Keren Mock, Hbreu. Du sacr au maternel, Paris: CNRS ditions, 359 pp.

, 25
(paperback).
What does the average person know about Hebrew? Near to nothing at all: it is
the language of the Jews and it is written in strange characters that are easily
recognized as Hebraic. After reading this book, we will have learned a great deal
about this language and the people who use it. The approach of the author is that
of an intertextual anastylosis: as an archeologist of the language, she starts
from the present, but then looks for the causes of the current situation in the
subsequent layers of the past.
In the first part of the book, the author takes us on a trip to contemporary Israel
for an inquiry into the situation of the Jewish immigrants and their progeny.
Today, Hebrew or Ivrit is one of the two official languages of the state of Israel,
the other being Arabic. That Hebrew is the official language of the Jewish people
and of Israel may seem evident, but it is not. Hebrew has been a dead language
for almost the whole population from the time of the Diaspora in the first century,
and even before that it was essentially the language of the Bible and of religion.
In daily life, people used another language and that has remained so in the
Dispersion. Thus, the immigrants to the Holy Land and to the newly formed state
of Israel had in fact many different maternal languages and had to learn Hebrew
mandatorily and were obliged to use it in all domains of public life. Hebrew
became for them practically a new maternal language, a living language next to
the Biblical Hebrew they knew from religious practice.
It goes without saying that this transition was not achieved without great
difficulty. To begin with, it is not easy at all to have to learn a new language in a
relatively short time and to have to use it immediately actively in all
circumstances. But neither should the psychological difficulties of exchanging
ones maternal language for a different one be underestimated. However, that is
part of the deal: immigrants to the state of Israel must learn to speak and write
Hebrew. It is typical for foreigners who are not aware of the languages spoken by
Jewish people around the world to assume erroneously that learning Hebrew as a
living language would come easy to them. They do not realize that for them,
Hebrew is indeed a dead language that they hardly know and often dont
understand at all.
The author has interviewed two Israeli writers, Aharon Appelfeld and Sami
Michael, and discussed with them in depth the transition they made whereby
they in fact abandoned their maternal language and decided to use only Hebrew
for their literary productions. These are very lively and captivating pages, offering
a unique insight in the deep complexity of the Jewish immigration and the
establishment of the modern state of Israel, but also in the exceptional situation
of writers who have made this transition or have developed their skills as writers
in these testing circumstances.
The second part of the book is devoted to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken
language. The origins of this movement are traced back to the Jewish
intelligentsia during the Enlightenment period in Europe. Persons of Jewish origin

wanted to participate in the emerging rational cultural and scientific endeavors of

their day and felt the need to do that in a language of their own, Hebrew, which
had thus far only been used for religious purposes. It was a period in time when
many other nationalist movements emerged and peoples wanted to express
their ethnic identity in a language and a land of their own. For the Jewish people,
that land could not be any other than the Holy Land, and that language could not
be any other than the Hebrew language of their ancestry. However, that language
was ill adapted to its new purposes, namely to serve as a language for daily use
in a new world, two thousand years after that language had fossilized into a dead
language for religious use only; and to become a language for the discussion of
profane matters, for a non-religious literature, for scientific endeavors, for
political and societal dispute. Therefore, it was not sufficient to try to revive that
language by organizing language courses and by fostering publications in
Hebrew; it was also necessary to expand the vocabulary of that ancient
language, which was rather limited both in size and in its range of subjects, and
add numerous new words and expressions required by the new circumstances of
time and place. One could try to give new meanings to old words, but that was
not always possible, and neither was it allowed: religion opposed such profane
use of the holy language which was Biblical Hebrew. Thus, the need was felt to
new create words for numerous new things and new ideas. Many other national
languages were in a similar position, but the difference with Hebrew was that in
the other languages this process had been going on for centuries, while Hebrew
had stood still for more than two millennia and one now had to catch up in a very
short time.
The prominent figure in this process was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), the
founder of modern Hebrew. He was an indefatigable lexicographer who collected
Hebrew words and expressions with their meaning and translations in other
languages on pieces of paper, in little notebooks and finally on index cards, which
served as the material for his later Hebrew dictionaries. He traveled the world,
looking for more raw materials for his ultimate project, the Dictionary of the
Whole Hebrew Language. But to the existing vocabulary he added hundreds of
words, neologisms of his own invention, for words found in other languages but
missing altogether in Hebrew. The author has dedicated herself to extensive and
meticulous original research in the archives of Ben-Yehuda and has acquainted
herself with his lexicographical methods and idiosyncrasies. Her report on this
ground-breaking archival research is fascinating and offers us a lively picture of
the complexity and the extent of the efforts of one man to revive a long dead
language into the new maternal language for a new nation and for new
generations.
The third part of the book is devoted to the early-modern Dutch philosopher of
Jewish descent, Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677), who used Hebrew in two of
his works, namely his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and his Compendium
Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae, which was published as part of his Opera
Posthuma in 1677. The first work is a thorough analysis of religion and its place in
society, the second is a Hebrew grammar. Spinozas outspoken ideas about
religion brought him in serious conflict with the leaders of the Jewish community

