SOURCE: Seidman, Naomi. “A Stormy Divorce: The Sexual Politics of the Hebrew-Yiddish ‘Language War.’” In A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, pp. 102-31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Seidman explores Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's influence on the polarity of vernacular Hebrew and Yiddish in Europe, aligning the former language with masculinity and the latter with femininity.]

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda,
What a far-out kind of Jew.
Words, words, words, words,
He concocted in his feverish brain.
And he had a son, and thus said he:
My firstborn shall be called Ben-Yehuda, Itamar
From the breast until old age,
From circumcision until the grave—
He will be a sworn friend to the Hebrew tongue,
And a fierce foe of all foreign ones.
Itamar—became a man,
Tall as a palm and handsome,
And he spoke the Hebrew tongue.
Itamar Ben-Avi,
His father's prophecy,
The sort of man who suits me.

—“Eliezer Ben-Yehuda,” lyrics by Yaron London

I want our son Eri to know Hebrew well. All other decisions I leave to you.

—Zev Jabotinsky, 1918 letter/will to his wife

I

In the past few decades, critics and historians have begun to contest and reevaluate the centrality of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's role in the revival of spoken Hebrew.¹ These critics argue, either explicitly or implicitly, that the Hebrew revival actually occurred both much earlier and much later than the 1880s and 1890s, when Ben-Yehuda was attempting to realize his project of raising a child to speak solely Hebrew. That is, Hebrew, or Loshn-koydesh, was occasionally spoken in the centuries before the revival, by members of different Jewish communities who shared no other language or by fervent Jews who wished to sanctify the Sabbath by speaking only the Holy Tongue. Moreover, the work of writers like Abramovitsh, whose Yiddish-inflected style infused written Hebrew with the idiomatic flexibility it had sorely lacked, had already set the stage for a full-blown vernacular revival years before Ben-Yehuda's project was launched.

Nevertheless, neither the scattered episodes of Hebrew speech nor the fluency of Abramovitsh's Hebrew style directly produced a Hebrew-speaking environment, and Ben-Yehuda's experiment was no more successful. Hebrew finally did begin to become the vernacular of an entire society only during the Second Aliya (the wave of immigration that began in 1905 and lasted until 1914), under very different circumstances than Ben-Yehuda's isolated work in Jerusalem in the 1880s. Benjamin Harshav is perhaps most responsible for the demystification of what has become an article of faith in Israel, Ben-Yehuda's “revival” of the Hebrew tongue. Harshav's revisionary linguistic history of the yishuv (which parallels recent historical approaches to many other aspects of yishuv, or pre-Statehood, history) insists that, “in spite of his pathetic figure and life, Ben-Yehuda had no real influence on the revival itself, which began to strike roots about twenty-five years after his arrival in Erets-Israel, in the milieu created by the Second Aliya.² Whatever one makes of his actual function in the Hebrew revival, however, it would be impossible to deny the other part of Harshav's claim: that Ben-Yehuda's position vis-à-vis modern Hebrew has attained the status of popular national mythology.

The process of mythologizing Ben-Yehuda's career begins with his own writings. In his autobiography, Ben-Yehuda describes the circumstances surrounding the birth of his son in the hushed tone of a witness to a miracle.

On the fifteenth of Av, the first new settlement of the yishuv was founded, the settlement of Rishon-letsiyon; on that very day, in a dark corner of a small room close to the Temple Mount, the child was born with whom the first experiment of reviving Hebrew as a spoken tongue was supposed to commence. … Is it not one of the wondrous events of human history that the beginning of the revival of our land, if one can call it that, and the beginning of the revival of our language happened simultaneously, on the same day, virtually at the same hour? On the day that the first settlement of the nation that had decided to return to the soil of their fathers was founded in the land of the fathers, on that very day was born the son who was destined to be the first of the children of the nation who would return to speaking the language of the fathers.³

The magical quality of the birth of the first Hebrew child is heightened, in Ben-Yehuda's account, by the child's appearance, as it were, ex nihilo, an effect achieved partially by the mother's absence from the narrative. The birth is translated from the natural universe not only to the realm of miracles but also to the historical sphere, one dominated by fathers, the fatherland, and the language of the father. The word “fathers” (avot) is repeated three times in the last line cited above, in “land of the fathers,” “country of the fathers,” and “language of the fathers”—avoiding the myriad feminine topoi for describing Zion and the Land of Israel. The word, of course, could also be translated as “ancestors,” but there are other elements of Ben-Yehuda's narrative that suggest the centrality of paternity to his Hebraist-Zionist project.

In describing Ben-Yehuda's place in the pantheon of Zionist heroes, Harshav conveys his sense that the myth of the Hebrew revival is inextricable from Ben-Yehuda's role as a father.

Popular mythology feeds off of the image of a hero who personifies an idea, the individual who in his personal life, which is understood by all, and especially in his suffering and sacrifice, is a symbol of the exalted goal. Thus Herzl is constructed as a legendary king (although “Hibat Zion” preceded him); Bialik as the poet-prophet, who paid with his “blood and fat” for the blaze his verses struck in the people (although there were other first-rate poets among his peers, such as Tshernikhovsky and Steinberg); Trumpeldor as “the one-armed hero” (although he lost his hand defending Russia from the Japanese); Brenner as the personification of the “in-spite-of-it-all” (as if his assassination at the hands of Arab rioters justifies the despair in his writings); and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda as the father of the Hebrew revival, who sacrificed his family on its altar.⁴

Harshav intends his catalog to demonstrate the condensation and distortion by which the idiosyncrasies of individual life stories are remade in the broad shapes of national ideals. Thus, the single-mindedness of Ben-Yehuda's lonely endeavor, his planting linguistic seeds in what could not have been very fertile ground, could legitimize his title “father of the Hebrew revival.” And Ben-Yehuda's paternal role is not just a figure of speech. In account after account, the varied scope of Ben-Yehuda's linguistic experiment is primarily reduced to and expressed by his activities as father, rather than as editor, publisher, inventor of new words (or as his detractors would have it, manager of the Hebrew “word factory”), or founder of various language societies.

Ben-Yehuda's story differs from Harshav's other examples, however, because his heroism is both derived from and qualified by his fatherhood: popular mythological reworkings of Ben-Yehuda's career demonstrate the centrality of the family drama to the Hebrew revival and the degree to which this drama is touched with the psychological and ethical ambiguities of patriarchal (self-)sacrifice.⁵ And while other stories about national heroes typically suppress the less attractive characteristics of their subjects, Ben-Yehuda's problematic fatherly behavior almost always has a central part in the cultural texts that transmit his story. Rather than elide Ben-Yehuda's “sacrifice” of his family, popular biographies, children's books, critical histories, and so on, cite his zealotry and its domestic effects as further proof of Ben-Yehuda's laudably unswerving commitment to Hebrew, an enhancement rather than a diminution of his heroic stature. What emerges in these narratives is a fable as morally complex as the binding of Isaac, an intertext to which Harshav's description of Ben-Yehuda's “sacrifice” of his family “on the altar” indirectly refers.

My aim here, however, is not to judge either Ben-Yehuda's character or his role in the Hebrew revival, or to decide whether Ben-Yehuda's family troubles were the price he paid or exacted for the vernacularization of Hebrew. Rather, I examine the insistence with which the story of the revival of the Hebrew vernacular has been transmitted as a story about the conflicting claims of Jewish paternity and maternity, about the establishment of masculine control over areas of Jewish life traditionally in the hands of women, and about domestic difficulty and guilt. The stories that have arisen around the figure of Ben-Yehuda, I argue, have the cultural power they have because they reflect and reinforce basic conflicts of Hebrew and Erets-Israeli society during the interwar period in which these myths began to circulate. Ben-Yehuda's family troubles and language obsession in fact encode and condense the overlapping territories of the language conflict and gender ideologies of his own time and of later times.

Let me draw the outlines of a few versions of what could be called the “primal scene” or the founding myth of the revival of Hebrew as a living tongue. In Ottoman Jerusalem of the 1880s, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, by supreme linguistic and ideological determination, raised the first native Hebrew speaker in modern times, his son Ben-Tsiyon (later Itamar). The experiment involved creating a “pure” Hebrew environment, severely restricting the child's access to other languages while immersing him in Hebrew speech. Ben-Yehuda relates that he taught his wife Hebrew quickly, even though this task “was a little hard at first.” He goes on to explain this difficulty: “As with virtually all Jewish women, and everyone except for a few maskilim and Hebrew writers of the day, even this daughter of the maskil Sh. N. Yonas knew no Hebrew, although she could read the Hebrew letters and write Yiddish.”⁶

Most historians seem to agree that Dvora Ben-Yehuda learned Hebrew slowly, if at all. In having a willing wife, Ben-Yehuda was luckier than at least one of the members of the Jerusalem group who had sworn allegiance to his project. As Ben-Yehuda reports, “Arye Horwitz would argue with his wife incessantly because she didn't know Hebrew and didn't have time to learn.”⁷ Despite the lack of such obvious discord in the Ben-Yehuda household, the difficulties of raising a child in a language one parent could speak only haltingly and the other barely at all seem to have taken their toll. Amos Elon summarizes the domestic manifestations of Ben-Yehuda's project in these words:

Ben-Yehuda's wife knew no Hebrew; while still on shipboard he told her that in Palestine they would speak nothing but Hebrew. He ruthlessly kept his vow. When his first son, Itamar, was born (by a curious coincidence on the same day the colony of Rishon-letsiyon was founded) he became the first child in centuries to hear only Hebrew from both his parents and almost nothing from anyone else, for he was kept isolated from all human contact lest the purity of his Hebrew be spoiled by alien sounds. His mother, though weak and ailing, agreed to her husband's demand not to hire a servant in order that the child might hear nothing but the holy tongue. …

It was a risky undertaking. The language was still archaic. Many words indispensable in modern intercourse were missing. The child had no playmates; until his third year he remained almost mute and often refused to utter a word.⁸

In a later passage, Elon recounts that “when Ben-Yehuda's aged mother, who spoke no Hebrew, arrived in Palestine shortly before her death, Ben-Yehuda, who had not seen her for years, refused to talk with her in a language she could understand.”⁹

In her biography of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Chemda Ben-Yehuda, who was Eliezer's second wife as well as Dvora Ben-Yehuda's younger sister, vividly describes Eliezer standing at the door to the birth chamber and giving the midwife and the female neighbors a Hebrew language exam before he would let them attend the birth; one barren woman, believing she could benefit through sympathetic magic from proximity to the new mother, was allowed to enter—but on the condition that she not call out the prescribed phrase “This is my child,” since she could not manage it in Hebrew. Chemda describes Dvora's efforts to silence the excited witness to the birth.

