Rafael Frank left his friends all too soon. It was not vouchsafed him to see how the modern Hebrew type he had made with the spirit and hand of an artist and the knowledge and thoroughness of a researcher—Frank-Rühl Hebrew—has become a meaningful tool in the revival of the Hebrew language and culture in the ancient Jewish homeland, Palestine. But how he was able to foresee this development! That can be read in the second paragraph of the treatise that is the focal point of this book.
Today, the Palestine Mandate that the League of Nations gave to the British regime is recognized as what determines the political status of Palestine. As we know, the mandate lets it be formally known that the Jewish people have the legal right to a national home in Palestine. The rebuilding of Hebrew culture in Palestine is based on Article 22 of the Mandate that states verbatim: English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine. — That means the official recognition that the Hebrew language has in fact been fully brought back to life in Palestine. Nowadays, Hebrew is spoken in the streets of Tel Aviv, the newest developing big city of the Near East, in Jerusalem, in Haifa, in the many Jewish colonies that are presently found across the whole country. Because of an extensive Hebrew school system, the language is firmly rooted in the lives of the people. The Hebrew University and the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem and the Technicum in Haifa are seeing to it that the absolute highest scientific goals are reachable, using the Hebrew language. Operas and plays in Hebrew should also be mentioned in this connection, to say nothing of the Hebrew language press. Accordingly, the printing industry in Palestine has greatly expanded in recent years. Today, modern presses operate in the cities [of Palestine] and their products satisfy even a refined taste. Numerous reputable poets, writers and scholars have settled in Palestine and they send their work to local businesses for printing. So, it is easy to understand, that the influence of modern Palestine’s Hebrew culture is not just limited to this country with its great past and wide-ranging expectations for the future, but also in addition to that, encompasses the entire world of the Jewish diaspora. In just a few years, materials printed from Palestine in Hebrew have become an important export. They are valued not only for their originality, [and] the fact that it is Palestinian work, but beyond and completely aside from this, for the quality relative to content as well as form. However, the characteristic of practically all of these printed works from Palestine, which can be found today in book stores of Shanghai and Buenos Aires, of New York and of Warsaw, is the design of the most important part of the vestments of a printed intellectual work, the cut of the type based on the ideas and designs of Rafael Frank.
If the Hebrew language and culture have an impact in the world beyond Palestine, it is because the Jew has planted the seeds of this influence. In the course of the last decades, he has returned to the land of his fathers from countries of the Diaspora as teacher and researcher, but also as builder and craftsman, carrying with him the experiences and impressions of a centuries-long presence amid foreign peoples and foreign cultures. All that is not so easily wiped from a single human being or an entire people. If the Hebrew language is not merely to be an outer shell of an intellectual life that has been torn apart by many influences, then the task of Hebrew culture must be to synthesize inherited and acquired cultural values. It must establish its own imprint on the nature of Jewishness today, a sphere of modern Hebrew thought and feeling that may very likely be different from the mindset in the Maccabean period, for example.
Think of everything that happened between that time when the destruction of the Jewish settlement in Palestine began and the present that spurs resettlement in the old homeland and the desire to consolidate the shards of the erstwhile culture into a living entity! The plethora of ways this manifests itself surprises us from the point of view of language history alone. The old common tongue of the Jewish people was Hebrew. The great literature of the Jewish people, above all the Bible, is written, almost without exception, in this language. The exceptions appear in only a few Aramaic passages, because, in ancient times, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the countries of southwest Asia, just as Arabic has been since the conquest of Islam. Already before the destruction of the Jewish state, Jews spoke not only Hebrew and Aramaic, but also the two great main languages of the classical world, Latin and Greek. This is very closely tied to the origin of Jewish colonies-in-exile that were found very early on in miscellaneous spots in Mediterranean countries. It was a sign of the migration, not only impelled by war and defeat, but which also set in as soon as the increase in population exceeded the capacity of the homeland. Correspondingly, we find Jewish colonies, not solely in Mesopotamia as a result of the Babylonian exile, but also, in fact, in the Egypt of the last Pharaohs, who had troops of Jewish soldiers in their mercenary forces. One of these troops formed the military colony on the Elephantine Island in the Nile that we know because of archeological discoveries.
