Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the first seminar in reconsidering of this term, at least, of reconsidering early Jewish nationalist ideologies.
I'm Peter Bergman and we're running the seminar.
Could have been even number two weeks in conjunction with the Israel Studies Seminar, which is a little bit different than last term.
But I think it's a good way to go.
Thank you very, very much for coming.
A couple of things before we introduce the speaker at the end, obviously, there will be a Q&A session for those of you who have questions.
If you click on the Q&A chat function, you'll be able to post a question.
Your name obviously will also come up with this.
And since this event is being recorded and will be streamed at some stage if you don't want to be identified.
Kind of free for posterity when we eventually send this out.
Please just indicate that in your question and I won't say a name otherwise.
I'd like to introduce my speaker with great pleasure, in fact.
Yo, voila. Who's that? I've got to somehow turn down my email notifications at the same time.
Too much technology at once. Yeah. As I've known him for quite a long time and in fact since he took took the job.
It's so us. And so it's therefore a real pleasure to introduce him today.
Yaya is the senior lecturer in Israeli studies at So US, the University of London, where he is also the head of the Soheir Centre for Jewish Studies.
He is a cultural and social historian of modern Palestine, Israel, who has published articles in Hebrew,
Arabic and English on urban and visual culture and on Jewish Arab relations.
His book, A City in Fragments, which I'm very glad to to inform You About Today, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2020,
looks at Arabic and Hebrew Street texts such as inscriptions, banners, graffiti and other media in modern Jerusalem.
Dr Wallachia year is currently until 2022, I believe,
a research lover whom research fellow and his project called the Arab Ashkenazi looks at Jewish Ashkenazi acculturation in the Arab Levant,
while has also published published articles in Haaretz, The Guardian and other media.
And today he's going to speak to them on the language of revival or conquest Hebrew in the streets of early 20th century Jerusalem.
So are you. Thank you very much, Peter.
Thank you. Off. And thank you both for this invitation and for the generous, generous introduction.
I.
So this is this took really based on on my book, which Peter is trying to show you again, it's called A City in Fragments of Text in modern Jerusalem.
And the idea of the book is to look at text duality in hubbins fear forms of text that are part
of the environment or part of social life in the sense that not books or newspapers so much,
but the kind of inscriptions, graffitis street name plates and various textual artefacts, like money, like I.D. cards, like visiting cards,
the kind of text that people read in part of their everyday life and today not think so much about.
And that is to look at how reading and writing changed in Arabic and Hebrew between the middle of the 19th century up until the mid 20th century.
That's the idea. I took today about Hebrew, but it's important to say that I look at both languages.
And I there's a lot of parent developments in both languages.
And there are also, of course, developments that fit the two languages against each other.
And I'll talk about it a bit in this talk. So before that, before I come to to talk about Hebrew and to talk about.
Hebrew texts, I should say something about the social landscape that we're talking about.
And what do we mean when we say Jews in Jerusalem?
The late Ottoman period and the mandatory period. And here I'm talking basically against various narratives or various historical
understandings that I think some of the viewers would be familiar with,
more or less. Both primarily see how I see it first.
So in the early 20s, at early 19th century Harlem and mid 19th century, there's the number of Jews in Jerusalem.
But 2000 in the middle of the century.
And the number, the population of the city generally is relatively small from the middle of the 19th century until nineteen hundred.
The city grows dramatically. So on the eve of the First World War, we're talking about something between 60 to 80000 people.
Depends what you count and who is counting. So we have estimates that the city really grows dramatically.
And Jews and Jewish communities in the city grow dramatically to tens of thousands.
Now, what is important for me to say is that it's a very confusing and fair landscape in because.
In some ways, we are talking about separate or distinct Jewish communities, and I think this is a very important to say,
we're talking about large Yiddish speaking Ashkenazi communities again within them.
There's lots of divisions. We are talk. And then there's Sephardic Jews, which have a longer history in the Ottoman history, Ottoman Empire.
And there's more recent migrants like Yemenite Jews, Muharrem, Jews, Malaby, Jews, Georgian Jews and Jews from Baghdadi, Jews and and so forth.
So we have. And a dramatic growth.
And most of it coming from immigration into the city.
So the number of communities that can kind of trace themselves back with is is is two before the 90s century is limited.
So on the one hand, these that separate communities in terms of their social life, who leads them?
Which schools they send their kids to? Where do they. Yeshiva.
They go to whether they pray, where they are buried and so forth.
We'll talk about separate social organisations in many ways. But in other ways, these communities are seen as part of a bigger hole.
And occasionally would act as part or as a kind of coordinated network.
OK, so that's part of the dynamic that I'm going to talk about.
And that becomes more pronounced the more when we move to the 20th century,
when when these communities are more more inclined to consider thinking of themselves as part of a single community.
And that assumes Proteau national Jewish dimensions.
It assumes Zionist dimensions, but it only becomes a social reality.
In the 20s and 30s, in my view. And in the sense that by the 30s, most Jews go to similar schools.
They speak the same language. They have more or less rely on leadership, which is, of course, has various factions, but one recognised leadership.
So that kind of congeals into something that we can call society a Jewish society in Palestine, which does not exist in 1880 or 1890.
And so. Yes, I think that's important. Now, one arena in which this is happening is through Hebrew because the Hebrew as a language that is in common,
use of all these common Jewish communities provide some kind of imagined landscapes, which is shared.
It's shared in 1850, is shared in nineteen hundred. It's shared in nineteen thirty.
But the meaning of that shared community or or imagined community changes throughout this period.
And I think that's what we'll see here. So let me start by, OK.
I'll just mainly show various. Various examples of what what Hebrew means to whom and and what does it imply?
So let me. So I hope you can see this.
Yes. You can see this. OK, so.
So I think one of the most striking forms of text morality and in the open space of Jerusalem is dedication inscriptions.
And again, if we go back to the eighteen thirties, there is only one recognise synagogue in Jerusalem.
It's four separate Sephardic synagogues that are connected as a kind of part of one complex.
And we have a current synagogue and we have maybe one or two unrecognised Ashkenazi synagogues, but that's it.
So that means that there's very few visible Jewish institutions.
