To avoid any doubt, the adjective contained in the phrase “world Hebrew” is not intended as a translation of “global,” “cosmopolitan” or “international,” but rather is taken from the ancient Hebrew concept “world” (‘olam), which has a double-meaning – referring to both space and time – as demonstrated, for instance, in one of the names for the Jewish people, “people of the world” (‘am ‘olam). In the introduction to the Hebrew version of the book World History of the Jewish People, known in Hebrew as Chronicles of a World People, ^{7 7} Simon Dubnow (1860-1940), Rawidowicz’s admired teacher, writes that ‘am ‘olam is a people

“whose home is the entire world. This is the literal meaning, which fits the reality of the Jewish people in all lands […]; yet there is another interpretive possibility: the Jewish people is called ‘am ‘olam in the sense of eternity, since this people is unusually wide-reaching not just in space but also in time, in its existence on the stage of history from antiquity until the present day.” ^{8 8}

Just as the Jewish people is a people of the world (and of eternity), so too Hebrew is an eternal world tongue. Insofar as its “worldness” (‘olamiut) is not new, ^{10 10} the question arises as to why the need emerged in the modern era to emphasize this inherent trait. The affirmation of world Hebrew became necessary precisely because this trait was negated and denied, initially in the temporal sense, and later also in the spatial sense. The negation of the eternity of Hebrew, which preceded (and in a significant sense even laid the groundwork for) the negation of its spatial dimension (i.e. the negation of the diaspora), became manifest in the myth of the death of Hebrew. ^{11 11}

Elad Lapidot’s article in this journal opens with Aristotle, who defined humans as living beings with language; ^{15 15} roughly two thousand years later, Italian humanists turned Aristotle’s definition on its head and described the languages of humans as living beings. The school of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) and Benedetto Varchi (1502-1565), refined the organic metaphor, which attributed life, on the one hand, to vernacular languages, and, death, on the other hand, to classical written languages. ^{16 16} “At the time when the title of dead languages was conferred on Latin and Greek,” wrote the sociolinguist Max Weinreich (1894-1969), “Hebrew too was stamped as dead, and the Maskilim introduced this evaluation into the Jewish milieu.” ^{17 17} In time, however, the figurative character of the metaphor was forgotten, and the death of Hebrew came to be understood by many, even today, as a historical fact.

Indeed, the death of Hebrew thesis translates into the negation of its worldness, since a language that is capable of dying cannot be an eternal language. Yet from the negation came forth an affirmation: the thinkers who opposed the description of Hebrew as a dead language were the first to extoll its worldness, in terms of both time and space, in terms of both time and space, and established the theoretical foundation for what is conceptualized here as “world Hebrew.” An early example of the affirmation of Hebrew’s “world character” appears in Well of Judgement (Eyn mishpat, 1867), by Sholem Yankev Abramovitch (1836-1917), known as Mendele Moykher-Sforim:

“It is true that the sacred tongue is not a spoken language, yet it is not dead like the languages of other ancient peoples. When the Chaldean language ceased to be spoken, for instance, the Chaldeans ceased to exist; they assimilated among the nations and learned their customs and laws. Their language is the meager legacy of a nation that had become extinct and removed from the realm of the living. But the Jewish people lives on; it has not splintered and withered: though it is scattered and dispersed among the nations, its flavor will endure and its fragrance will not be diminished; though it has gone into exile, it hath not settled on its lees (Jeremiah 48:11). The Jewish people thrives because of its faith and because of the Torah of its God. While the gods of other peoples lie down in sorrow (Isaiah 50:11), and the Greek idols sleep on Olympus, the place of their slumber, behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep (Psalms 121:4)! [The Jewish people] has not lost its eternity. It lives on because of its Torah, the Torah of life, which grants the people a soul and spirit to all the dispersed people of Judah to be one nation on earth.” ^{19 19}