A large Jewish community already existed in Alexandria during the time of the Ptolemaic kingdom and their colloquial language was Greek. The famous translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, was created for their use. In the wake of conquests by the Roman army hardly three hundred years later, the first Jews settled in the newly established fortifications in the Rhineland. And the language of these precursors of modern Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne was Latin. As a result of the political and economic pressure after the destruction of the temple and the downfall of their own State, the majority of the Jewish people gradually left the homeland to gain admittance to the already existing foreign colonies—some reports from the time still exist today to tell us about this. But furthermore, these people left to seek out new places to settle. Scattered in foreign lands, struggling for their daily bread in the midst of surroundings to which they were in many ways unaccustomed, they adopted the language of the people in whose communities they settled. Despite this, Hebrew was never forgotten. It remained the language of religion, the means of literary expression, the tool not only of theological, but also philosophical and often even of natural science, research. This faithful adherence to the language of their ancestors, this conservative tendency—and this is a very strange development—also benefitted the language that they had adopted in their new homelands. When during the Crusades and—many generations later—during the Black Plague, the Jewish communities on the Rhine and in southern Germany faced severe persecution and tens of thousands fled to Poland and Lithuania, they preserved there the Middle High German of their old domiciles to the south and west. In the middle of the Slavic world, in total isolation from the general German language roots, they kept developing this linguistic heritage up until modern Yiddish, which is written with Hebrew letters, but at its core is a medieval Rhine Franconian and Allemanic dialect, if also richly mixed on the one hand with Polish, Russian and Lithuanian, and on the other hand with not a few fragments of Hebrew.
Parallel to this was the phenomenon of the Spanish Jews, who took colloquial and literary Spanish with them when they were driven out of the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. Because of this, we can hear the same Spanish from the Sephardic Jews in Salonika today that the discoverers of America spoke.
To trace the linguistic fates of all the lost fragments of worldwide Jewry in every detail would lead us very far afield. Fantastical combinations would otherwise have to be mentioned like the cross between Yiddish and English that we find both in the streets of London’s East End—in Whitechapel—and in the million-strong settlement in New York’s Jewish quarter.
If the Hebrew tradition had been lost because of all of this fragmentation, confusion and intermixture of Jewish colloquial languages, then the people, striving in Palestine today to build a distinctive Jewish culture that is also inextricably combined with the nationalistic and societal goals of Zionism, would be facing an insoluble problem. For the mix of languages of the newcomers to Palestine is even greater than the morass the Biblical story of the construction of the Tower of Babel tells us. The settlers who want to establish a way of life today in Palestine bring not only Yiddish and Ladino, Polish and Russian, German and English with them, but also Persian, Arabic and all the languages of the Caucasus and Near East. How could they have found a common language, above all to initiate the communal upbringing of children, if it had not been possible to agree on Hebrew, the old language of the people, as the symbol of the national and cultural society! That this was possible is thanks to the circumstance that the tradition of a living Hebrew has never been broken, not since the Middle Ages and above all in Eastern Europe, home to the largest Jewish population. That gives us the opportunity to report on a unique historical juncture, about a point in the more modern Jewish saga, which immediately preceded the most recent era, that of the rebuilding of the homeland in Palestine. We speak here of the role that Hebrew played as an instrument of the modern European Enlightenment among the Jews of Eastern Europe.
Until the middle of the eighteenth century, Jews in Germany and in the East lived in complete isolation from the intellectual life of their surroundings. Their domain was the sphere of the Bible and the Talmud. Even among the Spanish-Portuguese Jews in Holland, whose diverse history bestowed upon them a much freer intellectual attitude—indeed they still continued to propagate knowledge in medicine and natural sciences, philosophical methods from the traditions of the Moorish Spain—even among them, someone like Baruch Spinoza would run into insurmountable trouble with the locality. Not until the Enlightenment and the impact of the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire and Diderot did cracks appear in the walls that surrounded the ghetto.
For Jews in German cultural circles, Moses Mendelsohn from Dessau was the leader in the realm of Western European thought. This went hand and hand with a linguistic transformation. The westernmost branch of Yiddish, the Jewish German [language] of German Jews withered. They even took up the language of their surroundings as their colloquial language. Accordingly—at the same time as their cultural integration and civil equality—Jews in France adopted French and Jews in England adopted English as the language of daily life and secular education. The development was different in Eastern Europe. Here, too, the ideas of the Enlightenment had an effect and here, too, Moses Mendelsohn was known, among the young enthusiasts of Western culture, as the great trailblazer. But the linguistic accoutrements of the Enlightenment were neither Yiddish nor Polish nor Russian here. Instead, Hebrew was per se the language for the expression of scientific thought for Jews in Eastern Europe. In the same way they had at one time studied the Talmud, people now delved into the ideas of the encyclopedists and their successors, [but] using the same language and the same methodology [as the Talmud]. This Enlightenment era of Eastern European Jews—its high point was reached in the sixth decade of the last century [1860s]—was known as Haskalah in Hebrew. Those who supported the ideas of the Enlightenment, all the young students and scholars, who brought the knowledge and goals of the West into the narrow world of the Jewish alleyways, were called Maskilim.
