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Babel in Zion
Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920â"1948
By Liora R. Halperin Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Yale University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21020-0
CHAPTER 1
LANGUAGES OF LEISURE IN THE HOME, THE COFFEE HOUSE, AND THE CINEMA
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There is no urban culture without coffeehouses, without idlers. —A. S. Lirik (Aaron Levi Riklis)
Labor, exertion, and sacrifice stood at the center of the Zionist movement's self-conception, and linguistic sacrifice in particular proved a potent symbol of nationalist commitments. To cast off the detritus of the Diaspora, according to mainstream ideology, Zionists were to engage in pioneering (halutziyut), a task defined both by cultivating the land and by building institutions to support the national project. The ideal of the pioneer was developed in the period of the Third Aliyah (wave of Zionist immigration to Palestine) in the years between 1919 and 1923 and was also applied retroactively to members of the Second Aliyah, who came between 1904 and 1914. Immigrants of these two waves of immigration, mainly from the Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, often deliberately chose Palestine over America or internal-migration options and tended to be particularly ideologically committed.
The volitional quality of pioneering extended to the realm of language as well. Hebrew, both the chosen national language and a language that in practice required a degree of self-sacrifice, symbolized the laborious process of building a nation. Using one's mother tongue, in contrast, appeared to embody a form of laziness. In a tract from 1921, Aharon Moshe Wizansky, a Zionist activist in Zurich who would soon after move to Palestine and teach at the elite Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv, argued against the claim, then widespread in Europe, that Yiddish should be supported over Hebrew as a national language because it was less burdensome. Easiness and comfort were not the goals, insisted Wizansky: "Not every unloading [of a burden] is liberation, just as not every loading [of a burden] is subjugation." Members of the two major waves of immigration before World War II, known as the Fourth and Fifth Aliyot, were frequently cited as lazy for their continuing use of mother tongues (mainly Yiddish, Polish, or German). Such rhetoric had existed earlier, too. An article from 1936 spoke of the "inertia of adhering to Yiddish," saying that new immigrants were not taking up "the heavy burden of national values" but instead "the lighter rubbish." These words capture a common pro-Hebrew perspective about the nature of cultural revival: relaxation—particularly relaxation that involved the casting off of hard-to-enact nationalist conventions—was not a form of freedom but a dangerous retreat into chaos. These poles of meaning—structure versus laziness, construction versus chaos—defined the sphere of leisure in the Yishuv, and became particularly apparent when leisure-time practices visibly (or audibly) defied a central tenet of Zionist material and cultural construction: that it be always conducted in Hebrew. Leisure was thus both a central realm for the use of languages other than Hebrew and a primary site of contest over the purview of Hebrew.
The three sites of leisure-time language use considered in this chapter demonstrate a fundamental tension surrounding the presumption that leisure was to take place in Hebrew, a language that required exertion, rather than in languages that provided spaces away from the strictures and rhetoric of the Zionist movement. The home was the perceived bastion of the mother tongue and the enervating domestic influences that would, in official rhetoric, be supplanted through education and national culture. The coffeehouse marked the importation of European street culture and the appearance of private conversation in a semipublic space. Finally, the cinema housed the imported cultural products of western Europe and the United States. In all cases, the use or consumption of languages other than Hebrew was attractive because it was natural, but by re-creating or evoking leisure-time patterns that had existed outside the Yishuv, these practices cast into question the capability of Hebrew to be hegemonic.
This chapter, like the one that follows, focuses in large part on Tel Aviv as an epicenter of encounter between an officially Hebrew Yishuv and people, products, or pressures coming from outside its confines. Together, they present Tel Aviv, the "First Hebrew City," as a paradoxical space where ideological norms, including linguistic norms, were both enforced and systematically discarded. In the growing literature on Tel Aviv, the city has been regarded as an anomaly, a place shaped both by collectivism and by cosmopolitanism and ideological diversity: "the most national, but at the same time—paradoxical though it may sound—the most international city of its size in the world." But the features that defined Tel Aviv, its leisure, and its commerce, while overwhelmingly concentrated in and associated with this urban space, were not limited to it. The tensions visible in the cinemas, coffeehouses, and marketplaces of Tel Aviv did not dissipate at its municipal boundaries into a state of national purity in the rural realm. As Louis Wirth wrote in his famous tract on urbanism, urbanization denotes not only life within the city, but also the proliferation of urban modes of life that "are apparent among people, wherever they may be, who have come under the spell of influences which the city exerts." And indeed rural denizens, nearly all originating from the cities of Europe, also partook of Tel Aviv, its products, culture, and cultural forms, and encountered there, though in less intense form than in the countryside, the dynamics of linguistic and cultural encounter typical of the urban center.