Sheyne Malke sang the infant something with her lips shut. At every moment Sheyne-Malke wanted to say something loving to the newborn child in Zhargon. The mother, however, reminded her of the prohibition against speaking by putting her finger to her lips, and the woman remained silent. After that, we always called her the “dumb aunt” [hadodah ha'ilemet].¹⁰

Chemda also relates that the months after the birth of her child were lonely ones for her sister, although Dvora did not complain. “Mrs. Pines,” Chemda writes, “tried to act as mother to Dvora, but since she spoke no Hebrew, she couldn't say much to Dvora in the presence of the newborn.”¹¹

While Ben-Yehuda writes little about his wife's Hebrew-speaking abilities, some of the passages in his memoir show evidence of a guilty conscience for having sacrificed his wife to the cause; despite Dvora's frail health, Ben-Yehuda writes, he did not allow her a servant girl for fear she would contaminate the pure Hebrew environment, an act of linguistic zealousness he later admitted had been unnecessary. In a long and apologetic passage, Ben-Yehuda describes the factors involved in deciding whether a maidservant would be hired to help the new mother.

The new mother was naturally weak and sickly; poverty, pregnancy, and birth had weakened her further. But even so she willingly and good-naturedly agreed not to have a servant girl in the house, so that the child's ears would hear no sounds other than those of Hebrew. We were afraid of the walls of the house, afraid of the air in the room, lest it absorb the sounds of a foreign tongue emanating from the servant girl, which would enter the child's ears and damage his Hebrew hearing and the Hebrew words would not be absorbed as they should be and the child would not speak Hebrew. This holy soul, who was destined to be the first Hebrew mother of the revival era which would give the nation a Hebrew-speaking generation, took upon herself with love the burden of raising a child without even a little help, although she herself was weak and sickly.¹²

Ben-Yehuda may have been making a reference to any one of these scenarios when he confessed that his determination to speak only Hebrew at times overrode ethical imperatives.

I speak Hebrew, only Hebrew, not only with the members of my household, but even with every man or woman whom I know to more or less understand Hebrew, and I do not take care in this matter to abide by the laws of common respect or courtesy to women [kibud nashim]. I act in this with great rudeness, rudeness that has caused many people to hate me and has engendered much opposition to me in Erets-Israel.¹³

If Dvora's Hebrew was limited, her husband's was not much better. One witness to the experiment reported that when Eliezer, for example, wanted Dvora to pour him a cup of coffee with sugar, “he was at a loss to communicate words such as ‘cup,’ ‘saucer,’ ‘pour,’ ‘spoon,’ and so on. He would say to his wife, in effect: ‘Take such and such, and do like so, and bring me this and this, and I will drink’ [k'khi kakh, ve'asi kakh, vehavi'i li kakh, ve'eshteh].”¹⁴ Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Itamar Ben-Avi did not speak until he was four, as he relates in his memoirs. His father taught him Hebrew, according to the memoirs of “the First Hebrew Child,” primarily by “standing at the crib and reading passages from the Bible to me, so that my ears would grow accustomed to the language.”¹⁵ According to Ben-Avi, he spoke his first sentence in the following circumstances: Yehiel Mikhal Pines, a family friend who referred to Ben-Yehuda's experiment as a “modern-day Binding of Isaac,” advised Dvora to speak to the child in a language other than Hebrew, for fear the child would grow up to be retarded or mute. She began singing Russian lullabies to him and was caught one day when her husband returned home unexpectedly. As Ben-Avi recounts, Ben-Yehuda was enraged.

“What have you done? All that we've built in the first Hebrew household—you've destroyed in a single day.”

Mother tried in vain to defend herself, to place some of the blame on Pines and some on her loneliness and homesickness for the songs she remembered that were so beloved to her.

But with the rage of someone who sees everything he has worked for in ruins, Father pounded his fist on the table—it was a little table, on which he had begun work on the great Hebrew dictionary—and the table smashed into pieces.

“There is no forgiveness for this, Dvora, because you have raised your hand against me and against our eldest son!”

Seeing my father raging and storming, and seeing my mother whimpering like a child who has been caught red-handed—I suddenly understood everything that was happening in this house, stood up straight before my father with the will of a boy defending his mother, even against his father, and screamed, “Father.”

Mother covered me with kisses. They both realized that good had emerged from evil, and that from my great shock at seeing my father enraged and my mother sobbing, the dumbness had been removed from my lips and speech had come to my mouth.¹⁶

Ben-Avi's “real” or imagined memory of the “primal scene” of the birth of Hebrew speech has disturbing similarities to the Freudian construction of the primal scene, although in the case of Ben-Avi, the child's perception of the father's aggressive behavior toward his wife is anything but a misunderstanding. Itamar Ben-Avi, by linking his first Hebrew words with both the rage of his father and the linguistic transgression of his mother, underlined the centrality of a parental and gender struggle in his own linguistic development. If we take all these accounts, including Ben-Yehuda's idealized one, as a collective myth of the Hebrew revival, it seems clear that the mother's silence, self-sacrifice, and absence (or, alternatively, her transgression) are built into the mythical structure.

I am not, it should be noted, arguing against the sincerity of Ben-Yehuda's perceived need for such radical measures as the linguistic quarantine of the first Hebrew-speaking child from his mother, the midwife, or a servant girl. But neither do I think that the silence, or silencing, of these women during the primal scene of the birth of modern Hebrew speech is trivial, secondary, or accidental, whether one reads the scenes I outlined above as literal truth or as myth. Given the educational patterns of Hebrew-Yiddish acquisition, there is a certain logic to Ben-Yehuda's changing the historical trajectory of the linguistic development of a Jewish child by prohibiting the speech of the child's mother. Moreover, Ben-Yehuda attempted to raise a child to speak Hebrew within the confines of the traditional Jewish family and in the larger setting of the old yishuv, with its conservative religious and social mores. The Hebrew revival finally succeeded under very different social and family circumstances, and its primary setting was not the home but the settlement school or its urban counterpart. In raising a Hebrew speaker within a traditional domestic Jewish environment, Ben-Yehuda may have had no choice but to substitute the paternal for the maternal role in the child's development.

Although Ben-Yehuda's experiment took place in an environment manifestly different from the ones in which the Hebrew revival eventually took hold, Ben-Yehuda became the symbol of the revival primarily during this later period. While it is not surprising that the proponents of the Hebrew revival would choose a hero from an earlier period, I argue that the narratives of Ben-Yehuda's life and vision served a particular purpose for later Hebraists. For one thing, Ben-Yehuda's domestic difficulties may well have proved the importance of combining a domestic and social revolution with the linguistic one.

But Ben-Yehuda's experience also encoded some of the larger difficulties inherent in the Hebrew revival, which was, on one level, the struggle between a “mother tongue” and a “father tongue.” The revival of Hebrew as the living language of an entire population and the concomitant suppression of other languages (primarily Yiddish) that was so central to this project were accomplished without the aid of any state apparatus such as the one that succeeded in destroying the Soviet Hebrew literary scene. Instead, the revival of spoken Hebrew called into service an array of deeply rooted Jewish desires, prejudices, and anxieties, including, I will argue, psychosexual ones. The first attempts at Hebrew speech, as we have seen, both involved the Jewish woman in a more central role than other nationalist projects and reduced that role to its biological minimum. The Hebrew revival also implicated Jewish women because it commonly (though not universally) saw its task as the suppression of the Yiddish language, with its feminine associations. The growing Hebrew-speaking culture derived a sort of psychic momentum from actively stigmatizing what it saw as the womanly tongue and distancing itself from it. The revival operated in part according to what could be called a “politics of revulsion”; the Yiddish critic Avrom Golomb once argued that the Hebrew revival was motivated more strongly by hatred of Yiddish than by love for Hebrew.¹⁷ Even if we take into account Golomb's Yiddishist bitterness, it seems clear that Hebrew was revived at least partially by tapping into a strong distaste for the disempowered diaspora existence that was often consciously or unconsciously perceived as having emasculated or feminized the Jewish collective; this distaste reflected itself, above all, in the rejection of the mame-loshn that both expressed and was the product of the objectionable Eastern European past.

