The mother of languages

The influence of Hebrew on other languages
Adapted from Norman Berdichevsky

What is the point of Hebrew? It is not a common language, spoken by fewer than six million people. This question is often asked – even by students who are aware of the great respect paid to the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome.

For those who equate a ‘classical language’ with a ‘dead language’, modern languages are at most practical tools. They are useful when studying prestigious career fields: English for technology and international relations; French, which is so closely linked to fashion, cookery and art; Italian, linked to music and opera; German, to philosophy, medicine and psychology.

Ironically, the current generation’s negative attitude towards foreign languages in general is even present among the many Jewish students of the Diaspora. Hebrew does not seem to them to be very useful except for synagogue or a journey to Israel. They think it is an exotic oriental language which bears no relation to the European languages. Furthermore, as a result of its Semitic roots its vocabulary, grammar and alphabet seem to reveal themselves as too foreign.

This impression is reinforced by the memory of traditional Hebrew lessons in the synagogue. Even many parents have an image in their heads of a shabby and badly lit room (the Cheder) in some shtetl in Eastern Europe, in which a bearded rabbi establishes some rule. And while he mechanically proceeds with his teaching, he tears to pieces those who are not listening to his explanations.

This image of Hebrew as a language of ritual and prayer is completely wrong and it prevents us from seeing that western civilization has a lot in common with this language – which is thus in no way inferior to Greek and Latin. During the Renaissance, Christian scholars were particularly interested in the Old Testament and produced new translations using the Hebrew original. A well-known example is the new edition of the Latin translation, the Vulgate. This interest can also be found in the poetry of William Blake and John Milton (who could read and write Hebrew fluently) and in the famous painting ‘The Writing on the Wall’ by Rembrandt. The Round Tower in Copenhagen bears the Latin word Doctrinament. It is also decorated with a sword, a heart and the name of God with the four Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton. This shows that the protestant monarch was guided by the word of God. The Hebrew letters were placed there to show that the king was faithful to the ‘original’ Hebrew word of God and not inaccurate translations. This faithfulness to the Hebrew original of the holy scripture can also be seen in the case of the Christian scholar Johann Reuchlin (1465-1522), whose study of the Hebrew texts had a great influence on the clergy and who prevented the burning of the Talmud as a heathen book.

Our view of history was deeply influenced by Greece, Rome and Christianity. However, each of these reacted in their own particular way to their Jewish roots in the creation and development of what we know as western civilization. However in fact this term is incorrect, as parts of these cultural foundations – monotheism, Judeo-Christian ethics, the alphabet – come from the middle east. It was the heart of the ancient world and reached from the Aegean Sea and the Nile delta as far as Mesopotamia (including the kingdoms and empires of Assyria, the Akkadians, the Hittites and the Babylonians).

This view of history is incorrectly divided into separate categories – Greece, Troy, Egypt, Rome, Israel, Carthage. At the same time, an appropriate understanding and appreciation of commons sources and a common heritage often falls by the wayside. Many elements which underlie all of them were united in the Roman empire and later referred to as “western”. In reality, the practice of distinguishing between the “East” and the “West” derives from the fifth century, when a conflict led the Orthodox Church in Constantinople and the Roman Catholic Church to split.

Nowadays it seems clear that the Old Testament and the Hebrew language have many relevant points of contact with early Greek civilization and its classical works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both share the common heritage of the eastern Mediterranean region and a large number of cultural contacts existed between them. "Only two of the ethnic groups that emerged historically in the eastern Mediterranean of the second millennium have enjoyed a historically conscious continuity down to the present: the Greeks and the Hebrews,” emphasises the university professor Syrus Gordon. This fact was ignored for a long time, because few researchers were experts in both Greek and Hebrew. However, an investigation of the great works of the Hebrew and Hellenic cultures sheds light on similar customs, common particularities of the monarchical system, military strategies and science, sacrifices and music. They dealt with the key questions of human fate, evil and suffering, in similar ways, as is described both in the book of Job and in the great Greek tragedies. These central elements of “western culture” originate from the Near East, from ancient Israel and Greece.

