Cynics Unlimited

It used to be that the essential components of a gentleman’s education included Latin, Greek and Hebrew. (Not so much attention was paid to a lady’s education.) While today Latin and Greek are still offered at many high schools and universities and are mandatory for secondary students in some European countries, it is difficult to take a Hebrew course outside of a synagogue or Jewish day school. But even if we never study Hebrew, it befits us to know more about a language that has helped shape the culture of the West.

One characteristic that distinguishes Hebrew from Latin and Greek is the language family to which it belongs. Latin and Greek are Indo-European languages, a group of languages that encompasses most of the tongues spoken in Europe – including English – as well as several in Western Asia and Northern India. Hebrew on the other hand is part of the Afroasiatic family of languages that as their name implies are native to Africa and Asia, to Northern Africa and Southwestern Asia more specifically. Hebrew can be narrowed down even further to a particular branch of the Afroasiatic family, the Semitic. The Semitic branch includes a number of living languages, like Arabic, Maltese, Aramaic and Ethiopia’s Amharic, as well as several extinct ones, such as Phoenician, Edomite and Moabite, the speakers of some of which are mentioned in the Old Testament (Ruth, for example, was a Moabite woman).

The first writing in Hebrew dates back to the eleventh century before Christ. Though the Hebrew script might strike most Westerners as undecipherable, it is actually based on the same alphabet, the Phoenician, that gave rise to the Latin alphabet. One difference between Hebrew and Latin script is that the former is read from right to left rather than from left to right.

Hebrew was at first spoken on a daily basis by the ancient Jews. After their exile in Babylonia in 600 BC, though, the Jews adopted Aramaic as their everyday means of communication. Hebrew was nevertheless still employed for religious and literary purposes, just as during the Middle Ages Latin was used in the Catholic Mass and in scientific treatises. For instance, while Jesus’ mother tongue was Aramaic (no, Jesus didn’t speak English), he most likely knew Hebrew as a ritual language.

As the Jews moved throughout Europe and other places during the Diaspora, they tended to take on the languages of the people – Russian, English, Spanish, etcetera – among whom they lived, all while retaining Hebrew for religious services and literature. At times the Jews modified these languages to create their own forms of speech. The best-known example of this is Yiddish. Yiddish is basically a variety of German but contains a substantial amount of Hebrew vocabulary and is even written with the Hebrew alphabet. This fusion can be illustrated in the Yiddish words for “dog.” Two such terms are used: “hunt” from the German “hund” (as in “Dachshund”) and “kelef” from the noun of the same meaning in Hebrew.

What, one might wonder, brought Hebrew back from the brink, so to speak, of being an almost purely ritualistic medium to become the mother tongue of over five million people? Though even in the nineteenth century there were attempts to revive it as a spoken language, the real boost occurred with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The promulgation of Hebrew acquired a nationalistic slant for many Jews: it was a language they could call their own. Undoubtedly Hebrew’s resurrection was aided by the fact that it had remained in use for religious ceremonies; for a considerable proportion of Jews it had never truly disappeared, which may explain why the revival of Hebrew succeeded while that of Gaelic in Ireland after that country’s independence from Britain did not. Hebrew is now the official language of Israel together with Arabic.

Finally, one might ask what has Hebrew contributed to English and other modern Western languages. At first glance, most English words of Hebrew origin tend to refer to Jewish objects or concepts, such as “menorah” or “mitzvah.” One Hebrew noun with an interesting history is “chutzpah.” While in Hebrew it originally meant “impudence,” in English “chutzpah” has taken on the positive connotation of “grit.” Some Hebrew words have ironically managed to make their way into Christian religious vocabulary. “Pesach” – Passover – becomes the Italian “Pasqua,” Spanish “Pascua,” French “Paques,” Swedish “Pask” and our own “paschal,” all signifying Easter, not a fortuitous transformation, as Jesus’ Last Supper was essentially a Passover meal. In a curious twist, “Pesach” has
ended up (through “Pascua”) in the Tagalog language of the Philippines as “Pasko,” meaning however not Easter but Christmas.

Hebrew’s principal contribution to the languages of the West lies in personal names that appear in the Bible. Though some of these names, such as Hannah or Moses, are primarily – though not exclusively – confined to the Jewish community, others, like John, James and David, have entered the mainstream with no Jewish ethnic connotation at all. Another mainstream name ultimately of Hebrew origin is my middle name and my mother’s first name, Elizabeth (“God is my oath”). The “El” signifies “God” and turns up as well in words like “Bethel” (“house of God”).

While a large percentage of names in most Christian majority nations are of Hebrew origin, they have nonetheless had their periods of boom and bust. Old Testament names, almost all of which are Hebrew, saw a surge in popularity after the Reformation and into the 19th century, when many Protestant families turned away from the Roman Catholic practice of calling children after saints with no connection to the Bible. Hence we have Abraham Lincoln and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Protestants are not the only ones however to look to Hebrew nomenclature: Spanish-speaking countries have their fair share of boys with names like Efrain, Neftali and Abel.

Whatever its history and contribution to the West, Hebrew shows no sign of dying either in the synagogue or in the street.