Domestic strife around the issue of Hebrew speech continued for many years after the Hebrew revival was well under way. In a 1928 pamphlet, “The Hebrew Tongue on Women's Lips,” Itamar Ben-Avi reported on the importance and difficulties of including women in the project of reviving Hebrew.

It seemed as if there was no hope that women in the holy city would utter Hebrew words. Even our great and beloved poet Yehuda Halevi, in spite of the beauty and softness of his verses, even he cannot give us the scent of the perfume that emanates from every word of our ancient rhetoricians. And do you know the reason for this? Because he never heard the music of the words of his tongue uttered by the lips of his mother, the lips of a woman, in his childhood. It is precisely this that is lacking in our language—womanhood! childhood!¹⁸

In fact, women did increasingly contribute, in their role as mothers, writers, agricultural workers, and teachers, to the linguistic transformation of the yishuv.¹⁹ Women like Nechama Feinstein-Pukhachevski, a writer who corresponded with Y. L. Gordon in Hebrew in the 1880s and raised a Hebrew-speaking child in Rishon-letsiyon in the 1890s, and Chemda Ben-Yehuda, who worked as a journalist and agitated for women's rights,²⁰ saw Hebraism and the struggle for women's equality as complementary causes. As early as 1889, Feinstein-Pukhachevski campaigned for Jewish women's education in Hebrew, albeit with the explicit goal of raising a new generation of children as Hebrew speakers.

It will do no good to worry about your sons' education, as long as you don't pay attention to the education of your daughters … to inscribe in their hearts love for their people and their brothers, so that they may bestow their holy spirit onto the generation that will be born onto their laps and make them loyal sons of their people.²¹

Feinstein-Pukhachevski and other women were welcomed into the circle of Hebrew speakers with a special warmth, since a Hebrew-speaking woman, as much as a Hebrew-speaking child, clearly signaled the dimensions of the Hebrew-language revolution and heralded its successful future. For Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the contribution of women to the Hebrew revival was a necessary and valuable part of the national project and not just in their biological or educational roles.

The necessity of the hour is that the woman must penetrate Hebrew literature; only she can bring warmth, softness, flexibility, subtle, delicate, and shifting hues into the dead, forgotten, old, dry and hard Hebrew language. Simplicity and exactitude in the place of unbounded ornateness [melitsah, the flowery Hebrew style replete with biblical allusions characteristic of Haskalah writing].²²

Ben-Yehuda was right to see women as the potential vehicles of a Hebrew style free of habitual allusion, one of the benefits of having remained outside the Hebrew textual system. Jewish women's historical exclusion from traditional Hebrew education became, in the first decades of the Hebrew revival, something of a blessing in disguise, since it enabled women writers to introduce not so much the “warmth” Ben-Yehuda sought as a flexible idiom free from the “echo chamber” of the traditional Hebrew library.²³ Rachel Katznelson-Shazar explicitly described the power of the poetry of Rachel, the Hebrew modernist, in these terms:

The literature of her time (Lamdan, Uri-Tsvi Greenberg, etc.) begins with the biblical verse, the sentence. With her it is the word. A word—an autonomous universe—with its literal content and sound. The word arose from the depths. Hatred and love, jealousy and forgiveness, appeasement and revenge, heights and depths understandable to everyone. How did her word acquire such weight? Because she learned it from the sources, with no commentaries, and because she was the one and only poet with her world, the world of a woman, which had no precedent in Hebrew poetry.²⁴

The “sources,” in Katznelson-Shazar's use of the word, are no longer the exalted texts of the Hebrew library but the more primary sources of individual expression “understandable to everyone.” It was only in the modernist reevaluation of poetic style, that women's approach to Hebrew, “with no commentaries,” could finally be perceived as a virtue.

Nevertheless, the road to full female participation in the Hebrew revival was a difficult one, given the head start a grounding in Jewish texts provided nascent Hebrew speakers. In 1929, the revisionist Zionist leader Zev Jabotinsky confirmed the impression that dedication to Hebrew in the yishuv sometimes bypassed the women: “Even the most fervent Zionist cannot guarantee that his wife is also a Zionist or that she takes his side with regard to the importance of Hebrew speech.”²⁵ He may have been making rueful reference to his own situation. Y. Avineri related that Jabotinsky had to exempt his wife from the fines exacted by the “strict Hebrew police” enforcing Hebrew speech in their house because of the drain on his household finances (the “fine” was a small donation to a Zionist cause).²⁶ Although Zionists continually stressed the necessity of female participation in the Hebrew revival, it was clear to them that women were the segment of the population least able to make the transition to Hebrew speech quickly. Sometimes official concessions, mirroring Jabotinsky's private one, were made: in the 1930s, the Histadrut, the Zionist-Socialist Federation of Labor Unions, required Hebrew speech of all members, with the exception of “women who had been in the country for fewer than two years.”²⁷ The labor organizers were not being chivalrous. They were operating on the assumption that even the most recent male immigrant could put together a Hebrew sentence from remembered fragments of a yeshiva or cheder education. No such assumption could be made for women.

A language revival with such built-in gender discrepancies could not fail to have profound cultural repercussions. The folklorist Alter Druyanov relates a riddle that circulated during the early years of the Hebrew revival: “Someone said that Erets-Israeli women are better than all other women in the world, since all other women talk without understanding, while the Erets-Israeli woman understands but does not speak.”²⁸ In a note at the bottom of the page, Druyanov adds that the joke refers to women's difficulty in learning to speak Hebrew. The joke, if it was ever funny, derives a certain sadistic/comic power from more than just the difficulties women were having in mastering a language for which their education did not prepare them; it also invokes the stereotypical views of women as foolishly garrulous, “talk[ing] without understanding.” Enforcing the language laws, as Ben-Yehuda was not the last husband to attempt to do, had the added “benefit” of finally silencing the talkative Jewish woman. And the quasi-talmudic form of the joke only reinforces the equation between men and proper Hebrew speech.

Even the debate over the proper pronunciation of Hebrew had sexual overtones. Ben-Yehuda characterized the Ashkenazic accentual system as “soft, weak, without the special strength the emphatic consonant gives to the word.”²⁹ The preference for the Sephardic or Oriental accentual system was often described as a rejection of a weak and “whining” intonational pattern for a forceful accent as far removed from the Yiddish-inflected Hebrew as possible. Harshav has summarized the prevailing attitudes toward the two systems: “This is the perspective: our language is pioneering, coarse, strong, masculine—like the ‘masculine’ rhyme imposed by the Sephardi accent as opposed to the soft, ‘feminine’ rhyme dominant in Ashkenazi poetry (as in Italian).”³⁰ Jabotinsky pushed the accentual question further, campaigning for a Hebrew devoid of Yiddishisms and Eastern European “ghetto” intonations. In a letter to Dr. Yevin, the well-known Hebrew teacher, he describes his disgust on hearing Jewish women trying to speak Hebrew: “The woman says, ‘Thank God, I'm much better,’ but she speaks in a whining, almost sobbing tone, as if she were relating some disaster.”³¹ Jabotinsky's misogynist revulsion far exceeds the linguistic character of his observation: Hebrew intonation must distance itself from an entire mind-set, marked here as “feminine,” that fuses complaint with euphemism (a typical Eastern European Yiddish speech act). What Jabotinsky insists on is not just a different accent or intonation but also a new type of speech performance, the straight-talking, clipped mode of address that has become increasingly identified with Israeli speech.³² The revival, then, reinforced and solidified Hebrew's masculine associations in its adoption of particular speech patterns as well as a regnant Hebrew accent.

Ben-Yehuda's bookishness, his bourgeois image, his stubborn insistence on making the conservative city of Jerusalem the center of his pioneering linguistic efforts did not endear him to either his Orthodox neighbors or the later generations of Hebrew activists. Nevertheless, Ben-Yehuda's story acquired considerable cultural currency, and it continues to fascinate generations of Israelis. There are many reasons why this should be so, but among these I propose this one: for both Ben-Yehuda and the language pioneers that came later, Hebrew was not just a language, it was also a reorganization of traditional family structures and a recovery program for wounded Jewish masculinity.

II

Successive waves of immigration ensured that the work of Hebraist activists remained necessary. Nevertheless, victories began to mount. While the first revivers of spoken Hebrew told stories about the thin veneer of Hebrew speech breaking under the impact of fever or in a husband's absence, later generations of Zionists increasingly had wondrous tales to recount, especially of the children who had been born and educated in the new Hebrew schools of the yishuv. Anecdotal material about the new generation of Hebrew-speaking children reveals how profoundly the linguistic transformation symbolized a psychosexual one. Whereas the Ben-Yehuda family drama had pitted male against female speech, the new psycholinguistic drama was taking place within the structure of Jewish masculinity. Itamar Even-Zohar, with barely concealed pride in the macho character of Hebrew, in the success of Zionism at “transforming the identity, the very nature of the people,” relates the well-known story of the visit of two Yiddishists to pre-World War I Tel Aviv who watch the schoolboys leave the Herzliya Gymnasium after classes have been dismissed for the day.

The elder one says to the other: “The Zionists boast that Hebrew is becoming the natural tongue for the children of Palestine. I will show you that they are lying. I will tweak one of the boy's ears, and I promise you that he will not cry out ‘Ima’ but ‘mame’ in Yiddish.”

