat. It has all kinds of meanings in Yiddish. I’ll give some of them.

Nehemia: Actually, before you do that, I just want people to understand. This word davka… I grew up saying it dafka, which you can talk about the difference there. It really is an important concept in Yiddish-speaking culture. I’m a person who didn’t know more than a dozen words of Yiddish, and I knew the word davka. And it’s a word that I would not have necessarily realized was even not English until I reached a certain age, just because I was immersed with words like davka, and chutzpah, and mamesh. These are words that were so deeply ingrained in my upbringing. And my father didn’t speak Yiddish. My mother could understand it, and she could speak a little bit of it, and she does speak a little bit of it. My grandmother, that was her native tongue. So, it’s not some obscure word. And it’s an important concept in modern Israeli culture, I would say, as well. Would you agree with that?

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: La’asot davka, “to do” davka. So, tell us about davka.

Elon: It has several uses and it’s not perfectly translatable. So, we said le’asot davka. One of the ways you use it is when you say somebody le’asot davka, “does davka”, or when you say, “he’s going to school”. Okay, so somebody’s going to school. If he’s going to school davka, you’re saying he’s doing it out of spite. He’s doing it to make you angry, or he’s doing it on purpose to hurt somebody. So that’s what davka does when it’s added to the end of a sentence.

But you can also use it completely differently when you put it inside a sentence. When you say, “I like eating cheese,” you can say, “davka I like eating cheese,” and then it’s me that likes eating cheese rather than the other people. These other people, they don’t like eating cheese, it’s me that likes eating cheese. Or if I put davka before the word cheese, so it’s, “I like eating cheese, not these other foods, it’s davka the cheese I like to eat.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Elon: So, it has this specifying… but not only saying specifically, it’s saying “not the others”. And you can use it in any sentence. You can add it, and the thing you put it before, you’re saying that that thing is true while other things aren’t true.

It’s a great way that mothers-in-law insult in a subtle and a very painful way. Jewish mothers-in-law have been doing this for generations. Say your daughter-in-law made a beautiful cake, and it’s delicious and you really enjoyed the cake. It’s so good, and you say, “Zuh davka ugah me’ulah.” You said, “the cake is excellent,” but by using davka it’s surprising that the cake is excellent. It says, “I wouldn’t have expected that this cake would be good, but this one actually is.”

Nehemia: It’s like saying, “This is actually good,” that would be the translation here, I think.

Elon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. It’s a very versatile word, and it’s a word that’s used quite regularly, right? It’s not some obscure word.

Elon: All the time. All the time in Yiddish and all the time in Hebrew. And the thing is, Hebrew could have adopted the word straight from the Talmud and used it the way it’s in the Talmud. But we don’t use it that way. We use it exactly in the same way that it’s used in Yiddish.

Nehemia: We davka use it in the way that it’s used in Yiddish.

Elon: Davka the way it’s used in Yiddish, exactly! And not like the way it’s in the Talmud. And we also davka pronounce it the way they pronounce it in Yiddish, we say dafka and not davka. It’s still spelled today in Hebrew…

Nehemia: And nobody says davka?

Elon: You could say some hypercorrect and if you’re speaking in a formal way. Or maybe you’re on TV, you’re supposed to say dav’ka with the stress at the end of the word. But people say… in regular speech, I haven’t counted or recorded, but everyone says dafka. And dafka, there is a linguistic explanation for this.

Nehemia: Tell us!

Elon: This is a partial assimilation. What happened is, there are different qualities of consonants, so the “veh” sound, that’s a voiced consonant as opposed to… and it comes as a pair, an unvoiced version of that, is a “fuh”. There’s another one that will be helpful to understand what we’re talking about as voiced. We have “vuh” and “fuh”, and we have “kuh” and “guh.” The voiced is the “guh”, and the non-voiced is a “kuh”. There’s a vibration-y-ness of the consonant, which is the voiced quality.