The Haskalah brought not only the scientific results of European research to the Jewish masses, but also the great political and cultural demands of the time, the trends toward nationalism and socialism. The Jewish people of the East were receptive to it all. Gruesome persecution in Russia shook them out of the quiet day-to-day life in the small cities and villages of the settlement area. Industrial revolutions shook the foundation of their economic existence, [namely] retail and small businesses. Traditions began to falter. The Jewish individual sought a new goal. The Jews of Zion had never forgotten. The wish and belief in a return to the ancestral homeland lived not just in prayerbooks but also in innumerable pious hearts. Now enormous cultural, political and economic pressure entered the mix, which allowed vague hopes to ripen into firm resolutions. The great migration of East European Jews began. In the course of decades, many hundreds of thousands went to America, but already from the beginning—since the 1880s—hundreds also [went] to Palestine. A great friend of the people, Rothschild in Paris, supported them. This was already a long time before the rise of the great movement toward Jewish nationhood, that we have known for the last thirty years as Zionism. The further development is known. Zionism was first set forth by the Basel Program. It became internationally recognized through the Balfour Agreement of November 2, 1917 and was finally attained through the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations. Today America is for all practical purposes as good as closed to the Jewish immigrants from the East because of current American immigration laws, and for this reason, Palestine is already taking in 4,000 Jewish immigrants each month.
The Jewish national movement of the last decades arose out of the world of political ideas from of the Enlightenment era. The Haskalah transformed itself step by step into a Hebrew cultural movement. Its leader was an important European thinker, the philosopher Achad Ha’am, whose essays Am Scheidewege [At the Crossroads] are today the gold standard of modern Jewish national literature. With all its new content, modern Hebrew literature has never lost the conscious sense of connection with Hebrew culture’s great past. The poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, who ranks first among the Hebrew poets of this time, has also brought new life to the Agadah, the narrative part of the Talmud.
For a long time, the Hebrew cultural movement had a precarious existence in synagogues and religious schools, in the salons of scholars and poets, in more or less informal circles. Today it is strongly anchored in the evolving Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Hebrew school system of the Zionist Organization in Palestine presently already supports 132 educational institutions with 550 teachers and 13,246 students. Among them are 43 kindergartens, 75 elementary schools, 3 secondary schools, 3 teaching schools, 4 professional schools and 4 crafts schools. All educational support materials had to be newly created for these Hebrew school entities. It was not enough to translate textbooks from other languages into Hebrew. Rather, the contents had to be tailored to the special circumstances of the country. At present, Palestine already has a richly developed pedagogical literature in the Hebrew language. An enormous amount of work toward language-building has therewith already been accomplished. A pioneer in this area was the great language scholar, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in Jerusalem, the compiler of a large Hebrew dictionary, the publication of which is in the process of being completed by his heirs after his much too premature death. Modern Hebrew is built above all else on his work: how the Jews of Palestine speak today, how children in the isolated farm colonies of Galilee, no less how those in the high schools in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, learn. The Hebrew educational system in Palestine is presently strong enough so that even the children of immigrants, streaming in from all possible language regions, can be absorbed into the educational system without too much trouble. The future of the Hebrew language in Palestine is secure. The University and National Library crown the achievement. At the same time, the focus lies on the founding of research institutes that above all serve the scientific advancement of specific practical and cultural interests of the country, on the one hand, in intellectual areas and on the other hand, in natural sciences.
The renaissance of Hebrew has spread from Palestine to Jewish groups in all the countries of the world. Partly, we learn Hebrew because we ourselves want to settle in Palestine and integrate in the life there as soon as possible. But we approach the study of Hebrew also in part because we, from afar, seek to gain a personal relationship to the new intellectual developments that are paving the way in Erez Israel—the Hebrew name for Palestine, literally, the Land of Israel. Today in Moscow, the Hebrew Theater is one of the top art institutions of the Russian metropolis. Likewise, in the last few years, a Hebrew theater company has earned great acclaim in Berlin. Today, very traditional Hebrew kindergartens and Hebrew language schools all over Europe and America support a living Hebrew language, as do Hebrew primary and middle schools in Eastern Europe. Newspapers and books promote the Hebrew cultural movement.
In addition to all the traditional tendencies of national-cultural movements, the goal that has been set for the renaissance of Hebrew is very special. That is to revive not only the language, but also the spirit of the Bible, the powerful artistic creative power, that speaks to us from the Song of Songs, the Psalms and simple biblical tales, as well as the high moral concepts of the prophets’ writings. For this reason, the Hebrew cultural movement of Jews striving for national reunification concerns humanity [and is] something of interest to the leading intellects of the present. This was made manifest at the opening of the Hebrew University on the Mount of Olives. Hebrew type is a faithful servant in this work. The most gratifying reward for all the passionate efforts that the immortal Rafael Frank devoted to his Frank-Rühl Hebrew is that, in the forms of this type, the language of the Book of Books will now be awakened to a new life and a new future.
Setting and printing by
Poeschel & Trepte in Leipzig
using Antiqua-Venetia and Frank-Ruhl-Hebrew
from H. Berthold AG.
Produced in a limited edition
for a circle of friends
Furthermore, 500 numbered copies
were made available to the
Soncino-Gesellschaft in Berlin