History is always written by the victors. Rome defeated Greece in an almost entirely peaceful process and absorbed large parts of the Greek heritage: mythology, philosophy, and laws. Two further rivals on the other hand were destroyed in a series of horrific wars: Israel and Carthage. These two shared a large part of the Semitic traditions through their language and neither accepted Rome’s claim to be a superior culture. Emigrants from the two Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon founded Carthage and preserved their language. At first it was called Phoenician, then Punic. The famous Israeli author Amós Kenán described this relationship between Israel and Carthage, Rome’s two bitterest enemies, "I always had an attraction to this wonderful phenomenon called Tyre and Sidon, and as one who was born on the sands of Tel Aviv on the coastal lowland, I feel a closeness to all that was, is and will be, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean ... Why shouldn’t we feel a sense of pride in our proximity to that ancient contemporary of ours who stamped his image on the area, gave to the world writing, and once sent his elephants across the Alps under Hannibal’s leadership and momentarily brought mighty Rome itself in danger of destruction?"

Not only their ‘strange’ religion, but also the Hebrew language of the Jews reminded the Romans of the Carthaginian enemy and their old Punic language. One must not forget that the Romans, who out of their own free will shared their cultural dominance with Greece, were unwilling to adopt and acknowledge anything coming from the defeated Jews, Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Unlike the numerous other peoples defeated by the Roman Empire, the Semites presented resistance to Roman superiority and claimed the superiority of the (at first Jewish, then Christian) monotheism. They were proud of their alphabet, which first the Greeks and later the Romans adopted. Our alphabet is the direct successor of the Phoenician-Hebrew alphabet and owes its name to the first two letters, alef and bet, of its predecessor.

Nowadays no one can read a newspaper or listen to a presentation on art, science, military matters or any other field of professional activity without stumbling across a large number of concepts and expressions from other languages which have to a certain extent become part of every modern language. Expressions such as status quo, casus belli, laissez-faire, déjà-vu, savoir-faire, haute cuisine, allegro, pogrom, de facto, de jure, sine qua non, prima facie, modus vivendi, leitmotiv, blitzkrieg, lebensraum etc. (yes, even et cetera) are part of our everyday language.

Hebrew’s contribution to other languages is less obvious and is often overlooked, precisely because it is so widespread. Cecil Roth, a leading Jewish historian of our time, expresses this as follows: “Generation after generation of Englishmen heard the Bible read in church and studied it at home. In many cases, it was the only book; in all, the principal book. At last its cadences, its music, its phraseology, sank into his mind and became part of his being... Hence by slow degrees his daily speech was not merely enriched, but to some extent moulded by its influence."

Those who do not know Hebrew, its majestic cadences and its rich imagery, could imagine that certain expressions are simply a result of the evolution of English from its beginnings. The fact of the matter is, however, that translations of the Bible had a huge influence on all modern languages. Phrases such as “a heavy heart”, idioms such as "a drop in the bucket,” or “by the skin of his teeth” are no more than repetitions of literal translations from the Hebrew Bible.
The words of the Bible were often adopted with a slight change in the pronunciation: Alphabet, Sabbath, Amen, Messiah, Hallelujah, Cherub, Seraph, Satan, Leviathan, Jubilee, Sodomy, Bahamas (probably derived from the mythological creature Behemoth). Perhaps the most surprising case is Europe, probably from erev, evening or setting sun, since for the Hebrews and Phoenicians Europe was the continent over which the sun went down. Many first names are directly derived from Hebrew ones: Jonathan, Joseph, David, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Esther, Eve, Deborah, Rebecca, Leah etc.

However, the influence of the Hebrew language extends far further than the field of linguistics and religion. Its contribution goes much deeper than the borrowing of individual words and concepts. The Hebrew mode of thought has been embedded in English words and phrases for so long that we hardly think about their origin any more. Certain expressions used in both everyday speech and literature come from the Bible and thus the Hebrew language.
There are also curious cases of mistranslations. The most famous is probably that of keren, “ray” or “beam”, which was translated into Latin as “horn”. As a result generations of artists incorrectly portrayed Moses with horns, whilst the biblical text actually describes him as emitting beams of light. Although Hebrew was not spoken between the second century BC and the second century AD even in Jewish territory, it remained the language of the Jewish religion and influenced Jewish hybrid languages. Thus, for example, Yiddish, Ebri (Judeo-Persian) and Mograbi (Judeo-Arabic) still use the Hebrew alphabet. Fifteen percent of Yiddish words come from Hebrew and smaller percentages appear in other hybrid languages. Many Hebrew words in Yiddish describe spiritual and religious practices. Yet others form a vocabulary that existed parallel to words of non-Jewish origin and describe a concept, a profession, a ceremony or an object from Jewish life.