So, there’s some stickiness between consonants when they’re placed together. Sometimes it becomes similar to each other. If there’s a voiced consonant before or after the consonant before or after will become voiced even though it’s not supposed to be voiced, or the opposite can happen.

In this case, the “kuh” in davka is unvoiced, while the “vuh” sound that was before is voiced. So, people anticipating in their mind that they’re going to need to make an unvoiced “kuh” in a fraction of a second, they also unvoice the sound before, and instead of saying davka, they say dafka. This process happens over time, and it’s not that this is happening every time we say the word. It’s not because it’s unvoiced or not voiced. This rule of un-voicing, of the dissimilation in this case, isn’t active in Modern Hebrew, it only appears in words that Hebrew adopted from Yiddish.

For example, savta, “grandma”, is spelled as if it’s supposed to be sav-ta, again with the voice “vuh.” But we pronounce it safta, because again, the “ta” is an unvoiced consonant, and it’s backwards partially assimilated.

Nehemia: And both examples you gave are Aramaic words that were adopted into Yiddish, savta… Are there examples of a word that is an original Hebrew word?

Elon: Sure. I wonder if mamash… because mamash is in Hebrew, but it probably comes from Aramaic. I don’t think it appears in the Bible; I think it is Rabbinic. We talked about tzafon and darom and those are…

Nehemia: No. I mean, is there an example where you have that partial assimilation of the “v” into an “f”? That’s what I’m asking. I don’t know off the top of my head.

Elon: In Modern Hebrew, if this happened?

Nehemia: Do they all come from Aramaic? Savta and davka, are they all Aramaic words?

Elon: I’d be hard-pressed to find more examples of this phenomenon.

Nehemia: Ah, so there’s only two that you can think of. Okay.

Elon: So, their recovery has a lot of Hebrew words, and those words remain…

Nehemia: By the way, this happens in English, where we say “wife” and “wives”. It’s the same linguistic phenomenon.

Elon: Is it assimilation? Possibly.

Nehemia: Alright. In any event… So, there’s a bunch of words that come into Modern Hebrew from Yiddish, but it’s more complex than that. Basically, they were trying to take Yiddish and Hebraize it, is what you’re really saying.

Elon: Because the basic grammar of Hebrew, the sentence structure, it’s very Yiddish. The backbone is Yiddish, in terms of phrases. Also, there are lots of phrases, Hebrew phrases, that we say or Aramaic phrases. “Ein hanach’tom me’id al eisato,” we say. That means “a baker does not give his opinion on the quality of his dough.” It’s a way to say somebody else should comment. You shouldn’t comment.

Nehemia: Yeah. But does that come from… and I don’t know the answer. Does that come from Yiddish or does that come from the Talmud?

Elon: Yeah, so this would be used in Yiddish. Nearly all the phrases…

Nehemia: No, but what I’m asking is, is it a German phrase? A Germanic phrase that was translated into Hebrew, or it’s…

Elon: No, I think this is from Rabbinic literature, I believe.

Nehemia: Okay. And as a contrast you bring an example in one of your videos, “to close your fly.” Which actually is a Germanic phrase now translated into Hebrew, meaning zipping your pants.

Elon: Yeah. Also, in the comments to that, people have been telling me that in Lebanese Arabic they use it, in French they use something similar, in Brazil they use something similar, and Turkish they use something similar. Which I was unaware of.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: So, it seems like it’s almost international. I would assume, since these people are all mother tongue Yiddish speakers, that they would take it from Yiddish. But I cannot be completely confident about that anymore because it seems that everywhere around the world people say the same thing.

Nehemia: So, just to explain to the audience… let’s back up. The Modern Hebrew word for “a fly” which is the thing you zip up at the front of a man’s pants, tell us about that.

Elon: Not the zipper. The opening itself, the fly.

Nehemia: The opening itself. Okay. So, tell us about that. I’ve seen the video, but most people haven’t. So, tell us about that story.