So saying, he approached one of the boys and tweaked his ear. The boy turned on him and shouted “hamor” [donkey, in Hebrew]. The Yiddishist turned to his friend and said: “I'm afraid the Zionists are right.”³³

This anecdote is so similar to others that arose about different figures (usually connected in some way with Yiddish) that one can detect in it a “joke type.” The success stories of the Hebrew revival, and this anecdote is of course an example, often involved children, as in the Yiddish poet Yehoash's awed report of the Tel Aviv street urchins playing ball “in Hebrew.”³⁴ The awe of older Yiddish-speaking Jews visiting Palestine, either sincere or exaggerated by proud Hebraists, seems to apply equally to the two—presumably related—phenomena: children speaking Hebrew and Jewish children playing ball. The implications of the anecdote about the two Yiddishists, however, go further than the suggestion that the new generation has succeeded in acquiring a new mother tongue or even that it enjoys sports. Itamar Even-Zohar interprets this joke as suggesting that “a nation cannot be tweaked by the ear and cry ‘mother,’ that is, run for help to its mother. The ‘Jewish mother’ thus had become culturally incomprehensible.”³⁵ Implicit in all the anecdotes related here is not only the obsolescence of the “Jewish mother” but also the replacement of the despised diaspora “femininity” with a new model for Jewish masculine behavior. Mame-loshn is, literally, the language of “mama's boys,” whereas Hebrew is the language of the ferocious, disrespectful young.

Yeshurun Keshet relates another anecdote that circulated somewhat later, after the refugees of Hitler's Europe began to arrive: a refugee child in one of the temporary camps that had been set up beside a kibbutz ran crying home to his mother, “Mame, di hebre'ishe shkotsim'lekh viln mikh shlogn” (Mama, the little Hebrew gentile boys want to hit me).³⁶ Keshet's story captures the difference between the Yiddish-speaking diasporic Jewish male, clinging to his mother in fear and helplessness, and his fierce Hebrew counterpart, who is associated, in the mind of the Yiddish child, with the non-Jewish hoodlums of Europe. The new Hebrew male, this anecdote seems to be saying, is so different from his diasporic other that recognizing him as Jewish requires a major shift in the Jewish/non-Jewish paradigm. This last story, however, has a pathos lacking in the jokes I related earlier, since the young refugee boy is genuinely afraid, unlike the older Yiddishists. The unadulterated pride with which the earlier anecdotes were repeated is somewhat mixed, in this anecdote, with the bittersweet regret that overtook even the most fervent Hebraists in the wake of the genocide of European Jewry.

It is no coincidence, perhaps, that one of the most notorious acts of hostility by the militant Brigade for the Defense of the Language was its struggle in the autumn of 1930 against the showing of the Yiddish film Di yidishe mame, which Arye Pilovski describes as of “extremely limited aesthetic value” but which was nevertheless the occasion of an international Jewish scandal.³⁷ Pilovski relates that the film was only shown after protests and threats under the protection of the British police, and even then the brigade succeeded in disrupting the event. When additional screenings were canceled, the Yiddish press decried the “pogram” against Yiddish in Palestine.³⁸ Yosef Klausner, in an article protesting the film when it was first scheduled, explained the Hebraist fervor as implicitly connected with the film, rather than merely finding a convenient scapegoat in it. As Klausner put it, Yiddish was dangerous precisely because it was the language of “our mothers and the masses.”³⁹ The sentimental Yiddish film, with its clear call for loyalty to the Jewish mother and its appeal to a broad audience, represented more than just a linguistic danger to new Hebrew speakers. It also threatened to wear down the emotional barriers that the Hebrew pioneers shored up not only against Yiddish but also against its symbolic attractions.

At least some of what is at stake in these stories transcends the Hebrew revival and the Hebrew-Yiddish conflict. The Zionist embrace of masculinism has derivations other than the Hebrew-Yiddish language conflict. The fin-de-siècle Central European cult of youth and athletics (and in a previous generation, dueling fraternities) certainly contributed to Zionist culture. Theodor Herzl envisioned Zionism as a means by which Jews could “become real men.” Michael Berkowitz describes the Zionist agenda as follows:

[Herzl's] attitude, shared by most early Zionists, was an internal and external disavowal of the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish men as unmanly, and it affirmed the European-wide equation of manliness and rightful membership in the nation. The way to a “new Jewish existence” could only be reached through participation in a “society of friends,” or “a special type of comradeship” that was possible for Jewish men only through Zionism. This myth reflected the reality of a movement, which, like the larger society, was male-dominated. The inaugural assembly of 250 Zionists included only around twelve female delegates, and women were not accorded voting rights until the Second Congress. To be a Zionist was to “take a manly stand” and be a manly man, asserting the Jews' rightful place among the people of the world.⁴⁰

Max Nordau's influential speech on “Muskeljudentum” (Jewry of Muscle) on the opening of the Zionist sports organization Bar Kokhba is perhaps the clearest statement of the necessity of improving the physical prowess of feminized Jewish men. In a passionate appeal for global Jewish transformation, Nordau contrasts the stereotypical Jewish male with his vision for a new variety of Jewish masculinity, but one that was once the rightful property of Jewish men: “In the narrow Jewish street our poor limbs soon forgot their gay movements; in the dimness of sunless houses our eyes began to blink shyly. … Let us take up our oldest traditions; let us once more become deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men.”⁴¹

Considering the degree to which Hebraism was intended as a program for the most fundamental self-transformation, it is not surprising that the first step in Hebraization often entailed a name change, or that the Brigade considered it a public service to help people Hebraize their names. Elon describes the practice of name changing (which appears in a number of biblical stories) as a “magical” act. The Hebraizing of diaspora names can be traced to

the old Jewish custom of changing the name of a very sick man in the hope of cheating the angel of death. Thus, it may be more than accident that so many Jewish refugees from lands of persecution—even more often their sons—have shown a proclivity to redefine themselves with names that denote firmness, toughness, strength, courage, and vigor: Yariv (“antagonist”); Oz (“strength”); Tamir (“towering”); Lahat (“blaze”); Kabiri (“tremendous”); Hod (“splendor,” “majesty”); Barak (“lightning”); Tsur (“rock”); Nechushtan (“bronze”); Bar Adon (“son of the master,” or “masterful”); or even Bar Shilton (“fit to govern”).⁴²

Although the Hebraization of women's family names typically followed that of their husbands or fathers, sometimes women took the opportunity of the widespread name changes to take on their own Hebrew names; these names can reveal something to us about how self-transformation was viewed by women, who could be assumed to be outside the cult of Hebraic masculinism. Among the most prominent examples are writers like Rachel, who dropped her family name altogether. Rachel's use of her first name alone, which is in keeping with her poetics of simplicity, might also signal a newfound freedom from both the European past and her own family history. The name also serves to present the poet as a neobiblical character or as a woman with whom her reading public could feel itself on an intimate first-name basis. The Hebrew poet Yocheved Bat-Miriam (the daughter of Miriam) chose a matronym, as Ilana Pardes calls it, thus adopting her own foremother as a voluntary family affiliation. “Bat-Miriam's choice of a name,” Pardes argues, “needs to be seen both as a concrete challenge to the patrilinear naming system and as a critique of culture in which literary tradition, like names, is passed down from father to son.”⁴³

In feminine reworkings of Zionist/Hebraist practice such as Bat-Miriam's, the desire to forge a connection with the biblical past often turned out to contain an element of feminist subversion (just as the feminine use of the biblical topos “land = beloved woman” could produce a lesbian rather than a normative heterosexual love poem). In the case of Bat-Miriam's adoption of a name, the reversal of a biblical parent-child relationship—in the Bible Yocheved is the mother of Miriam—in the modern Hebrew name can also be seen in the light of the Zionist reversal of the parent-child hierarchy. Here, the biblical mother becomes the daughter's daughter, or alternatively, the biblical daughter becomes the mother's mother, so that biological affiliation and the respect and authority traditionally invested in the older generation give way to a fluid model of imaginative and voluntary affiliations.

Other women writers chose names from nature, as did many men. Malka Shechtman, for instance, called herself Bat-Chama, daughter of the sun.⁴⁴ Again, in cases like these, the feminine version of the Zionist model often contained an additional revolutionary element, since the women were clearly setting up a personal rather than a dynastic or family model of name transmission. A brief perusal of a collection of articles by Zionist women workers published in 1930 suggests how widespread such name changes were among women: of forty-five contributors, ten used only their first names and three used a single initial as a surname. Among these ten, two names are of Yiddish origin while one is European; the others are Hebrew names (it is impossible to decide whether these names were adopted, though names like Carmela and Techiya have a distinctly Zionist ring). Of the family names, one, Bat-Rachel, is a matronym. One woman signs herself Dinah Bat-Chorin (Dinah the Free Woman, or Dinah the Daughter of a Free Person), while another one is called Nechama Bat-Tsiyon (Nechama the Daughter of Zion).⁴⁵ A woman taking a name like Bat-Chorin or Bat-Tsiyon was doing more than transforming a Yiddish family name into a Hebrew one; she was also rejecting the patriarchal transmission of family names. To adopt a family name with a clear feminine marker, even as a pen name, was to declare independence from husband and father.