And by implication, there's also very few places where you could expect to see Hebrew in the urban sphere.
By the time we reach 19 100, there are dozens and well over 100 of Jewish institutions in both inside the walls and outside the walls.
And and and we see a dramatic explosion of this kind of dedication inscription.
The most striking form of text reality in these congregational institutions, which included synagogues, seminaries, alms, houses and, you know,
various other kinds of communication institutions where this kind of dedication
inscriptions that you can see here that I usually long paragraphs of text.
Which usually talk about the highlight, they have the name of the donor and the family and and the terms of the donation,
usually warning against selling the property and saying that this is this is for.
To be, in this case, a synagogue or a seminary.
But let me go out and so forth. OK. This is an example of one such dedication inscriptions in the current quarter outside the city walls.
I think. I think it's I would say a few things of these kind of inscriptions that this is not a sign.
This is not something that you do kind of pass in the street and and read casually.
This is a paragraph of text that you have to stand in front of it and kind of read it carefully.
If you want to read it. And we can assume that normally people didn't do it, you know, on a daily basis.
It's not that the name of the institution is highlighted in any.
Sometimes the name is not even mentioned. The name of the donor is mentioned. OK, so this is not unlike if we go to, you know, institution today,
we would usually expect a big sign above the entrance saying the name of the of the synagogue and so forth.
This is not the kind of text.
This is a text that is about a form of writing that inscribes the conditions and the meaning into the fabric of the institution.
And it's basically we can look at it as a kind of act of worship.
And that kind of is written into these institutions, which are about congressional life and worship.
So now. V.
The these. One of the reason one of the ways to know about these inscriptions is by is from a survey
that was conducted nineteen twenty eight by a person called Husband v. Bensley Krajewski.
And you can see this on the left of the dedication stone.
And it's a series of booklets that he published on the name Stones of Memory of Masika,
one in which he collected all the all wrote down all these dedication inscriptions and and documented them,
including some other places beyond Jerusalem. But many focussing on Jerusalem.
What is interesting about this is that it's an amazing corpus of evidence and.
He says that he is prepared by the you know, he feels like this has to be documented because some of them are very old and they're falling to pieces.
And this is a very important information. So. But when you look at the corpus of inscriptions,
it is striking how these are really modern inscriptions in the sense that I think there's 10 inscriptions before 1850 out of
two thousand and two thirds of these inscriptions were placed between nine nine and nineteen hundred and nineteen forty.
So that kind of shows you how this kind of explosion of Jewish life in Jerusalem happens in this very particular moment.
And it's not it's not does not rest on existing communities.
Basically a very recent thing. Now, you can ask is various reasons why he justifies his project.
Why is it so important to document is inscriptions?
But it's very clear that he feels that in 1928, he and he is someone who was born in Jerusalem to a family that came from Bella,
both Ashkenazi Litvack, that kind of received traditional education and did not.
I don't think he ever travelled beyond Palestine.
He understands his community is better being written out of the historical record as the quote unquote, old issue, traditional,
reactionary, you know, unimportant, you know, and portrayed in various negative terms by the new Zionist Germany.
And he is very keen to write his communities into the historical narrative.
And he fails in the sense that.
This amazing corpus of evidence has not been used by any Storin of Jerusalem, I mean,
the only the only exception is over Gaffney, who wrote something very brief on it.
And I think it's quite striking because it's quite an interesting body of evidence for social history of Jerusalem.
Now. Coming back to this inscription. What is interesting about these inscriptions are various things.
The first thing is that they usually describe donations from overseas.
So they basically portray the kind of political economies of charity in which different communities were embedded.
So we can see that Jerusalem was in the centre of various networks of charity and and so forth.
And and that was determined by usually by ethnic logic.
And we can see very clear that generally Baharuddin Institutions was supported by foreign donors.
And Mugabi by donors from North Africa, Ashkenazim, depending where they were.
But these are all separate kind of networks of charity that highlight the fact that these are in many ways different communities.
There are some examples of cross charity.
And we have target that the donors that donate to the Habad synagogue and to the whole synagogues and so forth.
So we do have cross ethnic charity and support.
But these are the exception rather than the rule.
So on the one hand, when you look at these kind of inscriptions, it's usually very easy to tell which congregation are we talking about.
On the other hand, by using similar language, like the quote from Isaiah at the top of the inscription.
And by using Hebrew Square letters that kind of these inscriptions were legible to a wider constituency, wider.
So Jews from other communities. So we can say that if there is a sense of common denominator through Hebrew,
it establishes a kind of maybe sense of people, a good kind of sense of solidarity between different communities,
that that it often functions separately differently, but do have a lot of common at the same time and understand each other as Jewish communities.
OK, so this is one example of Hebrew and one of the most striking examples of Hebrew, which is as a congregation language,
not a national language, and certainly not a language that lays claim to the land, to the geography, to the territory, you know.
It does not seek to connect with some ancient past and to reclaim the kind of the kind
of Zionist claims that we'll see later are completely absent in these kinds of very,
very visible inscriptions. Another example of inscriptions that we would see in Jerusalem.
And this period is the car is the graffiti of pilgrims in various holy sites,
in various tombs and and and and dramatically, I would say on the on the there on the Western Wall.
And this is one of the chapters of my book that I did at the Western Wall, is one of the places you would see Hebrew in large square letters.
And, you know, but but the very presence is predicated on the idea that Hebrew is not written everywhere.
It's that language laden with sanctity, particularly in the square letters.
And it is it's using it in public space is, you know, a.
He's about a congregational act, an act of worship and veneration.
I'm not going to go into detail about. About the graffiti because it's a long story now.
So this is one form of very dominant form of Hebrew.
That one exists. At the same time, we have the mother Jewish communities grow.
We have other forms that are different, that are what we you know, if we look at the dedication of.
This is a format that goes back centuries and so forth.
But we have also a much more recent forms of text tonality that are interesting and the kind of claims they they they they make about Hebrew.
First is Hebrew as a commercial language that has a commercial value, as a common denominator between different Jewish communities.
OK, so on the one hand, we have communities that do not speak each other's languages in many ways,
but they do or they do read Hebrew, at least the literate amongst the communities.
