THE HEBRAIST MOMENT
IN AMERICAN JEWISH
CULTURE AND WHAT IT
HAS TO SAY TO US TODAY
by ALAN MINTZ
T he existence of an ambitious Hebrew literary culture on these shores is one of the best kept secrets of American Jewry. We know something of the Yiddish culture of the “World of our Fathers,” but when it comes to Hebrew, our focus has been on the miraculous rebirth of the language in Israel. This is indeed a miracle that deserves our admiration, but in thinking about modern Hebrew as a language owned by its new-old native land, we do a disservice to our own cultural memory as American Jews. Modern Hebrew had its own brilliant moment here before the Jewish state was established. If we hold some hope for Hebrew as a critical cultural resource for building the future of American Jewry, then it is surely important that we become aware of the existence of the literary and educational creativity that preceded our efforts and come to know its main achievements and personalities.
I am speaking of the Tarbut Ivrit movement, in both its educational and literary dimensions, that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. The movement was fueled by the idealism of young people who arrived in America before World War I and were influenced by Ahad Ha’am’s Hebrew-based cultural nationalism. If the territorial accomplishments of Zionism in those years were only fledgling and tentative, the accomplishments of the new Hebrew literature had already long been assured and burgeoning. In an age of dwindling religious belief and practice, Hebrew was put forward as a reenergizing axis of national renewal which, unlike territory, had the advantage of being portable and therefore suitable for becoming in America the backbone of a new cultural elite. These young Hebraists captured Jewish education and prevented it from becoming a Sunday-school religious movement, creating instead the modern Talmud Torah — and later the Hebrew colleges — with an emphasis on Hebrew, holidays, Torah, Palestine, and “customs and ceremonies.”
The Hebraists also set about to create a serious Hebrew literature that would engage some of the large themes of American history and culture. They wrote for two audiences, and in the case of both they experienced harsh disappointments. The Hebraists hoped to educate a home-grown elite of young Americans who, though living their lives in English, would possess a deep Hebrew cultural literacy. But the embrace of American culture proved too consuming and the writings of their Hebraist teachers too difficult and remote. It was in Palestine that an audience for Hebrew literature was exploding; and it was to this center that the American Hebraists hope to make a vital contribution from their populous yet remote post in the Diaspora. Yet in the eyes of the dynamic literary modernism in Tel Aviv, the American Hebrew writers came across as too romantic and old fashioned, and the tales they told of bygone times in America irrelevant to the bloody national struggles unfolding in the Yishuv and Europe.
Precisely because these writers persevered in the face of these discouragements and produced a rich harvest of American Hebrew literature, their work deserves our attention and recognition. The poetic component of this literature has been the subject of my academic research over the past years and will be publish by Stanford University Press this fall under the title Sanctuary in the Wilderness: A Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry. It will join recently published volumes by Stephen Katz (Red, Black and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature, University of Texas Press, 2010) and Michael Weingrad (American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish National Identity in the United States, Syracuse University Press, 2010), and it is much to be hoped that through these efforts American Jews will get a glimpse into the Hebraist moment in their communal history.
Beyond their historical contribution, these studies have relevance for urgent issues both inside the academy and beyond. The most palpable presence of Hebrew in American universities is as a subject of foreign language instruction. As the tongue of contemporary Israel, Hebrew is certainly a foreign language; yet for the many American Jewish students who study Hebrew as a heritage language, it is much more. It is now, happily, an established tenet of foreign-language instructional theory that language and culture cannot be disentangled from one another. The ramifications for Hebrew have yet to be thoroughly explored. Hebrew is the language of Israel today; Hebrew is the language of historical Jewish civilization; and Hebrew is also a language of intense creativity on these shores over the last century. It would therefore seem unnatural and even ludicrous that American students should be studying Hebrew in America without some awareness of all that was written here in that language.
There is a vitally critical role for Hebrew in America, even if it lies in the domain not of creative literature but of serious cultural literacy. Unfortunately, at the moment the very notion of what it means to know Hebrew is a source of great confusion in American Jewish life. With the establishment of Israel and the reported successes of the ulpan method in the middle of the previous century, the romance of oral fluency, the capacity freely to converse in Hebrew in a contemporary idiom, took hold in the American Jewish imagination. Thus the ability to speak Hebrew became the benchmark of knowing Hebrew. Making speech the only criterion for success, I would argue, has had a profoundly harmful effect. This is not because speaking Hebrew is unimportant — to the contrary! — but because speech is the specific language competence least likely to be realized in America. The expectation of oral proficiency has created a standard that, almost by definition, cannot be achieved. This onedimensional definition of Hebrew achievement has condemned many serious American Jews to a sense of frustration and pessimism about learning the language. There must be a general rethinking of the kind of Hebrew knowledge that is achievable and meaningful in America. This does not necessarily mean a “dumbing down” of expectations, and the current news is not all bad. Average day school graduates, for example, cannot speak Hebrew with much fluency and often have a negative self-perception in that area for this reason; yet because they have spent many years reading Hebrew texts, the passive store of knowledge they have acquired can be activated and built upon in an intensive Hebrew-speaking environment in Israel. It is much more difficult to move in the other direction — that is, from spoken Hebrew to an understanding of the sources of Judaism in Hebrew. I make this point not out of partisan sentiment but to argue that when it comes to Hebrew in America, there are more assets and infrastructure than we imagine. In the case of Jewish leaders who have not had the benefit of these intensive years of schooling, it would make sense to approach Hebrew not through its formal grammar but through the concepts and values embodied in its three-letter roots. Computer-aided instruction has a vast potential for Hebrew learners of all types that has not yet been explored. In the end, the Hebraists may have been wrong about Hebrew being the measure of all things — this was the monomania that contributed to their eclipse — but they were surely correct in seeing Hebrew as the binding DNA of Jewish civilization. They understood the unique role of Hebrew as a bridge that spans many cleavages: between classical Judaism and the present, between religious and secular Jews, and between Israel and the Diaspora. They further understood that any Jewish society that takes place largely in translation runs the risk of floating free of its tether to Jewish authenticity. It is much to be hoped that a revived interest in Hebrew in America will provide that integrity. ■
Alan Mintz is the Chana Kekst Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he directs the Ivriyon, a summer Hebrew immersion program for day school teachers, and Shoharim: Hebrew Fellows Program for JTS students.
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