Negotiating the Purview of Hebrew
The supposition that the exertion associated with Hebrew maintenance would suffuse both work and leisure—in other words, that leisure would express a pioneering ethos—rested on a radical reorientation of Hebrew's purview and a repositioning of its relationship within the traditional dichotomy of sacred and profane languages. Hebrew, the language of the sacred, was set apart, associated with spatially or temporally limited activities such as prayer and study. But in the Yishuv, the situation of Hebrew had theoretically been transformed. Refashioned as a vernacular, the language was tied not primarily to delimited ritual but to the ostensibly perennial work of building municipal, political, and educational institutions. The concept of labor, 'avodah, was resignified in the Zionist context to refer not only to one's occupation or physical effort but also to the collective, often metaphorical work of building a country, whether in agricultural fields and industrial factories or in cultural clubs and the home, and in both times of work and times of leisure. The word 'avodah, which was used in rabbinic discourse to refer to Temple worship, was used frequently to describe culture and literature, for example, in Hayim Nachman Bialik's mention of "the labor of literature" in his speech to the Twelfth Zionist Congress in 1921 or in the author Abraham Levinson's references to the "labor of [Hebrew] culture" at the Eighteenth Zionist Congress in 1933. Carnivals, sports, books, theater, and newspapers were all part of the Hebrew culture-building activities of the Yishuv. As Hebrew became, in the estimation of one scholar, "the language of entire lives: in theater and song, in literature and politics, in the sciences and in private reflections, in poetry and in signs on the street," and the "language that does all the labor [melakhah] demanded of it," as Nathan Alterman wrote, those tongues that had formerly functioned as profane vernaculars were nominally eliminated and deemed irrelevant. In practice, however, the sanctity and set-apart quality of Hebrew was less stripped away than transformed. That which was in danger of defilement now was not the divine but the nation, construed as sacred and therefore requiring constant maintenance and oversight by its caretakers, the members of the nation.
Hebrew between Sacred and Profane
In this new national orthodoxy, Hebrew was to be a perennial tongue extended to the realms of both work and leisure. In practice, however, the notion that leisure was to be construed as a time of Hebrew language use was not intuitively acceptable. The exceptions made for other language use during leisure time highlight both the constraints on Hebrew hegemony and the persistent effort to brand non-Hebrew mother tongues as foreign imports.
One temporal site particularly associated with the nonuse of Hebrew was the Sabbath, the primary day of leisure in the Yishuv. Ironically, in the traditional Jewish experience, the Sabbath was also linguistically marked, but in reverse. Hebrew, the quintessential sacred tongue, was associated with the special ritual requirements of the Sabbath, the day on which Jews were enjoined to desist from quotidian labor, known biblically as melakhah, hear the Torah read, and recite a mostly Hebrew liturgy. Noting this ritual place of Hebrew, some rabbis went further, recommending Hebrew speech on the Sabbath. The custom, apparently most widespread in early modern central Europe, was also practiced by some religious women in Ottoman Jerusalem. The work week, it went without saying, was the time for profane languages, whether local tongues or Jewish languages such as Ladino and Yiddish; the Sabbath, in contrast, would contain a flash of the sacred language amidst and against the profane.
The Sabbath continued to be marked as a day apart by many modern, Hebrew-speaking Jews, but now in a linguistically opposite way: it was in practice a day for languages other than Hebrew. A newspaper feature in the mid-1940s recounted the story of "a professor from among the German immigrants": "He learned Hebrew, lectures in this language, and speaks it every day of the week. But on the Sabbath he speaks German. His friends asked him why. He said, 'It says in our holy book, "Do not do any sort of labor [on the Sabbath]," and I strictly observe this commandment.'" The story is a clear adaptation of a better-known anecdote about the writer Hayim Nachman Bialik, who had died several years earlier, in 1934: "Once Bialik was caught in the act [be-kalkalato], speaking Yiddish on the Sabbath and they asked him 'How can it be?' He replied: 'Yiddish speaks itself but speaking Hebrew is labor [melakhah], and labor is forbidden on the Sabbath.'"
We would be incorrect to assume that anyone, Bialik included, made a rigid distinction between Sabbath and weekday language use; the absurd strictness of the distinction is part of what makes these anecdotes function as jokes. But a joke, based on rigid oppositions or absurd juxtapositions, functions as a mirror in which societies see themselves. Indeed, the Zionist Sabbath, the day of rest and leisure in the new national context, became a setting for negotiating the limits of Hebrew dominance, in this case among immigrants who knew a variety of other languages and enjoyed using or hearing them during their free time.