And that means that if you want to advertise, for example,
something you can advertise in Hebrew and you will reach Sephardic and Mugabi and Ashkenazi people all at the same time.
Oh, if you can see here, this is the use of the Hebrew for postcards.
The story of this poster is the ultimate post office decides to open a branch in state of the Jews in Jerusalem and it hires a guy called Leo Honey,
a Hasidic Jew.
I am who calls himself in an Arabic alias offending, and he is a very entrepreneurial character, was involved in many, many initiatives.
And he opens this this branch. And in order to attract business, he issues these postcards which say, you know, in in in French and in Hebrew,
the post of the Turkish government, in the street of the Jews in the city and the holy city of Jerusalem may be rebuilt.
And so, OK. So we have Hebrew in a semi-official use.
So this these are Pasqua cards basically issued in a kind of kind of by the Ottoman Empire.
And not only this, we have the cancellation marks that you can see on the stamp has.
Has Ottoman, Turkish and French and Hebrew, you can see your Shalgam at the bottom of this.
So this is a semi-official, you could say,
use of Hebrew as a language that the Ottoman authorities are willing to kind of allow it to be used in that sense,
because it's a language of a of a large number of Jews in Jerusalem and because Jews are very using post a lot during this period because they.
The the main Ashkenazy economy particularly depended on sending various various printed out effects,
such as calendars and various other things, newspapers.
Has a kind of product that they would export to various diaspora communities and including, you know, request for the nations.
But not just that, also actual products. And if we look at industry in Jerusalem amongst the Jewish community.
So we have about six printshop. So this is the main form of industry if you're looking for such.
So in that sense, the postal connexions are very important and they are a source of revenue.
So when Hanneke faces this post office manager, faces accusation that he's a Zionist, that is is this is a form of you know.
Of text that has various nationalist intentions.
He justifies himself that this is not. This is a commercial initiative.
And the idea is to appeal to Jewish, Jewish communities in Jerusalem and so forth.
And the Automan governor of the district defends this.
This this kind of rationale says, no, this is not about Zionism.
This is about Hebrew is a kind of language for commercial use.
So this is one example of the kind of use of the Hebrew for commercial uses as a common denominator between different communities.
Then we have the use of Hebrew as as it has Kalala by by various taskbar to
organisations that come to Jerusalem as part of a project to modernise Jewish Command.
And if in the dedication inscription, I talk about networks of charity and and donations.
And these are networks that operated within these kind of ethnic economies.
There has clan networks operated quite differently in the sense that they saw Jewish
communities in Jerusalem as backward and needing not only support but needing modernisation.
And part of a colonial mission. We we could say by French and German Jews to kind of reform and modernise Jewish communities.
You know, Africa and the Levant in their Balkans and so forth.
And this is Dilemma's School to sign here by the Lamma School, the kind of the first modern Jewish school opened in 1850.
And this is a new building that was opened around nineteen hundreds.
You can see this is the sign is in German and in Hebrew.
And it was supported by the Asla German society, which was kind of competing with the Alliance French network.
And the idea here is to recruit Jewish pupils of all communities.
With a Sephardic or Ashkenazi and so forth for a modern education that would
kind of train them to become a middle class in the modernising Ottoman Empire.
OK, so we have. So Hebrew here is the language of modernity.
You could say and of of a kind of proto national cultural imagination of the Jewish people hould.
That is not Zionist. But but does see a kind of cultural common denominator matter.
That is not embedded within within the oldest structures.
Now, while these calls were not Zionist persay, they acted as as incubators for the Zionist teachers and pupils.
And we know that the. The language was of 1913 about the role of Hebrew in instruction came out of the Islah institutions like that,
like dilemma's school, and later it would become limit school, would become one of those bastions of Hebrew nationalism.
For example, the demonstrations before 1929 leave from Dilemma Lemmings School.
OK, so this is one example of a kind of.
Hebrew is a proto national language of modernity.
Then you have Hebrew as a national language of Jewish communities, which is something that becomes stronger, often Latino, right.
And I say say a few words. Yes. So this is the masters of the.
Newspaper and one of the things we have in Jerusalem is a very vibrant landscape of Hebrew publishing.
I mentioned the print shops already, but specifically newspapers. So there's a.
And depending when you look exactly, but there's about five Hebrew newspapers that are published in Jerusalem for various kind of perspectives,
Orthodox Hasidic modernising of a tell it.
We have the kind of modernising Litvack in Moyez newspaper.
We have elements of Ben-Yehuda Zionist secular newspapers all.
And we have this award, which was a modernising Sephardic Zionist newspapers after 19 or eight.
It's important to say that all of them are in Hebrew and are all read by various political and ideological factions.
And they create a kind of, again, the kind of imagined communities that that become.
I would say national at this point. Now, it's important to say that that the 1920 revolution in the Ottoman Empire gives a huge boost to this.
After 19 great constitutional revolution and.
And then new elections for Parliament's in 90, no way to 1912.
And that is creates an incentive for Jewish communities in Palestine specifically
to coordinate and to start thinking of themselves as a national community.
Now, that happens in the context in which the Ottoman Empire.
It is understood as an Automan metal nation that is composed of different kind of nationalities.
So you could be an Armenian national and an Ottoman at the same time.
And Ottoman and Jewish and Ottoman and so forth. So when this kind of language of the Ottoman Empire as a family of nations emerges and there's a very
strong incentive to Jewish communities and Jewish elites to think of themselves as that as a nation.
And this is when we see the term issue. Emerges really in a serious way.
You know, people talk about the issue of the projected backwards to the 19th century,
but my argument and I I wrote about this in my article, Rethinking the Issue.
My argument is it's only after nine, you know, eight within that Ottoman context.
There's these different communities. See a room for them to think of themselves as as one national group that is composed of different factions.
The Zionists and specifically what we know is Labour Zionist compose a very small and minor part in this story at this point.
OK. And we have the voice of Safadi.
Zionist Jews like old is as dominant, if not more dominant.
I would say at this point, and they represent in many ways the elite of Jewish communities.
And we have to remember that the leadership piece in a formal way,
the leadership of the Jewish community was in the hand of the hammer bashing the chief rabbi of Palestine, who was the Sephardic Jew from.
