Resituating Multilingualism in the History of Nationalist Language Revival: The Case of Jewish Palestine

The Zionist national movement’s promotion of Hebrew and the sidelining of competing vernaculars in the decades before the founding of the Israeli state have been emphasized by existing historiography. A period of language consolidation was in practice, however, also a time of language diversity. An increasingly Hebrew-speaking community, itself constituted of multilingual immigrants, remained in contact with the Jewish diaspora, the Palestinian Arab community, the British rulers of Palestine, and the cultures of Europe. These contacts rewarded existing linguistic competencies and, in certain circumstances, led to second-language instruction programs. How did advocates of Hebrew contend with the contradictions engendered by the persistence and utility of languages other than Hebrew during a time of growing Hebrew hegemony? How can the historical study of language use, proficiency, and contact outside or seemingly in contradiction with official national programs complicate our understanding of the workings of national consolidation in modern societies in contact with globalizing economies, migration flows, foreign powers, and transnational cultural forms?

Focusing on Zionists’ usage of, competence in, and contact with languages other than Hebrew between World War I and 1948, my presentation, based on my book that should be published just before the 2015 AHA conference, offers a journey through the spaces in the Jewish community that were not Hebrew—from multilingual marketplaces in Tel Aviv to British governmental offices in Jerusalem; from programs of persuasion directed at Palestinian Arabs to private spaces of leisure time activity—and reveals a society that remained, by both necessity and preference, connected to that which lay outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew Zionist community even while deeply committed to an emerging Hebrew culture. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a tale of a national community’s coming to terms with the limitations of its power in an interconnected world.