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Book Review: The Story of Hebrew
(Wall Street Journal) Benjamin Balint - When I took some American visitors to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, my guests were struck not so much by the parchments themselves as by the group of Israeli fourth-graders reading aloud from texts that were two millennia old. In The Story of Hebrew, Lewis Glinert, a professor at Dartmouth College, aims to track the fate of the Hebrew language. The era of biblical Hebrew reaches as far back as the second millennium before the Christian era. Spoken Hebrew seems to have died around 200 CE, more than a century after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. But throughout the diaspora, Jews used written Hebrew, which would flourish as a medium of cultural continuity. In the 19th century, Eastern European cultural Zionists brought about a rebirth of Hebrew, an achievement, Glinert writes, "without precedent in linguistic and sociopolitical history." For pragmatists, resurrecting a bookish tongue that lacked words for tomato, theater, microscope or fun seemed either ridiculous or inconceivable. Even the father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, envisioned a Jewish state of German speakers. Yet the history-hallowed language returned to its native soil by the sheer will of pioneers like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), the author of a 16-volume dictionary of Hebrew usage.