OK. So not only the leader of this community, which is diversed, mix, fragmented and mostly non Sephardic, is the Sephardic establishment.
Now, it's clear by that time that this is a very that leadership is of limited value,
but it's still nominally this is the church that this is a result of.
The Sephardic elite remains as the. Kind of a very important element.
Now, who would represent a line of Zionism, that is, if we can say kind of very briefly articulated in Hebrew, sees Hebrew as a letter,
as a national language, and is primarily an urban form of nationalism that is focussed around cultural revival and representation.
And if and then cultural autonomy and representation within Ottoman structures.
It is not focussed on colonisation. OK.
It is not against colonisation, per say, but it is not focussed on colonisation.
And I can spare.
And then one example of that fact is, is that there there is only one Sephardic colony out of this.
You know, quite by this time, about 15000 Jews live in colonies in Palestine, in in the agriculture colony is the most of what they are minority.
There is about 80000 Jews socially. There is something like 20 percent.
And mostly these are Ashkenazi Jews. There's only one Sephardic colony, which is Altuve of Bulgarian Jews.
Mostly we're talking about an urban Milia that is very much interested in it.
And the elite is interested in cultural revival. And this is received.
It's received, I would say, positively by the Ottoman elite.
We can see this in the example of the fact that the HOTE is the only newspaper that continues to operate during the war years after 1914,
where all the other new newspapers are gradually closed down by the censorship, whether in Arabic.
Only Blowholes is the only one that continues to operate until 1917.
You can see here the text. The Ottomans also publish you know, they published notices in Hebrew.
They publish even the military newspapers in Hebrew. The Ottomans do not have any objection to the use of Ebru.
More generally, we do see that they are opposed to the use of Hebrew by various Zionist institutions, which they suspect are disloyal to the empire.
But that's quite different from the use of Hebrew as a national language within the Ottoman Empire,
which this is somebody that they they certainly tolerate.
Another example of use of Hebrew as a national language within Ottoman structure.
And this is from the printshop strike.
And this is from 1999. And you can see here the placards and the boxes of fish.
Long live liberty and liberty means the constitutional revolution.
The Young Turk Revolution. Long live the committee of print shop workers in Jerusalem.
And you can see below that in Arabic as well. And the.
PrintShop Strike was the first strike in the Jewish community in Jerusalem that
brings together Sephardic and Ashkenazi workers with Zionist socialist agitators.
You can see here on the left. It's a highly, highly an eight pence filled with.
The partner of a company to in a socialist Zionist activist in herself.
So here they are. They very much tried to fashion themselves as a loyal Ottoman subject, which kind of promote Hebrew as part of that context.
But we also have so this example of Hebrew is the auto, my national language.
But we also have the kind of Hebrew which has a colonising mission which is associated
with understanding Jewish nationalism as a colonial enterprise by its meaning.
And when I say colonial meaning, I'm saying that the colonisation and transformation of Jews through that act of
reconsidering what Jewishness means and what the land means is integral to that.
That's project and we can see this.
We can see this in the InDesign socialist newspaper Paulette's AOL, which writes in 1913, in the context of the language and the language,
were around the question of how much Hebrew will be used in Jewish modern institutions as language of instruction.
I put it there right. Our world rests on three elements.
Hebrew land, Hebrew labour and Hebrew language.
So land, labour and language are the three realms which the young worker, these socially Zionist seek to take over.
In other words, to colonise.
So the act of settlements, which at this point coalesces into this conquest of labour and conquest of land by co-operative farms,
comes together with the promotion and and the conquest of the use of Hebrew as a as a dominant language.
Now what that means. It means two things, it means imposing language, Hebrew as a everyday language of use in signage, in commercial use and so forth.
But it also means the kind of language that makes a reference to the landscape
and claims the kind of Zionist narratives of revival or rediscovery reclaiming.
Now, there's not many examples for that in Jerusalem in the late autumn appear.
One example we can see is we can say is the battalion school, the BATTAL Art School,
which is a kind of bastion of secular Zionism at this point, which, of course, Battal makes a very explicit reference to the art there.
The artist who built the temple.
And that kind of connexion to the biblical heritage will become very, very important, of course, in the kind of mythology of Zionism and later.
Now, that assumes that changes quite dramatically.
And in the kind of that the kind of mandate we as that and that kind of assumes different dimensions.
We're. With the British mandate and with British occupation, and especially in 1920,
with the arrival of habit, Samwell Hebrew becomes a state language, an official language.
One of the first things that habit Samwell does is to print over the stamps that were used at this point.
The name of the country, Philistine in Arabic, Palestine in English and Palestina is Israel and Palestine as Israel is.
This kind of compromise he comes up with quite quickly because he's afraid of saying anything slane, which is the Zionist term.
So he's kind of has a kind of compromise to use the transliterated Palestinian at.
Now, that use immediately creates opposition from Arab nations.
I think it's very, very interesting, that kind of. That opposition emerges in this particular moment because the U.S.,
they understand the use of Hebrew as the state language is not just about
recognising national cultural rights of a minority that lives in the country,
but it's a recognition of the Balfour Declaration. It's a recognition of the mandate terms.
It's a project which designates Palestine as a national and national home for the Jewish people,
which comes with colonisation, comes with some kind of threat of Jewish Germany.
And that's that. And I think that's why we see our Arab opposition in 1920.
Well, we don't really see it to the kind of Ottoman semi-official CU's of Hebrew that we saw before.
And this means that Hebrew is present on signage in Jerusalem and in various kinds of artefacts.
And that appearance of Hebrew is understood by our Palestinians as a way to claim space, as a threat to change the meaning of the country.
And it's understood similarly by Zionist activists.
What is interesting is that when you look at zine's, activists are very excited about recognition of Hebrew.
But when Elizabeth new, they individually right to the mandatory authorities and say,
yes, yes, we want more Hebrew, we want Hebrew to be in the telegraph.
We want Hebrew to be used on train tickets. We want Hebrew on every sign.
There she now is not. We want to take over land so much as their biggest fear is that there's lots of Jews coming from lots of countries.
And and if we don't indoctrinate them to use Hebrew, they will all revert to their language of use their everyday languages.