In other cases, name changes revealed both the revolutionary discontinuities called for by Hebraism and the submerged continuities that managed to survive even the most extreme attempts at Zionist self-transformation. The Hebrew poet Avot Yeshurun, in an interview in the mid-1970s, explained how and why he changed his name from Yechiel Perlmutter. The name change was not only from a diasporic name to a Hebrew one but also from a name with a recognizable Yiddish meaning (Pearl-mother, or Mother-of-Pearl), which includes a reference to “mother” rare in a family name, to a Hebrew name that means either “fathers of Jerusalem” or “Fathers are watching us” (Avot, fathers; Yeshurun, “are or will be watching us”). When the interviewer asked Yeshurun about his unusual name, the poet answered that he had chosen the first name, Avot, on his first day in the army, immediately after the founding of the state of Israel. He had long wanted to change his name, but he felt particularly strongly that he should have a Hebrew name for the swearing-in ceremony that was to take place the following day. Yeshurun described how he had lain awake most of the night, trying to think of a name that would suit him.

At dawn, I said to myself: remember your childhood. Maybe I could come up with something from my childhood. I remembered my mother singing beautiful lullabies to my brothers in her beautiful voice. Once, she bent over the cradle and sang to the youngest one in Yiddish and Ukrainian. But the children wouldn't fall asleep, and my mother stopped singing and instead called out excitedly, “tatelekh, tatelekh” [a common Yiddish endearment meaning “little fathers, little fathers”]. And then the child understood that she wasn't going to sing and he went to sleep himself. From this I took the name “Avot” and was very satisfied with it.⁴⁶

Yeshurun's story is emblematic in a number of ways. The first of these might be the poet's sense of the importance of finding himself a Hebrew name for the occasion of his induction into the new Israeli army. Any Hebrew name would signify a new masculinity, given the associations of the language with the proud biblical history of Jewish sovereignty; but Yeshurun was not simply translating his name from German or Russian into Hebrew, as many did, but selecting a name that would confer a new identity befitting a Hebrew warrior. In calling himself Avot, he not only chose a name that would signify his belief in a new and powerful connection with his patrilineage, he also erased the old name, with its associations of femininity and its recognizably Yiddish sound. If we read Avot as a replacement of his previous first name Yechiel (God lives or will live), another theme becomes prominent. In this substitution, the modern Hebrew name presents a human—albeit male—history in the place of the traditional Hebrew (or Yiddishized) Jewish name that refers to divine faith. Instead of asserting the existence and authority of God, the new name asserts the human continuities of Jewish history.

Nevertheless, the account Yeshurun gives of his self-transformation also indicates that his name expressed a strong sense of continuity with his past, in the form of his Yiddish-speaking mother. The name Avot, for all its patriarchal grandeur, in fact is a translation of the Yiddish term used for little boys, “little fathers.” Translated back into Yiddish, the name means “little boys are watching us,” as if Yeshurun were reversing the course of his own history or imagining his present circumstances from the amazed perspective of a little Eastern European child. The disappearance of the diminutive in the move to Hebrew might signal the process of replacing a Yiddish childhood with a Hebrew adulthood, but it might also be a clever concealment of the continuing existence of the Yiddish boy. Yeshurun's memorializing of his mother is also curiously ambiguous. By having her choose his name, as it were, he admits her continued importance to his new life. But the story of his choice and the name itself also signify her absence, erasure, or silence. The name comes, that is, at the moment when the mother breaks off her lullaby and moves away, just as the young man chose his name at the moment when his youth would be ruptured by his shouldering of the adult burdens of a Zionist soldier. This account, in all its complexity, reveals something of the ways in which radical discontinuity and continuity combine with masculine/feminine models of identity in the Zionist narrative.

III

The discussion of Hebrew and Yiddish occurred not at the margins of the Yiddishist canon but at its very center. Major Yiddish writers dedicated many poems to the struggle for the survival of Yiddish and against Hebraist claims. To read the outlines of the Hebrew-Yiddish language war in the Hebraist environment, however, requires an attention to the sub-canonical and marginal texts of the period. The Hebrew writers of the moderna (the Hebrew modernist generation) perceived their greatest achievement as the creation of a monolingual, “natural” Hebrew, one that could express their new environment without undue self-consciousness or linguistic borrowing. But the margins of this literature attest to the strain of defending the borders of this monolingualism and reveal the traces of what was suppressed in the creation of modern and of modernist Hebrew literature. Yiddish literature, by way of contrast, could afford to address directly the Hebrew it could also easily encompass in its own linguistic repertoire.

Yiddishists confronted with the sexual politics of the Hebrew-Yiddish language war had two choices. They could resist the identification of Yiddish with women and insist on its status as the language of the “masses”; Yehoash's new Yiddish translation of the Bible would certainly be counted among the efforts to reenvision Yiddish as a language for men as well as women. Or they could emphasize Yiddish's feminine roots. The Yiddish writer Y. L. Peretz's speech at the 1908 Tshernovits Yiddish Conference provided modern Yiddish literature with both its patrilineage and its matrilineage. Peretz's genealogy implies the continuity between the older Yiddish literature for women and the newer Yiddish literature, which also responds to the needs of a marginalized public.

Yiddish literature does not begin with Isaac Meir Dik. Its “Genesis” is the Chasidic tale. … But then the Jewish woman, the young Jewish girl also demanded something for herself. With that we get the “books for women.” And ivre-teytsh became mame-loshn.

The Jewish people have two languages. The first one is for the studious men in the study hall: the language of Torah, of Talmud; and the second one for the masses, and for the Jewish daughter. … And then comes the Jewish worker, who finds his tools for survival, for a workers' culture, in Yiddish.⁴⁷

The Yiddish novelist Sholem Ash, also speaking at the conference, presented a resolution to translate the Bible into Yiddish (a project ultimately realized by the poet Yehoash). Ash both acknowledged the need for a more modern translation than the Tsenerene, which was not, strictly speaking, a translation at all, and paid tribute to the women's literature that “preserved our folk-spirit … and from [which] we have been spiritually nourished.”⁴⁸

Debates about the status of Yiddish circled and recircled the territory Peretz and Ash laid out in Tshernovits with surprising tenacity. The project of translating the Bible into Yiddish suggested that Yiddish now had to serve the needs of a new audience, one defined by class or ideological interests rather than gender. The translation of the Bible into Yiddish, it was felt, would set Yiddish on the level of other world languages, on the one hand, and of Hebrew, on the other. As Katznelson-Shazar described what she saw as the illogical argument for the translation: “Can the Hebrew Bible be translated into all languages and not Yiddish, the language of the Jews, so that those Jews who know only Yiddish won't know the Bible?”⁴⁹ For her, this rhetorical question was illogical precisely because it saw an equivalence between Yiddish and other languages.

You can translate the Bible into German or English, because there is an equality between those languages and the language of the Bible, an equality that does not exist between that language and Yiddish; because no two languages have such different programs as those two, because we divided the contents of our lives between them.⁵⁰

In these remarks, Katznelson-Shazar lays out the perception many Yiddishists were combatting, that Yiddish would always be a partial language, doomed to a complementary and subsidiary role in relation to Hebrew. Set in these terms, it becomes clear why a new translation of the Bible should have been perceived as so (paradoxically) necessary for demonstrating Yiddish's independence from Hebrew.

While many Yiddishists preferred to set the female audience for Yiddish literature in the past, staking out new territory for the language, others celebrated precisely this feminine history. The major Yiddish poet Yankev Glatshteyn, who published his first poems under a female pseudonym, made the most of the connections between Yiddish and women, often taking the part of women and Yiddish simultaneously. In his 1929 collection Kredos, Glatshteyn responds to the ill treatment of the Yiddish writers in the yishuv in poems that often embody the silenced other of these poems in female characters. One poem is entitled “There Where the Cedars,” in an ironic reference to the well-known song “There Where the Cedars Bloom” sung by German-speaking Zionists, which is itself reworked from a patriotic German song, “The Watch on the Rhine,” popular at the turn of the century. The German original is evident behind the revised Zionist lyrics:

There where the cedar kisses the sky,
And where the Jordan quickly flows by,
There where the ashes of my father lie,
In that exalted Reich, on sea and sand,
Is my beloved, true Fatherland.(51)

While the father and “Fatherland” are prominent in the Zionist version of the song, Glatshteyn's portrait of “where the cedars bloom” (the title cannot be bothered to complete the trite phrase) foregrounds the women who have been omitted in the other version, replacing “the ashes of my father” with the living, if silent, matriarch Rachel:

There where the cedars bloom—
They don't let you speak Yiddish.
They don't let my language touch the lips.
Mother Rachel, who cried her way through the entire
          taytsh-chumesh,
Lies at the crossroad and waits, silent—
She would cry for her children
But she only knows Zhargon.(52)

The power of Glatshteyn's Yiddishist message lies not only in its sentimental rhetoric of maternity but also in its appropriation of Zionist themes, beginning with the title (and Glatshteyn, later in the poem, uses some Hebrew as well) and continuing with the claim that the matriarch Rachel properly belongs, not to the Hebrew Bible or to the Holy Land, but to the Yiddish translation of the Bible for women and to her diaspora children. Glatshteyn's ploy could work, of course, not only because Rachel has been associated with the diaspora but also because of the associations he could count on his audience to make between Yiddish and women, especially older women.