The claim that Hebrew was a dead language led Abramovitch repeatedly to assert the opposite argument. ^{22 22} For Abramovitch, the life of Hebrew is tied to the life of Israel. He did not reject the organic metaphor in relation to language, and he did not hesitate to declare the death of the Chaldean language, Aramaic. Yet his affirmation of the life (and the eternity) of Hebrew and of the Jewish people led him also to affirm the space within which they exist. In his assertion that Hebrew has not “settled on its lees” we find an affirmation of the diaspora avant la lettre, ^{23 23} that is, decades before the diaspora was completely and explicitly negated. Therefore, even if Abramovitch did not use the term “world” (‘olam), his words invoke the merging of time (“it has not lost its eternity”) and space (“all the dispersed people of Judah” in the sense of “one nation on earth,” i.e. throughout the world) that brings us closer to the concept of “world Hebrew.”

The negation of Hebrew’s world character was expressed not only in the claim of its death but also in the declaration of its revival in recent generations. At this stage, the simple organic metaphor of life and death was transformed into a new and more sophisticated metaphor: the resurrection of the dead – a kind of realization of Ezekiel’s prophecy, the ascent of the Messiah from his grave, or even an act of sorcery. Although this wondrous and unnatural metaphor does not align with common sense, ^{26 26} here too figurative language seems to have been forgotten to such a degree that the resurrection of “Modern Hebrew” came to be accepted by many as an unproblematic idea, a known fact, as it were. ^{27 27}

The myth of the revival of Hebrew relies on the premise that Hebrew was a dead language, and thus on the negation of its worldness, its eternity. In this case, too, the negative intellectual reaction contributed to the theoretical refinement of the concept of “world Hebrew,” which became more and more necessary. In his essay “Neuhebräisch?” (New Hebrew?) of 1925, Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) renounced the separation of “Modern Hebrew” from the Hebrew that preceded it, as well as the distinction between “Hebrew” and “the sacred tongue” (lashon-hakodesh). ^{30 30} He rejected the association between sacredness and stagnation and emphasized the vitality of Hebrew from its beginnings and throughout the generations:

“The holiness of the Hebrew language never signified holiness in the original sense of “seclusion,” a meaning which has been overcome in classic Judaism. The holy language, the language of God, has always drawn strength for renewal from the spoken language, from the spoken languages of man; and this was so not only in the times of Moses and Isaiah. In other words, holy though it was, Hebrew never stiffened into something rigid and monumental; it always stayed alive.” ^{31 31}

Mira Balberg’s essay in this volume sheds light on the expressions that Rosenzweig employs: “the holy language” (die heilige Sprache) and “the language of God” (die Sprache Gottes). ^{34 34} In a brilliant philosophical move, Roseznweig invokes precisely the sacredness of Hebrew in order to suggest a non-dichotomous model of fruitful interaction between writing and speech, while rejecting the humanistic paradigm that distinguishes between a living spoken language and a dead written language. Rosenzweig insisted, it is worth noting, that forces of renewal flow into the sacred tongue not just from one spoken language (Hebrew) but from many “spoken languages.” He elaborates:

“…the spoken Hebrew of time immemorial, the common Aramaic of the Persian era, the Greek of the times of the Diadochi, then – stronger and more enduring than all – the Aramaic of the Palestinian and Babylonian academies, and, simultaneously, the language of the armies and law courts of Rome and that of the rulers and subjects of the new Persian empire, the Arabic of the physicians and philosophers of Islam, and the languages of Europe, developing their own structures in the shadow of the widespread tree of the Latin of the universal church. By the fabric of language so wrought, the Holy of Holies of this sacerdotal people is both veiled from and indicated to the eyes of the peoples of the world.” ^{35 35}

According to Rosenzweig, the various linguistic apogees of Hebrew creativity in different times and places join together to form one unified language:

“The Hebrew of the Torah and of the Book of Esther, the majesty of the great central prayers, the exquisite proportions of the Mishnah, the baroque of Kalir, the classicism of the great Spanish authors, the pious sobriety of Maimonides, Rashi’s serene yet impassioned instruction, the absence of linguistic scruples of the Tibonides, the crudeness of the Shulhan Arukh, the historicism of the Haskalah in the historical nineteenth century – all this is Hebrew.” ^{39 39}