So that's part of the idea is colonisation. Not so much of the land at this point, but colonisation,
all of the Jewish communities and and this kind of awareness that the Hebrew revival at this point is a very fragile and vulnerable enterprise,
Hebrew in its kind of secular national use.
Is this something that is amongst a younger generation graduates of you of some kind of schools?
But is it something that could be easily overturned by a massive use of Hebrew, of Yiddish and other languages?
So that's the primary reason they are interested. But the more time goes by, the more we see the slang signage becomes one of the battlegrounds.
An ad for a Zionist activist. And we see, particularly in street names that.
That Zionist body is very much push neighbourhoods to introduce tiny snot sign name plates in Hebrew.
This is part of the idea of kind of of of of territory realising the language and claiming the territories through signage.
And partly it's about indoctrination, that kind of names that you choose, of course.
And these are ideally names that will resonate with the kind of Jewish history that Zionist official bodies want to cultivate at this point.
But it's also about making Hebrew visible in the urban landscape.
And and and kind of laying claim to the territory.
It's really striking that we don't see it in. In a moment, the Arab League.
So our belief is not particularly bothered about Straighten Street naming, and it's not a very high priority.
But when it when there is a new name in Arabic for some street there,
immediately there's a commotion in the Hebrew Zionist press and the sense of threat to the kind of Jewish character of Jerusalem itself.
This is a very strong emphasis on territorial ising the language which I am,
which again is part of the idea of of the language, of the Jewish vote, of settling, of taking over,
taking over both Jewish communities and making them into one home and and taking over territory, which is something that becomes, of course,
much more pronounced after 1948 with issues of names for geography, from phone street names and for neighbourhoods and so forth.
And I can say. More on that.
So, too, I think to conclude, I think we start by saying Hebrew more widely used as a congressional language
that is embedded within diasporic networks of pity and support and charity.
We move to a language that is a kind of commercial common denominator and then national proto
national language in autumn and context and then to a national language with a colonising zeal.
And these suggest different kind of registers and different kind of, I would say, resources that we can work with and in and in trying to think.
And I think when we tried to think what would Jewish nationalism, that is not Zionism,
what historic Zionism in the way that we understand it today as an ideology that is driven towards territory and and take over.
What would that mean? I think we can see here various kind of resource that we can work, work with and here and here.
Amuse yourself. I can't Peter, your muted.
Alone. Yes. Is that better? Yeah.
Now you hear me? OK, good. Sorry about that. I couldn't get the taskbar to come up when the presentation was still on online.
So excuse my technological capabilities.
And by the way, I forgot to thank Ya'acov for sorting out all the technological stuff before we've begun this year.
Thank you very much. I would urge anyone who has a question to please now type it into the live event.
Q And. We have none at the moment, but if I may, a couple of couple of maybe comments or questions for you, if that's okay.
Well, we're waiting for other people to load up. I suppose you talk about this kind of standardisation of Hebrew in one way.
This is actually not all that different from a standardisation, let's say, in a battalion in Germany as a kind of nationalist necessity, perhaps.
I don't know, or certainly a pursuit.
But I suppose it was there was that there was a there was a different dimension here, whereas in Italy, in Germany,
you're trying to kind of standardise the language that it was existing in situ already for for many hundreds of years.
And we're just kind of the standardisation of dialects. And here we're talking something completely different.
And I just so I suppose it's probably maybe restating the obvious a little bit, but to what extent do you think this is just a I mean,
indicative or another another example of this kind of trend and in kind of a certain type of nationalist direction?
And how much do you think it is particular to to the Zionists and the Zionist situation or the situation of Jews in Palestine?
I mean, I think there's. There's some kind of some really important difference there.
And and the first is the sanctity of the language, which is underlying, I think.
And then I I mean, I focus when I in the book two to discuss this transformation.
I used I used cannons only yesterday, Montejo.
And I assume some people listening will be familiar.
It's a story of a Jewish immigrant, Ali Ischaemia, second aliyah that comes to Palestine to be a pioneer.
And it doesn't quite work out. And he goes to Jerusalem and he becomes a painter.
And the pivotal scene in the book is when he is bitten by a stray dog now.
And so when he encounters a stray dog.
Now, how does his thing starts?
He's painting the education inscription in the Bahah and quarter, the kind of exactly one of those dedication inscriptions they showed.
He is hired to paint the inscription in different colours.
And part of the idea you give, you paint the name of the donor in gold.
You paint the warning in black. You paint the others in red.
So that's partly to show that this kind of inscription does not end when you put the red stone there.
It's a continuous practise and it's a practise that hinges on Hebrew being a sacred language,
that Hebrew has a power that when you warn people against the you know, you should not never sell the building you want.
The warning is in Hebrew. It carries some kind of divine weight behind it.
And he starts by painting this. And then there's a dog.
Walking by and he rides on the dog a can of Mitchell grass.
You know, Mad Dog. Yeah. OK, so basically I think.
And there's been enormous many, many people wrote about it.
But I think Organon says, you know, trying to say something about, you know, it's a kind of rupture and moment of crisis.
Well, you take the same colours that you use for dedication inscription in which Hebrew means something quite, you know, quite quite specific.
And you use it as a kind of joke to mark a dog and to and to label it, you know.
And the dog, of course, then roams the streets of Jerusalem.
So you the language becomes activated and the language becomes is sent to the streets of Jerusalem and becomes
something that kind of travels through space in a much less controlled manner in a way that comes to bite Isaac.
And in the end. And I think that kind of the bedrock of Hebrew Square letters and their meaning is something that we want to find in Italian.
But we will find it in Arabic to some extent, in the Islamic meaning of Arabic.
So because the language of, you know, as a divine language, it carries us.
And then we do. And it's transformation to a national language that is a parallel that we that we see it in Arabic and also in Arabic.
We do. I mean. The other thing that we do have enabled does not exist in the Italian or German example is the transformation to a spoken language.
Yeah. But I would say that this is something misunderstood, sometimes misunderstood and overstated because.
Because they're. The fact is for the.
You know, for the already Litvack publishers of more, yeah, it's obvious for them that they write in Hebrew.
And this is 1912. They don't need anybody to tell them to write an e-book about news, about science, about Ottoman politics.