Bialik's friends respond to his linguistic deviance with a mix of condemnation and laughter—a double move of license and control. When the friends enter, they deem Bialik to be committing a transgression and act surprised. Bialik's response, however, elicits a form of empathetic laughter from the reading audience and, implicitly, from those who visited him—his transgression was familiar; moreover, it fit within the unwritten rules dictating the boundaries of language use in the Yishuv. Bialik had a particular role in the imagination of the Yishuv. As Miryam Segal points out, he was the emblematic Hebrew writer who never entirely learned Hebrew and who did not cease speaking other languages. This contradiction was familiar to many, who despite their interest in and commitment to Hebrew in theory, were not interested in using it exclusively. Speaking Yiddish (or German, in the professor's case) could be construed as both an unforgivable breach and an entirely unremarkable activity specifically characteristic of the Sabbath, the day of rest. This combination of shock and acquiescence, of damning scowls and knowing winks, is laced through the sources on language and leisure in the Yishuv.
The shock, on the one hand, was palpable. "The profane has overpowered the holy," wrote a proponent of Socialist Zionist Hebrew culture in 1936. "Newspapers, meetings, and official business [take place] in Hebrew but profane life [haye hulin] [takes place] in the language of inertia and routine." Zionist work, he implied, was regularly taking place in Hebrew; the real threat to the language was arising during times away from work, times marked by the traditional Jewish notion of "profaneness" and defined by inertia and laziness. Bialik himself criticized the distinction between "Hebrew, which is the language of holidays and demonstrations in the schools, and other languages, which are the languages of ordinary (profane) days and regular use."
Were these practices—whether Bialik's individual "relapse" into Yiddish or the general practice of using other languages outside school and ceremonies—basically acceptable or basically unacceptable? On the face of it and from an official perspective, these manifestations were clearly unacceptable and thus subject to policing. Leisure is a sphere in which social norms are enacted and national ideals performed, and in which elites can exert control over the masses by encouraging or requiring certain collective pursuits. Official interest in leisure derives precisely from its independent nature; leisure invites concern "because it ostensibly represents the area of activity in which people can most be themselves." Controls on leisure, ultimately, are designed to shape "the kind of people that citizens are supposed to be when they are being themselves." In the case of the Yishuv, many of these controls—incomplete by their nature—focused on language.
Policing the Boundaries of Language Usage
The interplay of license and control, central to scholars' descriptions of the paradox of modern leisure, was pervasive in Zionist authorities' dealings with language transgression. The contestation over Sabbath language practices captured in the Bialik joke resonated in a society negotiating the terms of Sabbath observance, which, along with Hebrew language, constituted the "Hebrew" quality of the Yishuv. Religious Jews were interested in seeing traveling, cooking, and the use of money, electricity, and music curtailed on the Sabbath. Community committees, in Haifa, for example, worked hard to prevent such desecrations. Secularly oriented members of the Yishuv, on the other hand, attached a different kind of importance to the Sabbath: they did not tend to observe traditional Sabbath restrictions, which they pejoratively associated with diasporic societies, but saw the Sabbath instead as time for secular nationalist activities. Bialik's transgression, then, was not a nationalist rejoinder to and reinterpretation of traditional structures, but a snub to new nationalist "laws" and cultural orthodoxies.
Zionists had not so much cast off the bonds of Sabbath restriction as recast them in secular-nationalist terms of Hebrew piety; those who disregarded these terms were impious in a national sense. The Labor Zionist leader Yitzhak Tabenkin felt that there was no place in the world where the Sabbath was as truly experienced as in Tel Aviv, the secular kibbutzim, and moshavot. Israel Kolatt suggests that Tabenkin was promoting "a new mode of Sabbath observance," one closely bound up with a new orthodoxy. Leisure in this new mode would be structured by—and would serve—the demands of a Hebrew nationalist project. The Sabbath, like other holidays, was reconstructed as a secular festival in which Zionist ideals could be performed through communal rituals that replicated a sense of separateness and transcendence traditionally associated with religious ritual. These activities, which were particularly prominent in Labor Zionist institutions, have led Anita Shapira to write: "Basically the Palestine labor movement was a religious movement." Schools created ceremonies for the Sabbath, usually performed on Fridays, some involving a ritual donation to the Jewish National Fund box and a "sermon" on the political issues of the day. Sabbath was also a time for organized cultural activities in Hebrew. In 1928, the American financier Samuel Simon Bloom funded the construction of Ohel Shem, a community center that Bialik hoped would provide cultural and educational programming on the Sabbath. Raphael Patai recalls lecture series on Sabbath mornings at the Bet Ha-'Am in Tel Aviv and the Edison Cinema in Jerusalem. Such rituals and undertakings gave expression to "festive time," a lifestyle that existed beyond profane time and bound the group together. Significantly, the glue that bound them was their Hebrew-language substrate: the Zionist Sabbath was a Hebrew Sabbath, not a Jewish Sabbath.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Babel in Zion by Liora R. Halperin. Copyright © 2015 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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