The Mother Tongue

by Eliezer Segal

In 1845, the eminent scholar Abraham Geiger published a pioneering grammar of the Hebrew of the Mishnah. His analysis supported his claim that the language in which that central rabbinic text was composed was not a spoken dialect, but rather an artificial contrivance based mostly on the biblical language, combined with a large dose of Aramaic. Its character was thus analogous to the role of Latin in medieval Christendom. 

Geiger’s theory achieved influence among many scholars, but it was eventually disproven decisively. Not only were there internal features of Mishnaic Hebrew (as recorded in trustworthy manuscripts) that could not be ascribed to either the Bible or Aramaic, but documents that came to light subsequently—such as the Dead Sea scrolls and the Bar Kokhba letters—were composed in Hebrew dialects that resembled that of the rabbinic texts. There is now no doubt that Hebrew was a living vehicle of communication during the early years of the Common Era. 

To be precise: During the second Jewish commonwealth, the residents of the southern part of Israel, Judea, communicated in both Hebrew and Aramaic, while the northern Galileans spoke only Aramaic. The destruction, killing, enslavement and expropriation perpetrated by the Romans in their suppression of Jewish uprisings led to a mass migration northward. As a result, by the early second century, Hebrew was losing its status as a dominant vernacular. 

According to a story that is brought in several variations by the Talmuds, a group of students were puzzled by some unusual Hebrew words that appear in the Bible and rabbinic works. In order to ascertain their meanings they came to the regal home of the patriarch Rabbi Judah. They were met there by a feisty maidservant who, in ordering them about, made use of those obscure words in her conversation.

One of the perplexing words was “serugin” meaning “out of sequence.” The students learned its meaning when the maidservant scolded them for entering the building in a disorganized jumble instead of in an orderly double-file. 

Another obscure word was “halaglog,” referring to the herb purslane. The maidservant revealed its meaning when one of the students dropped some (which they referred to using an Aramaic word), whereas she designated them by the archaic Hebrew term. She also knew to sweep up the mess with a broom, to which she referred by means of an arcane term from biblical Hebrew.

Some scholars understand that in choosing a maidservant as the linguistic authority in these anecdotes, the authors intended to show that Rabbi Judah’s court was so learned that even a menial domestic worker could be knowledgeable about the intricacies of the sacred tongue. However, most historians seem to read the evidence in a different way—as evidence that after transferring to Galilee where most students adopted the local Aramaic culture, only an aged family retainer held fast to the old Judean customs, and was thereby able to preserve the remnants of the traditional Hebrew vernacular.

It would appear that spoken Hebrew was still alive, albeit tenuously, in the tenth century, during the lifetime of Rav Saadiah Gaon who was instrumental in formulating a synthesis between Jewish tradition and the prevalent Arab Muslim civilization. In their determination to create a pure, authentic standard of literary Arabic, urbane scholars would journey from Baghdad to visit bedouin tribes in the Arabian desert in the hope of hearing their sacred tongue in its rarified, unadulterated form as it issued from the lips of native speakers. 

Evidently, Saadiah was attempting a similar project for Hebrew. He recognized Tiberias in the Galilee, where he had resided before moving to Babylonia, as the preeminent centre of Hebrew language in his generation, as a locality where Hebrew (mixed with Aramaic) was used not only by scholars, but also served as the vernacular for Jewish men, women and children in their everyday interactions at home and in the marketplace.

In connection with a certain technical grammatical question of how a vowel at the end of one word can affect the pronunciation of the first consonant in the next, Saadiah reported: “This is true not only in the Bible, but also in all speech and conversation, even among women.” To illustrate this grammatical rule, he cited an anecdote about a woman who approached her child’s teacher and said to him: ‘O teacher, release my son!’ using the soft (fricative) form of the consonant, rather than the hard (plosive) form. On another occasion, she called her son “Gad Gad” using the hard form of his initial letter, and the boy did not respond until she called him “Ya Jad” using the soft form, because this time she had inserted the word “ya” before the name. 

Although some eight centuries separate the stories about Rabbi Judah’s maidservant and the young student’s mother in Tiberias, they are in fundamental agreement about the fact that Jewish women were speaking proper Hebrew in their homeland. 

In the modern era the role of women in the transmission of Hebrew became crucial again with the revival of the language under the aegis of the Zionist movement. Beginning with the establishment of the first Hebrew kindergarten in Palestine, in Rishon Lezion, institutions for early childhood education proliferated, often in the face of opposition from traditionalists and competition for scarce financial resources. Almost all the teachers were young women chosen for their competence in the Hebrew language. 

But of course, a spoken language is not acquired only in the classroom. Ita Yellin, a prominent activist in the fields of childhood education and Hebrew language instruction at the beginning of the twentieth century, observed how “the Hebrew mother had no choice but to learn the language from her children who were educated in our language, and once they returned home from the kindergarten, they chattered with their parents and sang their songs in Hebrew.”

Those mothers and teachers were continuing a long and honoured tradition of perpetuating the language that is so vital to the Jewish national soul.

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