anthropologists might be insulted by the question. All I know is that if you told me you just saw a nudist, a gay ornithologist, a railroad enthusiast, and a punk can-nabis smoker walking down the street together, I would be waiting for the punch line. But if you then told me they were speaking Esperanto, no punch line would be necessary. It would all make complete and utter sense.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, while the proponents of Ido, Ulla, Ilo, Auli, Ile, Ispirantu, Espido, Esperido, Mundelingva, Mondlingvo, Mondlingu, Europal, Europeo, Uropa, Perfektsprache, Simplo, Geoglot, and the rest of Esperanto’s competitors were advertising the potential practical roles for their languages—science, commerce, diplomacy, and so on—Esperantists were busy creating not a potential but an actual role for their language. While projects like Anglo-Franca, published around the same time as Zamenhof’s first book, were presented through examples like “
The Esperantists worked to create a community and a culture. Yes, they did this somewhat artificially and self-consciously, but it did work (forced tradition + time = real tradition), and it turned out that many people who may not have been inspired to learn a language in order to use it for something would learn a language in order to
Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Modern Hebrew, or, as some call it, the miracle of Modern Hebrew. Technically, Hebrew is not an invented language. There was no Zamenhof of Hebrew to sit down and draft its rules and vocabulary. But there was an Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who, as one biographer put it, “made it possible for several million people to order groceries, drive cattle, make love, and curse out their neighbors in a language which until his day had been fit only for Talmudic argument and prayer.”
By about A.D. 200, Hebrew had died as a spoken language. It survived as a liturgical language and as a written language for philosophy, poetry, and other elite intellectual pursuits. In 1881, when Ben-Yehuda and his wife, Devora, immigrated to Palestine from Europe, Hebrew also served as a sort of lingua franca of the marketplace for Jews from various language backgrounds, but it was nobody’s mother tongue. In 1882, when Ben- Yehuda’s first child was born, he declared that his household would be Hebrew speaking only, and thus raised the first native Hebrew speaker in over a thousand years. His friends thought the child was sure to be damaged by the experiment. His neighbors thought he was crazy. But three generations later their own great-grandchildren would be living their lives in Hebrew—at home, at school, at the beach, and in the sandwich shops.
Ben-Yehuda and Zamenhof grew up at the same time under similar circumstances (Ben-Yehuda in Russian-ruled Lithuania, and Zamenhof in Russian-ruled Poland). Both were deeply affected by the results of nationalist sentiment spreading through Europe. Zamenhof saw how it turned man against man and inspired people to violence. Ben-Yehuda saw how it strengthened and legitimized a feeling of common identity. Both saw that a fundamental element of a sense of nationhood was a shared language.
Unlike the Germans, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and other peoples who asserted themselves as nations during this time by uniting and throwing off, or attempting to throw off, foreign rule, the Jews were a widely spread diaspora without a significant, nation-worthy concentration in any particular territory. Many of them felt that if they were to define themselves as a nation, they must relocate. Ben-Yehuda believed that they must also revive their ancient language, and he relocated to Palestine to begin his task.
After the terrible pogroms of 1881, Zamenhof also came to the conclusion that the Jews needed a state of their own. After first supporting the idea for a Jewish homeland in the United States, he began an active involvement in the Zionist movement. But he became disillusioned with it and decided that “despite the heartbreaking sufferings of my people, I do not want to link myself with Hebrew nationalism, but I want to work only for absolute human justice. I am profoundly convinced, that this way I will bring much more good to my unfortunate people than through the goals of nationalism.”
Just as the growth of Esperanto was aided by fervent true believers who didn’t care what others thought of them, Hebrew benefited from a passionate idealism. Ben-Yehuda was criticized for being a naive dreamer, and even when he could convince associates to use Hebrew in their day-to-day interactions, they were met with an impatient request to speak Yiddish “like a normal person.”
Yiddish was the language of the European Ashkenazi Jews, and many of them argued that Yiddish should be the language of Jewish nationhood. Had they established a territory in Europe or the United States, rather than in Palestine, this is probably what would have happened. But in Palestine there were North African Jews, who spoke North African Arabic; Mediterranean Sephardic Jews, who spoke Judeo-Spanish; and local Jews, who spoke Palestinian Arabic. There were already significant cultural differences between these Jews and the Yiddish-speaking European Jews, who were viewed as not-always-welcome newcomers.
Ben-Yehuda saw that Hebrew was shared more broadly by the Diaspora and had more potential as a unifying force. His writings and actions inspired a small group of others to follow his lead. A few other families declared themselves Hebrew-only households, and a few more declared that they personally would only use Hebrew in all their daily interactions. These were the early years of the first aliya, an influx of over twenty thousand immigrants from Europe, and as they established small agricultural colonies in a new, strange place, many of them were receptive to new language habits. Some teachers began to teach Hebrew in these colonies through the direct method—just jumping in and speaking the language, without commentary or explanation in Yiddish, Russian, or any other better-known language.
They were all, to a certain extent, making it up as they went along. How do you say, in a language of obscure theological debate and ancient ritual, “washcloth” or “doll” or “typewriter”? If Ben-Yehuda wanted to do something as simple as ask his wife to pour him a cup of coffee with sugar, he was reduced to gesturing while saying, “Take such and such, and do like so, and bring me this and this, and I will drink.” It takes a lot of work and patience to run a household or a classroom this way.
Some conscious intervention was required. Ben-Yehuda would comb through ancient Hebrew texts, looking for long-forgotten words that might serve for the needed concepts. He also looked through more recent Hebrew literature, which had already done a good bit of grappling with vocabulary gaps. But the solutions that had been proposed in this literature were often too conservative, clunky, and inappropriate for natural, fluent language use. A tuning fork was referred to as “a bronze fork with two teeth that produce a sound.” A word for “telegraph” had been coined by adapting the following lines from Psalm 19:4—5: “There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.”
Ben-Yehuda sought simple, natural-sounding solutions, and he often resorted to making them up himself. Others did the same, and this led to a great deal of variation in the way Hebrew was spoken. A newspaper editorial complained: “Here they say
Though language academies were established in 1890 and 1904, they accomplished very little in the way of top-down enforcement of language norms. There was no standard or accepted authority. Though Ben-Yehuda introduced many of the words he created into general circulation by using them in articles he wrote for his Hebrew- language newspapers, he did not draw attention to them or comment upon them at all. Though the language was