For several generations there was a lively rivalry between Hebrew and Yiddish among authors, dramatists and philosophers. In 1908 at a conference in Czernowitz the supporters of Yiddish proclaimed it to be the “national language of the Jews”. At their 1913 congress in Vienna, the Hebraists for their part declared Hebrew to be the Jewish national language. They pointed to its historical continuity, the tremendously high profile of the Bible, its influence on a large portion of European literature and its venerable age. In the spirit of Zion one can hardly imagine a more convincing argument than that the Land of Israel itself “speaks” Hebrew – in the form of innumerable written documents on parchment, stone, papyrus and wood.

As a result of migration and assimilation, Yiddish lost more and more of its influence, whereas Hebrew built its up due to its geographical concentration in Palestine and later in Israel. Yiddish reflected the folklore and the religious life of the European Jews and was later adapted to the requirements of the establishments of city life and modern literature. The Holocaust killed it off as a spoken language, yet it experienced a Renaissance of academic interest. Thus Isaac Bashevis Singer finally received the first Nobel Prize for Literature for a Yiddish author in 1978.

The inventor of Esperanto, Dr. Lazar Ludwig Zamenhof, was Jewish. Without a doubt, his knowledge of Hebrew played a role in the development of the first artificial international language created with the aim of being transformed into a living language. Admittedly, Esperanto is derived for the most part from the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. However, it is likely that Zamenhof’s broad knowledge of the Hebrew and Aramaic languages contributed to its logical structure, which linguists acknowledge to be the easiest language to learn.

Esperanto became particularly popular in those countries whose languages are hardly spoken beyond their borders, such as Hungary, Poland, Japan, Brazil, Lithuania, China, Bulgaria and Korea. The use of the logical structure of Hebrew is doubtless one of the reasons for this success.

Zamenhof invented Esperanto at the end of the nineteenth century with the intention that it should become not only an international language but also a new national language for the Jewish people. He loved Yiddish and Hebrew, but he believed that Yiddish did not have the necessary historical continuity and prestige and that Hebrew would be very difficult to adapt to the needs of the modern world. One must bear in mind that in the 1880s Eliezer Ben Yehudah’s attempts to revive Hebrew were still in their infancy. The successful transformation of Hebrew into a living language and the development of its modern literature caught the attention of defenders of ‘minor’ languages overshadowed by their larger neighbours. Welsh, Breton, Irish Gaelic and Basque representatives visited Israel with the aim of studying the teaching methods employed there in the intensive Hebrew courses for immigrants.

Luis de Torres, a Jewish convert who accompanied Columbus on his first journey as an interpreter, intended to speak to the natives (whom they took to be inhabitants of India) in Hebrew and later he claimed that these “Indians” were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Many Renaissance scholars and later European monarchs wanted to declare Hebrew the “mother of all languages”. They believed that Hebrew was the original source from which all languages developed. This theory was later rejected as too simplistic. However some recent scholars have raised the possibility that Hebrew might really be older than the other Semitic languages. Its location at the point where three continents meet could have made it an important source for other language families. Its sister languages, Aramaic and Akkadian were both, in different eras, the lingua franca of the Near East.

The concept of a single origin for all languages is called “monogenesis”. This highly controversial theory, for which hundreds of examples in Hebrew and other languages provide evidence, suggests that Hebrew might perhaps be the source of them all.

Understanding Hebrew allows one to enjoy direct access to one of the world’s oldest still existent cultures. It is probably the most important factor uniting the Jewish people. The Bible and the works that followed it – the Talmud and the Mishnah – were written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The rabbis encouraged the spread of literacy among the people. More than sixty years ago, Mordechai Kaplan, one of the great Jewish thinkers and founder of the Reconstructionist movement in the United States, claimed, "Once Hebrew becomes a foreign or ancient tongue to the Jew, he ceases to experience any intimacy with Jewish life... the first practical step in any effort to live Judaism as a civilization should be to learn Hebrew. It should be included among the languages that Jewish children are taught in the high schools and colleges, and it should be given the same academic credit as Latin and Greek."

Learning Hebrew gives direct access to the Bible, to more than 3000 years’ worth of cultural activity and even a better understanding of one’s own language. It enables one to appreciate the biblical heritage in modern literature, film, song, art, rhetoric and politics. One even gains a broader understanding of the moral, ethical, religious and legal basis of what we know today as western civilization. Last but not least, Hebrew is the language of modern Israel and an essential key to understanding and appreciating its society and culture. At some point in the 21st century it will not be long till the majority of the world’s Jews are Hebrew-speaking Israelis. For diaspora Jews Hebrew remains an important part of their religious tradition, but increasingly it is serving as a window to Israel and a key to one’s own cultural heritage.