One of the questions people ask when studying Hebrew, especially in the Diaspora, where this language is associated with religious life, is how it can serve today to convey concepts and details of things that, until a relatively recent past, did not exist. Hebrew lacks the terminological refinement and precision of German, nor does it have centuries of lexical development comparable to Arabic, which the great medieval Jewish masters regarded as the best tool for discussing philosophy.

Nevertheless, Hebrew is a functioning language that, given a relatively meager – sometimes almost archaic – set of elements, works on the lexicon like a painter on a palette of basic colors or a chemist on a reduced periodic table.

My love for Hebrew began in adulthood, when I realized that behind the repeated sound of תפילות tefillot (prayers, for most people completely incomprehensible) there was a complex reality: rough but fascinating, outwardly simple yet internally complex, a kind of metaphor – at least as I see it – for what Israel is today.

My major academic professional achievement was the critical edition of the first Hebrew text written in the Diaspora, the Sefer Hakmoni, a sort of scientific-exegetical encyclopedia (containing much medicine, astronomy and astrology, all steeped in abundant Neoplatonic sauce) composed near the end of the Italian early Middle Ages, in the second half of the 10th century CE by Shabbatai Donnolo, a physician and philosopher born in Oria, in Puglia, around 912 CE.

Bassorilievo di Shabbetai Donnolo, Porta degli Ebrei, Oria. Photo: Laura Buccolieri, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The process of lexical generation and variation that Donnolo carries out in composing this work is in some respects very similar to what Ben-Yehuda would do in the mid-nineteenth century to revive Hebrew as a vehicular language, and also to what occurs today in Israel, where lexical borrowing – whether in the form of simple transliteration or semantic translation – is what makes modern Hebrew a language in constant change, a fabric whose weave is never static but shifting, somewhat like the so-called “Penelope’s web” that never seems to reach completion.

The model Donnolo references is, of course, the language of the Torah, but what he actually looks to and uses is the language of the Mishnah, the language of dialogue and debate, where identifying and explaining a detail is a fundamental practice. At that time, this linguistic heritage had only recently been fixed in written form (ca. 6th century CE), a segment of the Oral Torah that, as such, could not become a “canon” for living as a spoken language or as a means of oral expression.

The biblical canon and Oral Torah are Donnolo’s primary linguistic models for discussing knowledge of his time. However, these traditional sources lack the precise terminology needed for specialized fields like medicine and astrology. To compensate, Donnolo resorts to transliterations from Latin and Greek, the languages of his scientific sources. However, this approach has limits: borrowed terms assume readers already know them and understand the subject. If we did not know what Google is, we would not understand “to Google” in English and then “leh-gah-ghel” in Ivrit.

Is there a connection between that historical-linguistic experience and modern Hebrew? The question is rhetorically obvious if we ask whether a line of continuity exists between the Hebrew of that time and modern Hebrew, but in other respects it is less obvious – especially if thought of in terms of paradigms regarding the revival and use of a language that, while for centuries serving as an identity marker and a means of communication, had gradually narrowed its sphere of operation to function almost exclusively within liturgical life and religious studies.

In fact, between those early “experiments” in the deep Italian south of the early medieval period and what would happen with the revival of the Jewish state, there exists something much more important than grammatical detail, something having to do with the definition of Jewish identity. Language is not an entirely interchangeable tool equivalent to other languages, because each language also serves to forge ideas and convey particular sentiments, giving voice to a human community that recognizes itself in a set of foundational ideals.

Porta degli Ebrei (Jewish Gate), Oria, Puglia. Photo: Giargese87, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For anyone who encountered modern Hebrew more than thirty years ago and has decided to return to it today, it is evident not only how the language has changed, but also how these changes have been driven not only by linguistic reasons (to make communication faster and more efficient, especially with the advent of social media that demands ever-greater concision), but also by social and historical factors. These include the fears, anxieties, tensions, and hopes of a society which, under constant and often increasing pressure, has nonetheless always found the space to elaborate ideas and forge a deep humanity. 

An example of this internal dialectic in today’s Hebrew might be the verb letalfen, obviously coined from the English word “telephone”, and today, it seems to me, completely out of use. A “modern” word when coined, almost a simple transliteration of the term denoting the possibility of speaking at a distance (tele + phone), it is now replaced by a much more “authentic” lehitkasher, where the concept of distance is inverted to become connection, bond, something that, placed between you and me, serves to bring us closer, annihilating the distance that divides us with a “connection” (kesher).

It is a beautiful, fascinating paradox in which the evolution of a language, which transforms to include and become an ever-wider common space, manifests as a kind of return to and recovery of simple and original elements that, in theory, are much less effective because semantically broader, but in reality have an extremely strong ideal and communicative potential.

I do not know why this phenomenon happened – or still happens – but we cannot exclude that there is also a will to return not so much to an archaizing language as to a more shared form of language, less dependent on those diasporic tongues (German first and English later) on which part of modern Hebrew was modeled both lexically and grammatically. A language, then, freer, less bound to a specific foreign linguistic group and, consequently, much more universally Jewish.

Citizen Cafè, our school, is a clear and striking example of all this, bringing together in many ideal places – our online lessons – people from around the world who find in the foundational elements of the language also the reasons for their own existence.