"Modern Hebrew" is a Zionist invention:

  1. It was created by Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman, a notorious Zionist and a founder of "Hebrewism", a notion that Hebrew should be the only language that Jews should use, not Aramaic or Yiddish. (As opposed to Yiddishism)
  2. It is mostly spoken by "Israelis"
  3. At the time of Hebrew revival, most Jews opposed using holy language for discussing everyday things and preferred Yiddish as a national language of Jewish people

But can a language by itself be Zionist? It is a Zionist invention, it is used by Zionists, but does speaking it make you a Zionist? Should Jews worldwide learn and use Yiddish and Aramaic as a national language instead of "Modern Hebrew"? I mean, "Modern Hebrew" is so artificial, it didn't have curse words at the beginning, so Zionists sweared at Yiddishists in Yiddish!

P.S. Apologies to many smart people here bothering you with my midnight thoughts

  • Commiejones@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    22 days ago

    I would define zionism as taking the Jewish Religion and twisting it into a racial supremacist nationalist project in an attempt to revive a bronze age genocidal kingdom.

    In that context modern Hebrew is as zionist as it gets. They took a language that existed only in religious scriptures and turned it into a language they could use to celebrate genocide.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
      ·
      22 days ago

      Zionism is all of that, by all means, but I'd rather define Zionism by its causes than its acts: what's the bourgeoisie of a diaspora group to do to consolidate its power and advance its interests in the same manner as the bourgeois dictatorships that surround itself, when the said diaspora group exists as a disparate minority everywhere, with no clear lines to be drawn on a map? — Settler-colonialism, simply put, carried out under the auspices of the major empires and leveraging the persecution and discrimination against the minority group in question, to encourage class collaborationism.

      We call this phenomenon "Zionism" when we refer to the particular project that utilizes Jewish aesthetics and tries to recruit among Jews — which is after all the only extant form of this phenomenon, by the quirks of history — but the exact same phenomenon can really show its ugly face among absolutely any stratified diaspora group for which the stars happen to align, and I think this is worth remembering: a bunch of Jews didn't just suddenly decide one day to become genocidal maniacs for no particular reason, there are rather material causes behind everything that's happened.

      Not that I'm an expert on the topic, anyways.

    • deathtoreddit@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      22 days ago

      So, what are we to do? redacted-1 redacted-2 the Hebrew language to death?

      spoiler

      Honestly, if it's possible, any Jews of conscience might as well clean house and redefine the language, and to an extent, the culture that surrounds (of course, that will require a change in the economic mode that this culture relies, which should not be settler-colonialism)

      After all, if they can bring back Hebrew from the dead, someone can do the former job

      Of course, we'll probably encourage other Jewish languages like Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabiyuh, and so forth, since the Eastern, Iberian, and Germanic Jews are different from each other