Elon: So, we have a fly. Hebrew doesn’t have a word for that. I don’t know where the English word for fly came from. It couldn’t be that ancient because people didn’t have flies in ancient times, so there’s no word for this. But what there is, is when you see somebody and their fly is open, you say, “ha’chanut shelcha petuchah,” or “s’gor et ha’chanut”, which literally means either “close your store”, or “your store is open”. Now, this is a phrase used in Yiddish, and it turns out in many languages. In English you would say, “X, Y, Zed,” or “X, Y, Zee” if you’re American.

Nehemia: “Examine your zipper”.

Elon: “Examine your zipper.” But apparently, in many languages you say, “You left your store open; you should close your store.” I think there’s like a sexual connotation here, as if the…

Nehemia: I’m not sure. I think it comes from… people have these little kiosks, and you would open up a little awning, and that was the store. So, you’re looking now into the…

Elon: You’re implying that your wares are your…

Nehemia: Oh, maybe. I don’t know.

Elon: Yeah. Everyone can see your wares.

Nehemia: But the point is they didn’t use the word chanus or something like this in Yiddish, which is the Hebrew word for “store”, chanut. I’m asking; didn’t they use the Germanic word?

Elon: They used the Germanic, the German word.

Nehemia: Okay, that was what I was asking.

Elon: Fam, fram, something like that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: This was translated… in other words, once again, we’re going back to how the Hebrew was born. So, suddenly all these people from Eastern Europe were moving to Palestine.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: People often think of the end of the 19th century, like Ben Yehuda figures, but really that’s like a prequel to the story. Because in 1900 there were a handful of people that were speaking Hebrew, a few crazy families living in Jerusalem, it’s sort of like people raising their family in Klingon. And there are some people who could do that; there’s attempts with the Cornish in England. There’s even the 1900 Encyclopedia Britannica and their article about Hebrew, which gives a scholarly thing about the Hebrew language.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Elon: And at the end they say, “Currently in Palestine there are some people trying to revive the Hebrew language, but this is doomed to fail.”

Nehemia: Did it really say that? That’s awesome!

Elon: “Crazy people.” And he doesn’t treat it at all seriously.

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: And it wasn’t serious at this point. But what happened is, 20 years later, at the end of World War I, when an international agreement said that Palestine will become the land of the Jews, at that point thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands eventually, of Jews, moved from Eastern Europe and settled in Palestine. And that concerted effort between the end of World War I and the founding of the state, that is the nation-building period. And at that point you have thousands of Jews coming from Eastern Europe, or mostly from Eastern Europe, settling in towns and cities, and those people, most of them speak Yiddish and suddenly are forced to speak Hebrew.

Nehemia: Why are they forced? And it’s a real question. I don’t know the answer. In other words, if you go to the Walmart down the street from my house and you go to ask for something, you better go with Google Dictionary. I’m not trying to be funny. And you may have to pull up, literally, Arabic. You might have to pull up Spanish. If you want to know where the cold medicine is, and you ask in English, and this literally has happened to me. I literally had to pull it up on my phone and look up the Arabic word for cold medicine, and then immediately I was told with hands “it’s over there”. So, why were they forced? That’s my question. Because you can live in another country and never learn the language. My great-grandfather, I don’t know that he spoke English until the day he died. He lived in America for 30 years.

Elon: I think these people are not immigrants. They’re not people moving to a different country to build a better life for themselves and their children. These are people who have a historic purpose. They are part of an international movement. They’re living in living history. They’re reviving an ancient…

Nehemia: So, it’s ideologically motivated, I think is what you’re trying to say.

Elon: 100%.

Nehemia: Okay. So, they davka don’t want to speak Yiddish. They want to speak Hebrew.

Elon: Exactly!

Nehemia: Okay.

Elon: They’re very aware that they’re doing something historical. The people who were looking for a better life, they moved to America. The people who moved to Palestine, those are the crazy people who were really feeling a part of a movement of Zionism. These are amazing…

Nehemia: Alright, absolutely fascinating. Any final words that you want to share with the audience?

Elon: No, I very much enjoyed this, and I look forward to talking with you again.

Nehemia: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

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