Up until this point, Rosenzweig’s way of dealing with the myth of the death of Hebrew resembles that of Abramovitch. Like Abramovitch, Roseznweig emphasized the “vitality” of the sacred language rather than reject the organic metaphor altogether. Moreover, his description of Hebrew as a living language that is renewed consistently, ^{40 40} nourished by the languages that surround it and by its earlier layers, led him to assert: “What differentiates this vitality from that of a profane living language is that nothing adopted [by Hebrew] can ever be discarded; the language becomes richer and richer.” ^{41 41}

Indeed, Rosenzweig’s adoption of the life metaphor in relation to language does not emerge from an attempt to prove that the sacred tongue resembles other languages. On the contrary, for Rosenzweig, if the organic metaphor is applicable in any way to the sacred tongue, this is because the sacred tongue is more alive than any other language. Ultimately, however, the organic metaphor proves unviable in relation to the unique sacred tongue and is therefore replaced by a different, more suitable metaphor to the “eternal language” (die ewige Sprache):

“It does not proceed in a sequence of deaths and resurrections, the only expedient whereby everything that lives on earth can prolong its span beyond what nature has allotted. It endures because it cannot, will not, and may not, die. Nothing that has become an integral part of it is every discarded. Its growth is not that of an organism but of a treasure….” ^{43 43}

According to Rosenzweig, the portrayal of Hebrew as a treasure (in the original: Hort and Schatz) represents a more suitable metaphor for Hebrew. It is preferable to the organic metaphor, since Hebrew never ceased to accrue new layers of language in different time periods and places, layers that never fade and whither but rather remain within the language eternally. For Rosenzweig, even the language known as “Modern Hebrew” and the language spoken in the new yishuv are only part of this world language (understood in terms of both time and space):

“The point is that one cannot simply speak Hebrew as one would like to; one must speak it as it is. And it is tied up with the past. It does have obligations to the rest of the world [weltverpflichtet], even when spoken by the youngest child in the most recently founded settlement.” ^{45 45} דוד נתן מאיירס, „ראבידוביץ’ בברלין“, כאן, עמ’ 49–52.

Diasporic Hebrew

The term “diaspora” refers to the dispersal of groups of people, in the sense of sowing and germinating (the Greek word diaspora stems from the verb speirein, which means “to sow”). The recurrence of this word in the Septuagint (but never as a translation of “exile” [galut or golah]) ^{51 51} שלום יעקב אברמוביץ’, עין משפט (ז’יטומיר : א. ש. שאדאוו, 1867), עמ’ 4 (ההדגשה במקור). היבטים נוספים בנושא מטפורת החיים והמוות ביחס לעברית אצל אברמוביץ’ זוכים לסקירה בהרצאתו של יער חבר שעתידה להתפרסם במאסף הבא (ראו הערה 9 לעיל). is responsible for the association of this ancient Greek term with the Jewish experience in particular. However, since the 1970s the term has been expanded and used outside of the Jewish context in reference to an increasing number of groups that experience dispersion not only in different places but also in different senses of the term – a kind of diaspora of the concept itself. ^{52 52} ראו שם, עמ’ 5 ו־23. עבור אברמוביץ’ המשכיל, שאלת החיים והמוות של השפה חשובה, בסופו של דבר, פחות מאשר עובדת שימושיותה בחינוך : „תחיה לה גם מתה, אנו אין לנו כעת עסק בזה ; אנחנו יודעים רק זאת, כי היא אמצעי טוב ונאמן, להשכיל על ידה בני ישראל“ (שם, עמ’ 26). At the turn of the twenty-first century, diaspora theorists began to propose alternatives to the center/periphery model and sought to emphasize the positive, productive and radical aspects of the term “diaspora” in general and of individual diasporas in particular. The theoretical elaborations of the concept reached a new apex in the work of Daniel Boyarin, whose lectures in Berlin in 2012 and 2013 had a profound impact on this diasporic endeavor. ^{53 53} ראו, למשל, שמעון דובנאָוו, „‘חיוב הגלות’ (וועגן ‘שלילת הגלות’ פֿון אחד העם)“, איבערגעזעצט פֿון רוסיש דורך ח. ש. קאַזדאַן, אין בריוו וועגן אַלטן און נײַעם ייִדנטום (מעקסיקע, ד. פ. : שלמה מענדעלסאָן פֿאָנד, 1959), זז’ 395–409. המאמר פורסם לראשונה במאי 1909 בכתב־העת הרוסי Еврейский Мир („העולם היהודי“). Diaspora “need not imply trauma, an original scene of forced dispersion, a longing for a homeland, or even the existence of a myth of one homeland,” writes Boyarin. ^{54 54} השוו לעמדתו של רון כוזר המובאת אצל לפידות, „הלשון המשובש“, עמ’ 60. Yet within the negative definition (of what diaspora need not necessarily be) a positive definition of diaspora emerges as

