• rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    Come on, Israel is itself already almost anti-Semitic. They have that picture of the reborn Hebrew nation, and actual history and culture and language of really existing Jewish communities and groups they care about only when that serves that goal. If those communities and groups are underrepresented in Israel itself - may even be hostility.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      that picture of the reborn Hebrew nation

      The what? EDIT Oh you mean like, the way they sort of imposed their own European-Hebrew onto local Semitic people.

      Also, I know Israel is certainly racist, with mostly white faces in high places. Their colorismo is basically the same as Latin America - in fact there’s a very interesting history of technological and cultural exchange between racist Latin American dictatorships and the Israeli state.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        Well, you know, the resurrection of the Hebrew language after a couple centuries (EDIT: late to fix it, I meant millennia, but was frankly already drunk to notice) it was dead.

        There were and are neo-Aramaic (language closest to Hebrew, only it never died) speaking Jews in the world and in Israel, but making that the official language wasn’t sufficiently epic and those were, as you correctly pointed out, brown people for Zionist leaders back then.

        They love Masada story so much (its defenders spoke Aramaic), openly do that re-Judaification of Jerusalem etc.

        I mean, I don’t understand why you’re surprised.

        • stevehobbes@lemy.lol
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          11 months ago

          More than a couple centuries - but dead isn’t quite right. While it wasn’t spoken in most Jewish enclaves, it was still used in all religion and quite a lot of commerce and literature. Most practicing Jews knew Hebrew, even if they did not use it in daily life. Jews from different countries often used Hebrew to communicate - mostly in writing because it was the common language they would both know.

          Books have been published in Hebrew more or less continuously, including the first printing press in in the Middle East (now in what is Israel) in 1577 printed books in Hebrew.

          Hebrew has never been dead - it just wasn’t used because most Jews lived in countries that spoke other languages that Jews learned and often created pidgin dialects like Yiddish (and others).

          It is not like a bunch of zionists taught all the worlds’ Jews Hebrew, but if you put a German Jew and a Russian Jew in the same room, the only language they would both know is Hebrew.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language

          • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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            11 months ago

            I’m aware of that all, also yes it has been dead. Like Latin or Ancient Greek.

            It is not like a bunch of zionists taught all the worlds’ Jews Hebrew, but if you put a German Jew and a Russian Jew in the same room, the only language they would both know is Hebrew.

            Yeah, if you put a German Jew and a Moroccan Jew, your results could have been not the same.

            Still analogous to Latin, though. Like if you compare Latin in Italy to Latin in Poland.

            pidgin dialects like Yiddish (and others).

            Yiddish is definitely not a pidgin, it’s a pretty functional Germanic language, and not too much further from Standard High German than German casually spoken in Vienna.

            Actually it’s much less of a pidgin to German than neo-Hebrew is a pidgin to Hebrew.

            It is not like a bunch of zionists taught all the worlds’ Jews Hebrew

            There were competing views of the future of European Jews as a culture and what modernity will be for them. For some the modern language to be standardized etc would be, again, Yiddish.