Glatshteyn's bitterness at the Zionist suppression of Yiddish long outlasted the years of the outright “language war.” In a poem first published in 1961, “Ret tsu mir yidish” (Speak Yiddish with Me), the poetic speaker calls Israel “my Yiddish (or Jewish) country” and promises to answer in Hebrew if he is addressed in Yiddish. In the earlier poem, Glatshteyn used the figure of Rachel to personify the silenced language. Here, however, it is the men who suffer the brunt of the repression, while the women are still allowed some leeway in their expressive freedom. Thus the poetic speaker discovers a loophole in the masculinist Hebrew program, finding a conversational partner in the Jewish woman. The different status of men and women in the Hebrew project is implied in the second stanza, where he spies his “grandparents,” the patriarchs Abraham and Sarah (of course, Yankev is the Yiddish form of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham and Sarah):

God help us, Grandpa-Grandma.
Abraham is crossing the street in silence.
Don't take it to heart, Yankele,
Says Sarah, he understands every word.
That's the way it goes here.
A man has to stifle his Yiddish.
But a Jewess from the yidish-taytsh
Still has something to say.

Sarah comforts Yankele, the poetic persona, by reassuring him that although Avrom is silent, “Hu meyvin kol dibur” (He understands every word)—a Hebrew code phrase inserted into Yiddish speech to warn the interlocutor that a nearby non-Jew can understand Yiddish, as Janet Hadda points out in her analysis of this poem.⁵³ Thus the poem enacts two dislocations of traditional Jewish values, one social and one linguistic: the patriarchs are imagined as Yiddish speakers, as generations of Ashkenazic domestications of biblical figures had rendered them; and as Yiddish speakers, they are treated as outsiders in the Jewish state. In this context, the function of the Hebrew code phrase is completely reversed, working to reassure Yankele that Abraham is not an outsider rather than warning him that he is. Glatshteyn's clever reminders of the historical interconnectedness of Hebrew and Yiddish reinforce the poem's message that Hebrew speakers may not have changed as completely as the Zionists boast.

The discourse of linguistic maternity was so powerful that Hebraists could not completely cede the role of “mother tongue” to Yiddish. Arguing for the sole legitimacy of Hebrew as the Jewish national tongue, Achad Ha'am rhetorically asked whether the proper language for an individual can be any but the one in which “they sang to him lullabies, that was rooted in his soul before he even knew who he was and which developed along with him.”⁵⁴ What is true for the individual, Achad Ha'am claims, is also true for the nation. But the rhetorical move he makes in this passage is a contradictory one, since the metaphorical mother tongue of his audience (as a national collective) may have been Hebrew but the one in which many of them were in fact lulled to sleep was Yiddish. At stake, of course, was not only the emotional power of this maternal rhetoric but also the long-entrenched connections between nationality and the concept of mother tongue. Thus Achad Ha'am needed to establish a matrilineal heritage for Hebrew, not only the readily available patrilineal one. While thirty years before, only those writers who chose Yiddish were expected to defend their language choice, now the Yiddishists had a “natural” claim to their language that Hebrew ideologues were at pains to duplicate.

IV

In 1927, the Yiddish writers Sholem Ash and Perets Hirshbein visited Palestine to witness the Zionist revolution and make a gesture of goodwill and reconciliation with the Hebraists. Over the objections of some of the younger and more militantly Hebraist of its members, the Hebrew Writers Union arranged a reception in their honor. The Hebrew poet Chayim Nachman Bialik gave the keynote address, sounding the familiar note of Hebrew-Yiddish complementarity to welcome the Yiddish writers but subtly reminding the audience, as well, of the hierarchy that governed the relationship between Hebrew and Yiddish. Bialik began his speech by alluding to the hostility with which he had been received in New York a few years before and noting the warm welcome extended to the Yiddish writers in Tel Aviv, since, “thank God,” the Hebrew-Yiddish language war had already been settled in Palestine. A newspaper report the following day summarized the rest of his speech.

Hebrew and Yiddish are a marriage made in heaven that can never be sundered, just like Ruth and Naomi, but the very instant that Yiddish tries to cut herself off from Hebrew, she ceases to be ours. … The edict of Rabbenu Gershom [against bigamy] does not apply to languages at the present.⁵⁵

Bialik begins by describing Hebrew-Yiddish relations through the presumably necessary institution of marriage, a fated and irrevocable link. In the next phrase, though, Hebrew and Yiddish are tied by something closer to a friendship between women. This partnership, moreover, is between a Jewish woman and one whose origins are non-Jewish (presumably like Yiddish). Yiddish, like Ruth, is a visitor in Palestine on sufferance and liable to be evicted if she does not follow the rules and stick close to Naomi. The transformation of the married couple into a pair of women apparently called to Bialik's mind that other familiar trope the Yiddish cartoonists loved to exploit: the writer “at the present” may, if he chooses, take two wives. The language laws are more permissive, in this analogy, than those that govern Jewish marriages.

Over the next few days, the Socialist-Zionist organ of the Hebrew Writers Union recorded the reactions of other Hebrew writers to the polite welcome accorded the visiting emissaries from the world of Yiddish. The writers who boycotted the reception were primarily of a younger generation, and their responses had nothing of the tempered good manners the speeches at the reception had demonstrated. The younger Hebrew poet Avraham Shlonsky described the reception as a farce, an empty diplomatic ceremony that could not mask the urgent need for a decisive stance on the language question. In a direct and disdainful reference to Bialik's moderate position on Yiddish in Palestine, Shlonsky attacked those who signed the “marriage contract” without acquiring the power of attorney from the Hebrew camp.

We never accepted the match between the languages, so we're not going to dance at the wedding. And we're not going to wait for any Rabbenu Gershom to make a rabbinical decree against multilingualism. … We want our Erets-Israeli breath to be purely Hebrew. With both lungs!⁵⁶

Shlonsky's response to Bialik's pious blessing of the eternal linguistic union of Hebrew and Yiddish became a rallying cry, but not because it shed any new light on the language question: after all, Shlonsky did no more than rephrase Bialik's remarks in the negative. Shlonsky's slogan, “We never accepted the match between the languages,” was echoed because he succeeded in fusing a revolutionary sexual ethic with a call for an exclusive loyalty to Hebrew. Bialik projected the Hebraist disavowal of Yiddish onto the camp of the Yiddishists, claiming that Hebrew had no need to mistreat Yiddish and was in the position to make grand gestures of acceptance. By contrast, Shlonsky took full, conscious responsibility for the ideological repudiation of Yiddish, using this repudiation to launch a generational war against the poetic norms of Bialik and his epigones. And while Bialik's words are no more than a mildly clever extension of an exhausted metaphor, as automatic as the melitsah allusiveness Shlonsky decried in his futurist manifestos of the early twenties, Shlonsky's answer recharges the metaphor's dormant sexual dimension. Shlonsky, as the fiery revolutionary of the moderna, had to counter the implication in Bialik's speech that openness to Yiddish was somehow connected with sexual freedom. He did so by announcing that his own disinterest in having two women had nothing to do with conformity to rabbinical law. In Shlonsky's formulation, the move to a revitalized Hebrew and away from Yiddish requires no apology or concession to tradition. Shlonsky takes Bialik's heterosexual metaphor and reworks it into a rejection of marital laws and a plea for the health of the solitary body who “breathes” Hebrew with both lungs (presumably rather than splitting his lung capacity between two languages). Hebraism, for Shlonsky, is a gesture of both literary and erotic freedom, an expression of (masculine) liberation from both a conservative literary code and a repressive sexual order.

Historians have begun to explore the degree to which the Zionist revolution was also an erotic revolution, to use David Biale's resonant phrase.⁵⁷ But it is also true that the rhetoric of Hebraism and Hebrew modernism—including the discourse of the Hebrew-Yiddish language war—was intricately connected with that of erotic transformation. The twenties, in particular, saw an explosion of manifestos, speeches, and poems that championed Hebrew modernism alongside with and as an expression of a new sexual ethos. Bialik's and Shlonsky's remarks on the status of Yiddish in Palestine made full use of what had become, by 1927, a ramified and condensed code for talking about the language conflict and the sexual promises of the Zionist experiment simultaneously.

Shlonsky's rhetorical stance in the Ash-Hirshbein affair, then, was part of a larger project of infusing the new Hebrew poetry with the energy and dynamism of a sexual (as well as political) revolution. For Shlonsky, the Russian Revolution, which he admired, demanded a reshaping of poetic style, a transformation he thought of as intimately connected with a new model of manhood. The poetry of his day was too feminine, too timid, false, and ornamental, Shlonsky argued in a 1923 manifesto.

Do you remember Pisagov? He wanted to hear a coquettish woman speak in a simple, natural voice. What did he do? He snuck up behind her back and with a block of wood—hit her on the head! And when a great shout came out of the startled and wounded woman, he knew: This is her natural voice!

That's it! There is too much of the feminine in literature and especially in poetry: it minces, acts charming, and flirts.

World literature should have been knocked on the head by the Russian Revolution, so that the natural voice of humanity should ring out, the voice of the poet, the voice of pain! Only in prison did the dandy Oscar Wilde begin to speak in a human voice, and the word “sorrow” first flowed from his pen in “De Profundis.”⁵⁸

What the pain and shock of revolution could do for literature, Shlonsky argues, was to rid poetry of the coquette and the dandy, the woman and the homosexual.