So everyone is a very much, you know, activated in life as a culture and political language that is used for various kinds of coalitions.
And, you know, the change and transform. So the idea that the Hebrew is a kind of language as an active modern language
is something that belongs only to these very small Zionist settler enclaves.
I think that is misleading and that that is something that we see.
And the reason that they chose Hebrew is because there is such diversity in the Jewish community and because they write, you know,
they write, they want people to buy the newspapers, not just in Palestine, but also in Eastern Europe or maybe in Baghdad or in other places.
That kind of creates a kind of common denominator, which is also beyond the national line in that sense.
Oh, the national geography. So I would say also the irony is, of course,
that that that the big argumentation between that the first real Zionist school that hopefully a gymnasium was around,
whether they sit around this very time, was whether they should teach in German or Hebrew.
And it was that it was not a very it was completely not not very clear, actually.
And that's why I mean, that's why there was a strike. So it's actually very interesting. Yako, I don't see any questions.
And so is it. Is that the case, that I'm doing something wrong or is it no questions?
No. Ya'akov muted Okay. You mean to the outcome?
Yes. Thank you. Thank you. There are no questions. So take. Sure.
I guess the producer prerogative to ask a couple of questions. Yeah.
First of all, thank you so much for this fascinating talk and an interesting book.
I want to make a couple of comments that you already touched upon,
but generally just maybe to trigger you to speak about them a little bit in more detail and then maybe also a question.
So the two comments I have is that it's one comment about your intervention,
whether you know, explicitly or implicitly so in two very interesting debates.
One is you just noted, is this question of the revival of Phibro or I guess I can say building on you the myth of the revival of Hebrew,
meeting the negative sense of it, that a myth that tells you does is a story about a dead language that has been there and then being revived.
I think part of this has to do with the more general question, which is about Jewish nationalism.
And again, the debate you rageous from all over the place.
But you, in a sense, offering intervention into this debate of whether there was a sense of Jewish nationhood prior to Zionism.
And I think there is room for developing this idea and which has been done previously,
that this usage of Hebrew is as a common denominator of different communities within the sort of perceived Jewish community can be a marker of this,
uh, you know, a sense of people who maybe not modern European nationalism, but definitely a sense of nationhood.
And this brings me to the question.
A large section of this area that you covered is an area where Hebrew is just one language amongst a multilingual setting.
Were these same people, call them Jews, call them so far, idea Ashkenazim speak.
I mean, in your forthcoming project is about the Arab Ashkenazi Jews asking as the Arabs.
So people who speak out because their language would probably, at least amongst the elite, also Hebrew as a spoken language.
And we can assume that under Ottoman rule Frenchy's very well.
President Ladino could also be.
The story you are telling is also a story of the death of multilingualism under the heavy hammer of nationalism and this move to what it is.
Can I use this? It's just that it's not just the nationalisation of the language.
It's also the weaponization of language in the nationalist cause where multilingualism becomes a threat.
And then we have ideological forces trying to to erase it.
So the question would be, I guess the frame isn't a question. All of those inscriptions, for example, which are written in Hebrew.
I read in Hebrew as a choice, as you just say, because there are other languages that could be maybe even more accessible, may be better understood.
Can you say something about the way those people, your agents, in a sense, lived amongst these four languages and how it disappears from the scene?
I mean, yes. I mean, that's. That's clearly the direction from multilingualism to for to us to to monolingualism.
I mean, I think there's there's this there's this anecdotal examples that I can think of.
I mean, one. You know, for example.
I would say first we have to think in multiskilled our terms when we think about this period.
It would be wrong to tell it. You know, people did acted behave differently depending to the network that they were talking with.
And at that moment and they presented themselves differently according to who they were talking with.
And there was no and there's a.
There's a book by your own boss. I come from India and Palestine.
And one of the nice thing he has. He has maps of where people were born.
According to the census. And there's a kind of.
So you can see that you have Ashkenazim communities. There's no clearly connexion to Eastern Central Europe.
So far, the. Kind of regional. More or less Arab Muslims are very local.
Christine. So you have different kind of networks that they were.
That had various kinds of interactions to give one example. So the form Kim family.
So the Frumkin say the Lubavitcher is a print shop and have a newspaper.
And the big, big conflict between the father and the sons.
Is around Arabic. So it's the father is very it speaks Arabic, very much integrated into local politics and so forth.
Even takes hires someone to teach Arabic to his kids.
But when that is unhappy, when one of the kids again asking the same care.
And then one of them goes to Jaffa to be an Arabic teacher in that Hebrew school.
And he's unhappy about that. And the other one grad writes an editorial in the newspaper saying, Jews, you should Stotler learning Arabic.
And the father deletes these lines and they say there's a big confrontation between them.
So and for them, Arabic was the language of modernity, integration, progress.
And clearly about becoming Ottoman in a way that moved beyond what the father was comfortable with.
Although the father was very much, you know, you can find a form can you can find the pictures with him with the face.
Yes, it is. He's very integrated, but they are the limits.
Now, of course.
Good funkin later becomes a judge, part of his social capital is the fact he's fluent in Arabic in the court, but that becomes ultimately a liability.
So in the sense that his pleas to the Zionist issue agree that, you know, we must learn Arabic and self-worth, etc., all this goes on deaf ears.
And eventually that's kind of what is the value at this at a certain point becomes a liability.
And the other I would say that there are plans for covenant.
That and Zion is a good book on the kind of enduring multilingualism.
And they sure, of course, people continue to speak Yiddish or other languages on Arabic or other language.
They brought with them, but they were facing more and more pressure to stop doing this, for example,
by the battalion of the defenders of the Hebrew language, which were quite aggressive in telling people of to remove signs in other languages.
And for them, again, the local language that they use is the language of settlement, of colonisation,
of you know, for them, Hebrew is the language of building, you know, something in the wilderness.
And again, it's a very, very settler colonial language that is that's different from the language of the video link.
For him, Hebrew kind of exist in parallel with other kind of end in conversation.
Again, depending what moment you you catch, you catch him.
But for him, it's more of a conversation with other languages.
So, OK, so we had two questions come up. Hold on.