“a synchronic cultural situation applicable to people who participate in a doubled cultural (and frequently linguistic) location, in which they share a culture with the place in which they dwell but also with another group of people who live elsewhere, in which they have a local and a trans-local cultural identity and expression at the same time.” ^{55 55} נקודה זו נשענת על הרצאתו של יער חבר (ראו הערה 9 לעיל).

Boyarin refers here to groups of people, but if we apply his theory also to language we may conclude that, in all the different places in which it resides, Hebrew is nourished by the various cultures and languages with which it comes into contact (just as Rosenzweig argued in the quotation above). This diasporic cross-fertilization is particularly pronounced in places where Hebrew is a minority language. ^{62 62} רוזנצווייג, „עברית חדשה ?“, עמ’ 195. The poems and stories published in this journal attest to the manifest influence exerted upon Hebrew by majority cultures and languages in places like Warsaw, ^{63 63} שם, עמ’ 196. Paris, ^{64 64} רוזנצווייג, „עברית חדשה ?“, עמ’ 197. Los Angeles ^{65 65} גם המושג „גלות“, בין אם בהקשרו היהודי ובין אם לאו, רלוונטי, ואף שימושי במסגרת הדיון הנוכחי. ראו בעניין זה את הרצאתו של אדוארד ו’ סעיד, „גלות אינטלקטואלית : נוכרים ואנשי שוליים“, כאן, עמ’ 39–47. and New York. ^{66 66} Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora”, in Ethnic and Racial Studies 28.1 (2005), pp. 1–19. The local context has a decisive role in the Hebrew Berlin of today, where most of the articles and literary texts gathered here were written and edited. ^{67 67} הרצאותיו אלו שמשו יסוד לספרו : Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). At the same time, the aforementioned cities are connected to Berlin through a shared language and similar conditions of minority existence. The duality between the local presence and the trans-local presence of Hebrew, which this journal seeks to express, facilitates a minor, hybrid, heterogeneous Hebrew: a diasporic Hebrew.

In the Tents of Yiddish

Another component of Boyarin’s diaspora theory is cultural partnership (specifically in the joint custody of the text). ^{70 70} קיום כמיעוט אכן אינו תנאי מחייב עבור דיאספורה, כפי שרומז בויארין (Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland, p. 152, n. 66), אך עמדה מיעוטית (שאינה טראומטית בהכרח) יכולה דווקא להיות שימושית עבור דיאספורה. ראו „מחווה למשתמטי מלחמת העולם הראשונה בספרות העברית“, כאן, עמ’ 172. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), partnership was also one of the central concepts in the teaching of Simon Rawidowicz, the greatest theorist of the Hebrew diaspora in the twentieth century. ^{71 71} בוריס גרוס, „קופרניקוס“, כאן, עמ’ 123–127. The application of Boyarin’s diaspora theory to Hebrew allows us to acknowledge not only linguistic partnerships among groups dispersed in different places but also the possibility of a diaspora between languages themselves. As Boyarin stresses, the duality of diaspora can often be expressed through a doubled linguistic location.