More usually, Shlonsky spoke of the poetic revolution of his generation in terms of a revolt against the sexual constraints of an earlier day. In a 1922 manifesto, Shlonsky made particularly brilliant use of the rhetoric of sexual revolution to describe modernist changes in Hebrew poetics; he compared the previous generation's sublime style of compulsory biblical allusions to a traditional marriage in which sexual relations have become habitual and automatic. The Hebrew modernist rejection of allusiveness, in Shlonsky's formulation, echoes the calls for free love and erotic liberation that characterized some aspects of the Zionist social experiment.

Civil marriage, free love between words, without arranged matches of style, without family pedigrees and dowries of associations, and most important: without the bridal canopy and the marital blessings! (There is too much family purity in our language!)

Any combination of words—lawless attachments, one-night stands.⁵⁹

Zohar Shavit, in her study of yishuv literature and ideology, interprets Shlonsky's vehement attack on Bialik's stance toward Yiddish as merely a pretext for his poetic revolution against the hegemony of Bialik's style.⁶⁰ But in an important sense, the internal poetic struggles of Hebrew literature and the larger linguistic conflict intersected. By the twenties and thirties, with the growth of spoken Hebrew in Palestine, Hebrew was itself developing what could be called “internal diglossia,” with the gap between the lofty quasi-biblical style that characterized the Hebrew poetry of Bialik's generation and the vernacular that could already be heard on the streets of Tel Aviv becoming increasingly apparent to the younger generation of writers. Thus Shlonsky's explicit agenda of lowering the register of Hebrew poetry, one he only partially realized, demanded a double-pronged attack—first, on the sublime style of Bialik and his epigones, and second, on the threatened encroachment (and historical primacy) of Yiddish as the modern Jewish vernacular. And he could use similar rhetorical strategies in both battles, since the Hebrew high style and the Yiddish vernacular were part of the same traditional structure that was encoded in and exemplified by rigid and stultifying gender codes. The Hebrew sublime and the denigrated Yiddish coarse speech, in other words, are two sides of the same obsolete coin. Shlonsky's radical refusal of bilingualism, and his couching of this refusal in a marital metaphor, recalls Ben-Yehuda's determination to create a “pure” Hebrew atmosphere for what Harshav refers to as the First Hebrew Child. Both projects combine the creation of a monolingual environment with the refusal of female company and feminine speech.

The poet Uri-Tsvi Greenberg stands at the other end of the ideological spectrum from Shlonsky, but their modernist programs are remarkably similar in linking Hebraism with a new masculinity. Greenberg began his literary career as a Yiddish poet, moving to Hebrew poetry and right-wing Zionism only after migrating to Palestine in 1923. His 1926 Masculinity Rising describes the poetic speaker's immigration to Palestine and subsequent shift to writing in Hebrew as a psychosexual transformation. The section “From the Depths” (or “De Profundis”) combines the language of Psalms and the long, overheated phrases of expressionism to lament the poet's descent into the mires of European promiscuity and decadence. Whereas Wilde's sojourn in prison, as Shlonsky saw it, meant his abandonment of dandyism, Greenberg associates the depths with the degradation of an emasculating, hyperactive heterosexuality.

(Meanwhile: a smartly pressed body, bowtie on the chest, fragrantly coiffed hair, patent-leather shoes, a sneer, and a cigarette …) …

And even he did not come to me: my savior—madness, to rescue me from woman, from law, and from poesy—from the prison of the phrase …

And I, even then I was a Nazirite-of-sorrow: biting my lips when nobody was watching, full of gangrene inside,

Even when I gave a quivering body to the fornications of ten women—

For I hated the woman with a pity as rigid as metal and the lie became holy, because I pitied the corpse that the lie flung down beneath me.⁶¹

The poem echoes Marinetti's famous futurist call for freedom from women, the past, and the well-ordered sentence; this poetic speaker, though, is still imprisoned in these bonds. There is hope for him: even in the embrace of the woman, “the corpse that the lie flung down beneath me,” the poet retains the asceticism that will reach fruition in the rigors of pioneer life in Palestine.

In the next poem of the cycle, “In the Land of the Prophets,” the suffering European poet is saved from his sexual and literary hell not by madness but by the Jerusalem air, the company of comrades, and the Hebrew language, which together produce a body-text punctuated by what could be called an electric masculinity.

Exclamation points are shouted into my flesh like lightning bolts. Masculinity rising in the climate of the land of the prophets

And I was born in Poland a soft child of Judaism and my father's oldest son

(How could this Jerusalem body have been born in Poland?)⁶²

Just as “From the Depths” sets the poet off from his decadent surroundings even as he participates most fully in its rituals, “In the Land of the Prophets” carries the memory—wondrous or anxious—of the “soft child” of the diaspora in the thrill of self-transformation. Greenberg's rhetorical question measures not only the distance traveled from his contingent, inappropriate birth but also the potential instability of the Zionist transformation of the male Jew.

In Greenberg's 1928 manifesto To the Ninety Nine, the effeminacy he rails against is no longer in the European past; in a scornful tirade against the vast majority of Hebrew writers, Greenberg dismisses Hebrew poetry as a literature of “manicured nails,” a “spoiled queen in silk slippers.”⁶³ Like Shlonsky, Greenberg believed that the new poetic style required an escape from the restraints of an old order that emasculated and domesticated the male poet. In the passage that most clearly connects domesticity and traditionalism with women, Greenberg slyly praises the instincts of the common man over those of the hidebound, sentimental, Hebrew poet.

The common man, when the storm has blown over, comes out of hiding and asks the Rabbi: “Is my wife permitted or forbidden me?” The common man understands that a catastrophe has occurred. The poet, though, when the rioters have passed, comes out of hiding and peeks: at the sun and the blooming acacia … and doesn't ask the exposed and hushed life about his muse, what is his muse to him now in this bloodstained world? She continues to be his beloved to the end of time.⁶⁴

The allusion here, of course, is to Bialik's famous poem on the Kishinev pogrom “In the City of Slaughter.” In Bialik's poem, though, it is the priests (who have a stricter marital code) who emerge from hiding to ask if they can resume relations with a wife who has been raped: “Rabbi, is my wife permitted or forbidden to me?” Bialik bitterly continues: “And everything goes back to the way it was, everything is normal again.” Greenberg audaciously reverses what is itself a searing indictment of Jewish political passivity. In his version, the man who questions whether he can resume relations with his wife is not servile and politically impotent but rather the only one who recognizes the power of historical trauma to disrupt domestic tranquility. By contrast, the Hebrew poet's return to his beloved muse attests to his blindness to the horrors of contemporary life. The proper response to the ravages of the present is a rejection of sentiment and convention, in literature as in nation building.

The sense that Hebrew liberated its speakers from an antiquated domestic order was sometimes expressed by women as well, although usually the fatal femininity was located in the older generation. Rachel Katznelson-Shazar, the critic and editor of the Woman Workers' Word who also moved from the Yiddish camp to Hebraism, described Hebrew as a revolutionary language, freeing its speakers from a stifling maternal embrace.

There was something in Yiddish literature that reminded one of a mother. Its writers couldn't see or artistically penetrate into the inner lives of our distressed people. In the same way, the mother cannot see in the soul of her son all his inner wars, his sins, for, after all, he is her son and she is just a mother. …

In those days, right after the [failed] 1905 Russian revolution, when our nation was under such stress, there was something soporific in the best of Yiddish literature, a lack of wings, and it was hard to breathe in its presence. There was a time when the shtetl was exactly the same for us as it was for [Sholem] Ash: a special world, self-sustaining and nourished from its own beauty, but that's not what we needed then, on the eve of the Second Aliya. For if all we had was the capacity to see and think as it was revealed in Yiddish, we could no longer have thought our people to be one of the great nations.⁶⁵

Katznelson-Sharar contrasts the narrow horizons of Yiddish literature with the greater scope of Hebrew literature, which can see past the limited world of small-town Eastern Europe. Unlike her male counterparts, she continued to express the attractions of the mother tongue, even if they turn out to be ultimately illusory. For Katznelson-Shazar, it is the older generation of women who personify Yiddish, not her own—and this may be the move that allows her to participate so fervently in the sexually charged rhetoric of Hebraism. In this passage, she tells the story of rejecting the mother tongue not as the rejection of femininity per se but as the necessary break from the stifling maternal nest.

The poems and manifestos of international modernism express the conviction that the old ways of life, including the traditional sexual and domestic order, were exploding—or should be. For the Zionist modernist writers who left family and mother tongue behind, the Hebrew culture of Palestine was the clearest expression of the rupture of history, in its personal as well as national dimension. The furious outbreak that followed the Tel Aviv reception for the Yiddish writers cannot be understood outside this sense that Hebraism required the rejection of earlier codes, whether these were the sanctioned domesticity Shlonsky mocked, the maternal embrace Katznelson-Shazar escaped, or the heterosexual decadence over which Greenberg triumphed. The public debate that followed Shlonsky's rejection of the Hebrew-Yiddish “marriage made in heaven,” then, marks the end not only of traditional Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism but also of the Hebrew-Yiddish sexual-linguistic system as a whole. It is curious, therefore, that perhaps the most powerful phrase to describe this system was the metaphor proposed by Bialik and attacked by Shlonsky. The metaphor of Hebrew and Yiddish as husband and wife is, of course, implicit in the structure of Hebrew-Yiddish relations and underlies much of the metadiscourse of this language-culture. Nevertheless, the metaphor broke through to the surface of public discourse only at the moment when the long relationship between the two languages was finally dissolving.