Let me just go back. OK. Yeah.
So first I just read them out. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So the first is I'm from from my colleague Rooster who's doing a deal here at Oxford,
which is that I'm wondering about public spaces where the different uses of Hebrew that you outline might clash with or comment upon one another.
Do you see conversations between these different uses of Hebrew opening up in graffiti or vandalism, et cetera?
Not so much in that sense. What do you do see is an.
A Zionist unhappiness about the Jew.
The Jewish communities in Jerusalem and their willingness to embrace the new kind of ideas that were that they were pushing.
And I think that's very, very striking.
For example, Iran street names, and there's two stories in the vase from the late 30s that I'm quoting in the book.
And there was a map of Jerusalem that came out with street names.
And these names were not necessarily official. A lot of them were just people posting in our local neighbourhood committee, deciding on names.
They didn't ask anyone in their municipality and they just put a sign, OK.
Now. Most of these.
Tended to rely on fall back on commemoration practises in the Jewish community.
So a lot of them were various rabbinical figures in I've done and found and others that were part of these communities.
And the vibe is very, very unhappy about street names in Jerusalem, in Hebrew.
They say it's a disgrace. Where are the heroes of the nation?
Why do we have these rabbis? Nobody knows these rabbis. Nobody cares about these rabbis, you know?
What about some good science education and through street names, which you do seem to love?
I think they'll be one of the only things that you can see is, you know, for example, by the characters that they had, the names that are chosen,
for example, Healtheon or other Zionist activist, whether it's the biblical geography of the landscape, which are used as a street names and so forth.
So that kind of the idea of of Jews in Jerusalem not living up to the Zionist expectations is.
It's quite a strong one. I mean, you can see it in.
In the fact that Jerusalem continue to pose a problem for the Zionist leadership, which mostly lived not in Jerusalem.
I mean, I think I'm quoting Ben-Gurion in 48 that says that is 20 percent normal people and then 40 percent to reactionaries
or 60 percent reactionaries and 40 percent strange people and and 20 percent normal university related and so forth.
So the idea of Jerusalem tourism as a hostile environment, too, is something that I think Zionist institutions have struggled with.
And you can see it. I mean, what you see in in street names is Harvey, for example.
It's a very deliberate choice to use Sephardic to go back to the golden age and and the al-fassi.
Then my mind and all these names are very explicit, kind of over Traw of the founders of the neighbourhood, which was SSAFA Decollete.
And also a kind of conviviality, I think, that they thought would be useful for any kind of relations with the Arab Muslim elite.
And I think that it's very clear and it's very, very striking that the.
That's the phallic themes. You find them in Arabic as well. April, Arabic and English.
But the name I showed can chemically side, which is also part of the neighbourhood.
It's about the Jane F. The Jewish National Fund has only English and Hebrew and does not.
And that was put in a later stage where there's no attempt to kind of to to talk in Arabic.
You. So I have another question. So to put my glasses first for someone from some Teil mingled urf.
He says, thank you for your very interesting lecture, Dr. Vela. You mentioned that Hebrew ultimately developed as a commercial common denominator.
And based on the late Ottoman mandatory period artefacts you uncovered, did this new use of Hebrew extend beyond the diaspora communities in Israel,
for example, the transnational Jewish trade flowing in and out of Jerusalem at this time?
I mean, it's. Yes, certainly, I would say that's.
But Hebrew is used as something that cuts across communities and.
And you if you want to advertise. For example, cinema. OK, cinema is local.
So when we find adverts for cinema, Tehran.
So they're mostly in Hebrew. They will be the title of the movie would be in Arabic because maybe you get some, you know, Arab clientele as well.
And that is something that appeals to, you know, cuts across communities. But often it's it's more difficult to make this clear cut distinctions,
because when you put a big sign in Hebrew, then why do you put the sign above the shop?
I think if it's you know, people know it, it's not such a big place.
You don't need a sign. You're a barber. Everybody will know where you are.
I mean, there's no break. So partly it's about kind of, you know, saying, oh, I am I have a sign of I'm part of the new world which uses science.
OK. And partly it's about tourists and partly as a way to advertise themselves yourself.
So we've seen in the battalion sign.
I mean, the sign was not there. So if somebody doesn't know the way.
They can find a way to be a better school. The sign is there for the photograph and the photographs.
Is there is there in order for fundraising? So but also the side does say something to the new to the people involved.
I quote, I guess I what I saw.
I brought the Lemina school.
And the signing in Hebrew and German and part of the sign is saying that we are not at the Matau, you know, we are a different kind of institution.
We are a modern institution.
We are, you know, and and and I bring in the book, the short story by his arm, The Ham and the Ham is a novelist and short story writer,
Sephardic Jew from Daunia, who but immigrated to Jerusalem when he was six in the beginning of the century.
And he has a story about how he goes. He leaves little Mutawa, his Sephardic Domoto.
And he decides to join Lemon because it's a new modern thing.
And it and the sign is very important. You can see the sign is part of that kind of promise of tomorrow.
For him, it's a very. And the story shows also the ambivalence of Jews going through that transformation because it's a story of disappointment.
He regrets making that transition. He regrets leaving that kind of warm world of the turmoil, too.
And, you know, for him, Lemel is a cold, alienated place, smells of disinfectant.
It doesn't have you know, it's a disciplinary institution, which he feels very, very foreign and partly a partisan ethic thing because it's a very,
very Ashkenazim Ashkenazi in a modern sense, not not in a it's it's led by European Jews that have a colonising mission that he feels alienated in.
So that is both the kind of promise the signage are about,
the kind of transformation that I would say move both projected outwards to the diaspora networks.
And I think every Jew in Jerusalem is a winner of the Aspen, not some kind of tri diaspora networks,
whether it's the networks of charity or whether it's the hours or days or whether it's Zionists,
that they have some kind of influence of their lives and their position within their networks.
It's quite crucial. And in that sense, I think that when I talk about the emergence of proto national identity and this is very much.
In response to that. That's Patricia, institutions who wanted to overcome these kind of congregational divides and talk about in one Jewish people.
If you want. And I think that is something that helps to create this kind of common denominator.
So thank you very much. Ya'akov, if you've not got another question, maybe I'll just end with a final question to you.