For this reason, the present Hebrew enterprise, nourished by its local context in Ashkenaz, ^{73 73} צבי בן־דור בנית, „תפוח אדמה עם סוֹס“, כאן, עמ’ 107–113. views itself as a link in the chain of historical partnership between Hebrew and Yiddish. Each of these languages has had and remains in contact with many partner-languages, but the close relationship between the two languages here in Ashkenaz for roughly one thousand years makes them sister languages. Among the numerous historical, literary, linguistic and political contexts that they share, what stands out in particular is their shared historical destiny over the last two hundred years, during which both languages were dispersed across a vast geographical space. These two minority languages, whose place is the world, flourished and produced literatures so intimately intertwined that the literary critic Bal-Makhshoves (the penname of Isidor Yisroel Eliashev, 1873-1924) declared them “two languages – one literature.” ^{74 74} סמי שלום שטרית, „שמש בבקבוק פלסטיק“, כאן, עמ’ 145.

The shared destiny of Hebrew and Yiddish in the modern era can also be observed in the fact that both blossomed in the shadow of their denial. The very same early maskilim who declared the death of Hebrew also rejected Yiddish as “a miserable jargon” not worthy of being called a “language.” ^{77 77} מאיירס, „ראבידוביץ’ בברלין“, כאן, עמ’ 51. This tendency intensified in the following generations, since the maskilic movement that tried to “revitalize” Hebrew relied ideologically on a dual linguistic negation, as Lewis Glinert has observed:

“And just as the desire to revitalize Hebrew has ubiquitously been bound up with the desire to be rid of Yiddish, so too it has sought to reject the “old-style” Hebrew of Ashkenaz, its sound and words – and the knowledge of it.” ^{78 78} בעל־מחשבות (ד״ר עליאַשעוו), „צוויי שפּראַכן — איין איינציקע ליטעראַטור“, אין געקליבענע שריפֿטן, צווייטער באַנד (וואַרשע : „ביכער“, 1929), זז’ 57–64.

The shared destiny of Hebrew and Yiddish reached its apex during the years of destruction (khurbn) ^{81 81} לביקורת על הלוחמנות ההבראיסטית כלפי היידיש כפגיעה־עצמית, ראו בער באָראָכאָוו, „העברעיסמוס מיליטאַנס“ [1913], אין שפּראַך־פֿאָרשונג און ליטעראַטור־געשיכטע (תל־אביב : י. ל. פּרץ־פֿאַרלאַג, 1966), זז’ 365–367. לקשר שבין תכונתה הדיאספורית של העברית ובין עמדות של הימנעות ממלחמה, ראו „מחווה למשתמטי מלחמת העולם הראשונה בספרות העברית“, כאן, עמ’ 172. of the twentieth century, when Nazi Germany and its allies began to cut off the branches and pull up the roots of both languages throughout Europe. The appearance of Mikan ve’eylakh here, in Berlin and Paris, attests to the fact that these roots will not, or cannot, be torn assunder. The decision to publish it under a Yiddish roof is intended to emphasize the choice of a partnership between these two languages, rather than the relation of rivalry and enmity that has harmed both languages in the past. Like the pioneering Yiddish journal Kol mevaser (1862), published as a supplement to the Hebrew journal Hamelits, it is no coincidence that the Hebrew journal Mikan Ve’eylakh found its place with a Yiddish publisher: the Medem Library in Paris (Parizer-yidish-tsenter – Medem-biblyotek). ^{82 82} גילוי נאות : עורכו של מאסף זה הוא מנהלו של מרכז היידיש בפריז — ספריית־מֶדֶם. במקרה זה, החיפוש אחר עברית דיאספורית באשכנז הוא שהוביל אל היידיש, ולא ההיפך.