DEIFYING Zionism and DEFYING Religion: DEFINING Ideological Secularization of HEBREW Terms within the ISRAELI Language

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• Assoc Prof Ghil'ad Zuckermann, The University of Queensland, Australia
• Thursday 30 October 2008, 17:00-18:00
• Room 9, Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Sidgwick Avenue.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Geoffrey Khan.

ALL WELCOME

ABSTRACT

“The greatest virtue of a new word is that it is not new.” (Yechiel Michal Pínes, 1893)

versus

“It is absolutely impossible to empty out words filled to bursting, unless one does so at the expense of language itself.” (Gershom Scholem, 26 December 1926)

One of the problems facing those attempting to revive Hebrew as the national language of the emerging State of Israel was that of Hebrew lexical voids. The ‘revivalists’ attempted to use mainly internal sources of lexical enrichment but were faced with a paucity of roots. They changed the meanings of obsolete Hebrew terms to fit the modern world. This infusion often entailed the secularization of religious terms. This lecture will explore the phenomenon of semantic secularization, as in the politically-neutral process visible in English cell ‘monk’s living place’ > ‘autonomous self-replicating unit from which tissues of the body are formed’. The main focus, however, is on secularizations involving ideological ‘lexical engineering’, as often exemplified by – either conscious or subconscious, either top-down or bottom-up – manipulative, subversive processes of extreme semantic shifting, pejoration, amelioration, trivialization, allusion and echoing.

An example of defying religion is blorít. Mishnaic Hebrew [b’lorit] is ‘Mohawk, an upright strip of hair that runs across the crown of the head from the forehead to the nape of the neck’, characteristic of the abominable pagan and not to be touched by the Jewish barber. But defying religious values, secular Socialist Zionists use blorít with the meaning ‘forelock, hair above the forehead’, which becomes one of the defining characteristics of the Sabra (‘prickly pear’, a nickname for native Israelis, allegedly thorny on the outside and sweet inside). Is the ‘new Jew’ ultimately a pagan?

This negation of religion fascinatingly adds to the phenomenon of negation of the Diaspora, exemplified in the blorít itself by Zionists expecting the Sabra to have dishevelled hair, as opposed to the orderly diasporic Jew, who was considered by Zionists to be weak and persecuted.

An example of the complementary phenomenon, deifying Zionism, is mishkán. Biblical Hebrew [mishkån] means ‘Tabernacle of the Congregation’ (where Moses kept the Ark in the wilderness), ‘inner sanctum’ (known as [‘ohel mo`ed]). Israeli mishkán aknéset, however, refers to ‘the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) building’. Translating mishkán haknéset as ‘The Knesset Building’ (as in the official Knesset website) is lacking. The word mishkán is loaded with holiness and evokes sanctity, as if MKs (Members of Knesset, i.e. MPs) were at the very least angels or seraphs.

In line with the prediction made by the Kabbalah-scholar Gershom Scholem in a letter to Franz Rosenzweig (Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache, 1926), some ultra-orthodox Jews have tried to launch a ‘lexical vendetta’: using secularized terms like ‘dormant agents’, as a shortcut to religious concepts, thus trying to convince secular Jews to go back to their religious roots.

The study of Israeli cultural linguistics and socio-philology casts light on the dynamics between language, religion and identity in a land where fierce military battles with external enemies are accompanied by internal Kulturkämpfe.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ghil’ad ZUCKERMANN , D.Phil. (Oxon.), M.A. (Tel Aviv) (summa cum laude), is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in Linguistics at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He has been Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has taught in Israel, Singapore, England and USA , and has held research posts in Bellagio (Italy), Austin (Texas), Melbourne and Tokyo. His publications – in English, Israeli, Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese – include the books Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli, a Beautiful Language, Am Oved, 2008). He is currently working on two further books: (1) Language Genesis and Multiple Causation, and (2) Language, Religion and Identity. His website is http://www.zuckermann.org/

This talk is part of the CILR Monday Mailing: talks in language and linguistics series.

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