I think that there's a question from Daniel. I'm sorry. I just.
Sorry. Yeah. I've got a screw up. So Danielle. Danielle CO2 Drori.
This is. Thank you for an interesting talk.
Well, I see how monologue monolingualism becomes the dominant paradigm in the Jewish parts of Jerusalem once Hebrew undergoes Zion application.
It seems like multilingualism persists. So would you say your work is as much about the failure of Hebrews nationalisation as it is about its success?
I am. I don't.
I mean, multilingualism survives to the. To the mandatory, yes, but much less so afterwards.
I mean, I think, you know, if we look at the entry into this, that work by Yonnet, you're not an mandele on your big break was eradicate.
And then I think it's quite striking how how very few people, how very few Israeli Jews can can read Arabic, let alone now.
Today I am given. And when you look a century backwards, some of these are Arabic speaking communities.
Some of these communities that can negotiate their way in Arabic. And that is very much that is something that was very aggressively eradicated.
And partly, I think we are also living in a world which does not reward multilingualism.
It's not just the case of Palestine, Israel and Zionism.
I mean, you we can see this with immigrant children's everywhere, and I'm always struck by, you know, today to get your kids, if you if you come from.
Come with a language and you live in London or in the US and so forth, and you want to make sure your kids speak.
The language is such a struggle.
And I think, you know, if I think just kept Ladino 400 years, you know, we can barely keep the languages one generation forward.
It is quite extraordinary. And so in that sense, it's not completely unique.
It's part of our world which which rewards monolingualism and kind of in some ways does not we reward multilingualism.
But in this rare person, it does connect to specifically to the question of art,
because a rival enemy language and part of that kind of territory terrorisation and struggle of space and meaning.
Thank you.
So I just maybe I thought I just were by way of concluding, ask you some perhaps to talk a little bit about the book and the project itself.
I mean, it's very clear from the introduction that there's a personal dimension to of all this,
which I found really kind of a touching is so touching in a way.
And it's very interesting. And kind of I thought it was also quite interesting.
You know, a book that's called The City in Fragments has chapter titles that are very fragmentary themselves.
It's quite a quite a touch of genius. But I just wondered if you could just maybe talk a little bit about the book, the project and the book.
Am I okay? I mean, I think I clear.
I mean, there's different ways I can. I can tell the story in the book. But the idea came primarily from an interest in text reality.
I mean, I think that's where I started.
My sense is that it's the 20th century forms of text duality that we grew up on are losing their place in the world.
And digital text morality that we are being bombarded with is a new form, kind of suggest new forms of reading and writing.
So in a way, I wanted to understand. I wanted to.
To understand how the kind of things that we grew up with as standard forms of text that kind of organise our lives.
How do they come to be? Street name plate. You know, since when people put street name plates in the street and y, you know, shops, signs,
commercial use of text and text that kind of bans and tells you what to do and not to do it once.
At one point, graffiti becomes something that you cannot do that is forbidden.
That is bad. I am, you know, this this visiting cards that we still carry around us.
But it's not clear why I really can Google. You need to give them your card.
We still have them. So at what point do they emerge and why? But it's very, very clear to understand these kinds of forms of text reality.
I need to go a step backwards to look at when they emerge and against what background damage.
So in that sense, the prism was perfect because it's when I start the book in 1950s, it's not like there's no text in the streets.
There's lots of text in the street. It's just different kinds of text.
And it's meaning is different. So and and it's the kind of text that nobody is nostalgic about.
I mean, this dedication inscription, I think for most people who view them, you know,
if we have if we see a nice 1920s street name, plate it so it evokes some kind of soldier.
And I think from mostly secular people, dedication's Russian does not carry the same kind of nostalgia.
But I think you can't understand one without the other.
I think you have to understand, especially when you talk about Hebrew in Arabic,
it was important for me to do a project that looked at two non European languages.
And that's a sign that Jerusalem is very, very important as a place that is very rich in textual traditions.
But also a place where everything collides. So you have ultimate azem, you have European empire empires, you have Christian missionaries,
you have various kinds of Jewish communities that we talked about. You have Arab nationalists and so forth.
Now, for me personally, I think what the book was interesting, it was also as a way to to see Jerusalem in their fresh new eyes.
And that's because the question for me was not how I in 2020, I look at the science.
I analyse it. I will tell you what it means. No.
The question for me is what? When people put a sign in 1910, what does it mean to people in the street?
And that's a much more difficult question. For that, I had to read quite a lot of memoirs and and you autobiographies and newspapers and and so forth.
And from that, I actually came to see the city quite differently than I am used to it.
I mean, I have an essay that. Came out on the Jerusalem city centre.
But the idea of Jerusalem as a kind of modernising Ottoman city around the turn of the century that has a non-sectarian
understanding of a local middle class and Ottoman middle class that was very much kind of open to cosmopolitan influences.
That was something that was something of a real revelation for me.
And in a way, seen the late Ottoman city, which is not in Jerusalem.
I grew up in or I was not even aware that such a city existed.
That was quite a new revelation.
And in a way, it kind of made me when I said, well, when I walked through the cities, I have kind of companions and friends that work with me.
And. And tell me different stories. And partly it was about going in the streets and looking for signs,
looking for signs on the sewage, on various kind of street names that nobody pays attention to.
And so forth, and trying to read the city through these pretty signs.
So this is the kind of the project. All right. Thanks. Yeah.
So I think that's where we've got to conclude now. I just wanted to say that.
So next week we continue with the Israel Studies Seminar and we'll have our colleague,
Hadeel Abu Hussein, who will talk about Palestinian Arab cities in Israel.
Equality struggle. And in two weeks from today, we'll have Daniel Drori, who just posed the last question.
The final question to you, Danielle, is, is is teaching modern modern Hebrew literature here at Oxford this year?
And her we should do the early reconsidering early Jewish nationalist ideology seminar on Yosef Klausener and translation Zionism and Christianity.
So if you can come both of those, please do. And I would just encourage you one more time to have a look at Jerusalem's city and fragments.
Yeah, your wallet. Thank you very, very much for helping out today. And speaking to us.
Thank you so much for the invitation.