Liora Halperin, Department
of History, UCLA
Babel in Zion: The Politics of Language
Diversity in Jewish Palestine, 1920-1948
My project, a
cultural history of language diversity in the Yishuv, considers
collective discourses about languages other than Hebrew (including
Arabic, English, Yiddish, and German) during the three decades before
the creation of the State of Israel. I attempt to understand a society’s
often conflicted efforts to construct a Hebrew-only society while
simultaneously speaking, learning, and utilizing the languages of the
Jewish diaspora, Europe, and the Arab world.
The secularizing
thrust of the Hebrew Revival, my research shows, led to an important
paradox: On the one hand, it meant the redefinition of Hebrew’s purview
as mundane and universal rather than holy and delimited (as had been the
case historically). The expansion of Hebrew entailed, indeed required,
the displacement of other languages as Hebrew expanded into the realms
of family life, government, administration, popular culture, and
commerce. At the same time, secularization meant not the end of piety
but the transfer of the rhetoric of sacredness to the realm of secular
national ritual, liturgy, and education. In practice, this association
between Hebrew and the emergent civil religion meant that certain
spaces, marked as profane, remained available for divergent language
practices. Through a study of institutional records, opinion pieces,
memoirs, and ephemera, I seek to understand both the real and the
perceived limits of Hebrew and Hebrew culture.
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