Notes

1. See Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). Although Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose, does not explicitly discuss Ben-Yehuda's role in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, his study of the rise of Hebrew prose presents various ways in which Hebrew prose discovered or invented Hebrew style, idiom, and vocabulary for its own purposes—before, during, and after Ben-Yehuda's work. Alter traces these capacities to an educational system that could provide the basic tools for the creation of a realism “without vernacular,” but that helped lay the groundwork for the vernacular revival.

2. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 84.

3. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment [Hebrew], ed. Re'uven Sivan (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1978), 129-130.

4. Ibid., 9-10.

5. Of course, the phrase “the father of the Hebrew revival” is the English rather than the Hebrew term for Ben-Yehuda's role in reviving Hebrew. In Hebrew, he is called by the quasi-divine name of “mechaye hasafah,” the “reviver” of the language. Nevertheless, references to Ben-Yehuda's paternal role are ubiquitous in his own and in other writings on his contribution to the revival.

6. Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment, 83.

7. Ibid., 26.

8. Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founder and Sons (Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), 97. Elon's account draws from Ben-Yehuda's memoirs as well as those of his friends and acquaintances. A synopsis of these narratives can be found in Fellman, The Revival, 35-38.

9. Elon, The Israelis, 110.

10. Chemda Ben-Yehuda, Ben-Yehuda: His Life and Project [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben-Yehuda Press, 1940), 13. The story is also recounted in Robert St.-John, Tongue of the Prophets: The Life Story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (New York: Doubleday, 1952), 94. St.-John derives his material from English translations of Eliezer and Chemda Ben-Yehuda's memoirs as well as from personal interviews with surviving members of the Ben-Yehuda family, including Chemda.

11. Chemda Ben-Yehuda, Ben-Yehuda, 12.

12. Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment, 131.

13. Ibid., 57.

14. Fellman, The Revival, 58. Fellman reports Professor Rivlin's impressions of the Ben-Yehuda household, as relayed in a personal conversation between Rivlin and Fellman.

15. Itamar Ben-Avi, With the Dawn of Our Homeland: Memoirs of the First Hebrew Child [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Organization for the Publication of the Writings of Itamar Ben-Avi, 1961), 11.

16. Itamar Ben-Avi, Dawn of Our Homeland, 14.

17. Avrom Golomb, “People and Language: Jewish Nationality and Yiddish Language” [Yiddish], in Yearbook of the New Jewish School in Mexico, I. L. Perets (1962). Reprinted in Never Say Die, 152.

18. Itamar Ben-Avi, “The Hebrew Tongue on Women's Lips,” 1928, pamphlet (doc. A 43/104, Central Zionist Archives), 1.

19. For a collection of essays on women's contributions to the settling of Palestine, the Hebrew revival, and the labor movement, see Deborah S. Bernstein, ed., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

20. For a discussion of Chemda Ben-Yehuda's life and work, see Nurit Govrin, Honey from a Rock [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Misrad habitachon, 1989), 45-52.

21. Nechama Feinstein-Pukhachevski, “74 Questions of the Daughters” [1889], in Govrin, The First Half, 132-133.

22. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, “On Women and Hebrew” [Hebrew]; reprinted in Govrin, Honey from a Rock, 53.

23. It was not until the twenties that a generation of Hebrew-speaking women arose who had not encountered Hebrew from the wrong side of the mechitsa, as it were, but who had learned it as another language. The women poets of the Third Aliya were, in fact, successful at turning the Hebrew literary idiom into the flexible expressive instrument, outside of what Alter has called the “echo chamber” of Hebrew literary tradition. Poets like Esther Raab, arguably the first native Hebrew poet, and Rachel, who wrote a Hebrew as simple and distilled as the Russian Acmeist poets who were her influences, enacted the Hebrew modernist revolution Shlonsky called for but was unable to fully bring to fruition in his own work (his manifesto against allusion is, perhaps with conscious irony, itself a “tissue of quotations”), nor did he truly recognize it when he saw it. Nevertheless, the new generation of Hebrew women poets was never accepted as fully into the canon as the Yiddish women poets who arose during the same decade. See Michael Gluzman, “Suppressed Modernisms: Marginality, Politics, Canon Formation” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1993), 37-100.

24. Rachel Katznelson-Shazar, The Person as He-She Was [Hebrew], ed. Michal Hagiti (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, [1962] 1989), quoted from a 1931 entry in Katznelson-Shazar's diary, pp. 329-330.

25. Y. Avineri, “On Ze'ev Jabotinsky,” in Ze'ev Jabotinsky: On the Twentieth Anniversary of His Death [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hamashbir Hamercazi Press, 1961), 316-328.

26. Zev Jabotinsky [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hebrew Language Academy, 1970), 7.

27. Zrubavel, “We Accuse and Demand Responsibility” [Yiddish], in Journal of the League for the Rights of Yiddish in the Land of Israel (1936), 17-18, quoted in Never Say Die, 297-312. Zrubavel, a left-wing Labor Zionist who continued to champion Yiddish while living in Palestine, fought this and other similar anti-Yiddish policies.

28. Alter Druyanov, The Book of Jokes and Witticisms [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Dvir Press, [1945] 1991), joke no. 2663.

29. Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment, 205.

30. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution, 163.

31. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the letter of 6 Adar 1927, Jabotinsky's Letters [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Merkaz Press, 1972).

32. For an analysis of Israeli Hebrew speech patterns, see Tamar Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

33. Itamar Even-Zohar quotes from Druyanov's collection Jokes and Witticisms (Hebrew), in “Language Conflict and National Identity,” in Nationalism and Modernity: A Mediterranean Perspective, ed. Joseph Alpher (Haifa: University of Haifa, 1986), 131-132.

34. Yehoash, Ketuvim (1 May 1929).

35. Even-Zohar, “Language Conflict and National Identity,” 132.

36. Yeshurun Keshet, “The Works of Dvora Baron” [Hebrew], in Dvora Baron: A Selection of Critical Essays on Her Work, ed. Ada Pagis (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Press, 1974), 120.

37. This incident is discussed in Arye Pilovski, Between Yes and No: Yiddish and Yiddish Literature in Erets-Israel, 1907-1948 [Yiddish] (Tel Aviv: World Council for Yiddish and Jewish Culture, 1986), 213-215.

38. Pilovski, Between Yes and No, 214, cites a letter written originally to the Hebrew daily Do'ar hayom and reprinted in the Yiddish journal Literarishe bleter in which L. Chayn-Shimoni described the incident as a “pogrom.”

39. Cited in Pilovski, Between Yes and No, 213.

40. Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19.

41. Max Nordau, “Muskeljudentum,” Juedische Turnzeitung (June 1903), reprinted as “Muscular Judaism,” trans. J. Hessing, in The Jew in the Modern World, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 435.

42. Elon, The Israelis, 120.

43. Ilana Pardes, “The Poetic Strength of a Matronym,” in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, ed. Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidos Lerner, and Anita Norich (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 41-42.

44. For more on Bat-Chama, see Dan Miron's Founding Mothers, Stepsisters [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame'uchad Press, 1991), 13, 38-42.

45. Working Women's Word [Hebrew], ed. Rachel Katznelson-Shazar (Tel-Aviv: Mo'etset hapo'alot, 1930), i-iii.

46. Chayim Nagid, “An Interview with the Poet Avot Yeshurun” [Hebrew], Yediyot Achronot (11 October 1974).

47. Isaac Leyb Peretz, “Introductory Remarks” [Yiddish], in The First Yiddish Language Conference (Vilna, 1931), 66.

48. Sholem Ash, “Resolution” [Yiddish], in The First Yiddish Language Conference, 82.

49. Katznelson-Shazar, “Language Wanderings,” 192. This passage does not appear in the Yiddish translation.

50. Ibid., 192-193.

51. Amos Elon, Herzl (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 245.

52. Yankev Glatshteyn, “There Where the Cedars” [Yiddish], in Credos (New York: Verlag Yiddish Leben, 1929), 72.

53. Janet Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 140-141.

54. Achad Ha'am, “The Way of the Spirit” [Hebrew], At a Crossroad, vol. 2 (Dvir: Tel Aviv, [1898] 1961), 111.

55. “A Reception for Ash and Hirshbein” [Hebrew], Ketuvim (18 May 1927), 1.

56. Avraham Shlonsky, “On ‘Peace’” [Hebrew], Ketuvim (18 May 1927), 1.

57. See the chapter entitled “Zionism as an Erotic Revolution,” in David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

58. Avraham Shlonsky, “Freshness” [Hebrew] (1923), reprinted in The Successors of Symbolism in Poetry, ed. Benjamin Hrushovski (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1973), 153.

59. Avraham Shlonsky, “Poesy” [Hebrew], “Hump of the World” (1922), reprinted in The Successors of Symbolism in Poetry, 154.

60. Zohar Shavit, Literary Life in Palestine: 1910-1933 [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame'uchad Press, 1982), 176-177.

61. Uri-Tsvi Greenberg, The Complete Works [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990), 82.

62. Ibid., 85.

63. Uri-Tsvi Greenberg, To the Ninety Nine [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Sadan Press, 1928), 15.

64. Ibid., 20.

65. Katznelson-Shazar, “Language Wanderings,” 235-236.