Book review – Hebrew: From Sacred Language to Mother Tongue |
Similar to The Story of Hebrew by Dr. Lewis Glinert, Dr. Keren Mock, research associate at Paris Sciences & Letters University, details the revival process of the Hebrew language in her book, Hebrew: From Sacred Language to Mother Tongue (Columbia University Press). The book, translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer, is based on Mock’s 2016 French edition.
Mock focuses on the development of Hebrew through the work of four key Jewish linguists: Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda, Aharon Appelfeld, Sami Michael, and Baruch Spinoza.
While Ben-Yehuda is well-known as the father of modern Hebrew, the book introduces new perspectives by highlighting the lesser-known roles of Appelfeld and Michael and their impact on the development of modern Hebrew, which added depth to my understanding.
Appelfeld, a Romanian-born Israeli, and Michael, an Iraqi-born author, both immigrated to Israel and struggled with the new language, shaping its development.
The book details how Appelfeld, from Romania, and Michael, from Iraq, with his native Arabic, struggled with Hebrew in their early writing. Yet for both, Hebrew ultimately became their mother tongue.
She writes about Spinoza’s unfinished work on Hebrew grammar, Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language. It was published posthumously in 1677. There, he treated Hebrew as a rational rather than a divine language.
In the Compendium, Spinoza felt Hebrew was very difficult to understand for practical reasons. The complexity of its syntax was a key issue for him.
Spinoza was correct: no formal corpus of Hebrew permitted deeper knowledge. Part of the difficulty was that he left school in his early teens to work in his family’s importing business. He never had the chance to study Hebrew and the Talmud more deeply. Had he done so, his trajectory may have been vastly different.
While much more of an academic work than Glinert’s book, Mock has done a remarkable job of detailing the revitalization of modern-day Hebrew, culminating in a comprehensive and insightful account of the language’s evolution.