early in life and he was excommunicated by the Amsterdam Jewish community in

extremely harsh terms on July 27, 1656. He devoted his short years to a life of
study that resulted in an oeuvre that lies at the basis of modernity, as is
convincingly demonstrated in Jonathan Israels monumental trilogy on Radical
Enlightenment.
Keren Mock discusses extensively the uses that Spinoza made of Hebrew. In the
Tractatus, Spinoza investigates the meaning of the Bible as the Word of God, and
thus of Hebrew as the divine language. As is well known, both Jews and Christians
(and in a certain sense also Muslims) consider the Bible to be the revealed word
of the transcendent God. As such, whatever is written in the Bible is holy,
untouchable, unalterable and indisputably true. Spinoza reads and analyses the
Bible in detail in order to see whether that is really what the Bible claims to be.
With numerous convincing examples, he proves that the texts we have are a
rather dubious collection of disparate fragments, written in a language that we
are barely able to understand, and irreparably distorted by centuries of accidents
and willful alterations. The word of God has been largely and thoroughly rewritten
in magical, mythical and liturgical terms by human hands that have obscured the
one really divine revelation, namely the commandment of justice and love, a
commandment that God has revealed just as well trough the natural light of
reason. By that relentless analysis of the holy texts, Spinoza has desecrated the
holy language and unmasked the sacred texts as the means whereby a priestly
caste established and conserved its theocratic powers over the people. The
author illustrates this profanation of the Hebrew with many examples from the
Tractatus, but especially and in great detail from the Hebrew Grammar. As
Spinoza himself announced, he was not so much writing a grammar of the
language of the Bible, but of Hebrew as a language in its own right. The author
rightly claims his efforts as the basis for the non-religious use of Hebrew that
would be inaugurated in the Enlightenment at first in only a small group of
people, that would be captured by the Zionist movement with as much
enthusiasm and conviction as the claim for a land of its own, and that has
ultimately led to the revival of Hebrew as Ivrit as the official language of the new
state of Israel and the mother tongue of its Jewish population.
Keren Mock has degrees in Clinical Psychology and Philosophy and has a
Doctorate in Letters. She has been active as a translator and teaches at the
department of tudes psychanalytiques of the Universit Paris Diderot. Her
approach in this book testifies to her diverse qualifications and many
considerable talents. She makes constant and intelligent use of the achievements
of linguistics and psychoanalysis in order to formulate and clarify her in-depth
insights. Her language and style are impeccably and impressively beautiful, her
methodology is sound and reliable, and her enthusiasm is contagious. Her book
reads without effort, not least because of the diversity of the subject and the
variety in her approach. Even the detailed analysis of the Hebrew texts of
Spinoza remains very accessible to the interested general reader.
The author has a thorough knowledge of the philosophy of Spinoza and manages
effortlessly to apply his basic principles to the content matter of the two works

she discusses. She has convincingly argued that Spinoza approaches Hebrew as a
profane language, and not as a sacred one. She does not, however, explore the
consequences that may have for his interpretation of religion. Spinoza has in fact
not only rightly proved that Hebrew may be considered and used as a profane
language, as has indeed happened later so spectacularly, he has also mercilessly
demonstrated that the Hebrew of the Bible was not a holy language expounding
the Word of God, as the representatives of religions would have it. That has
enabled him to reject all of the commandments and prescriptions of the Bible and
dismiss them as useless, bothersome and indeed harmful, with the exception of
the one command of justice and love, which is however equally well perceived by
reason. In my opinion, this aspect of Spinozas radical iconoclasm may have
received perhaps somewhat less attention from our author, undoubtedly rightly
so because it does not find its place in the purpose of this impressive and
important monograph, that concentrates instead on the origins of the revival of
Hebrew as a living language and its rebirth as the maternal language of new
generations of a people living in its own country. The author has achieved this
goal magnificently.