[lg policy] Soviet Language Policy to Strangle Hebrew

[Harold Schiffman]

Soviet Language Policy to Strangle Hebrew

by Norman Berdichevsky (October 2011)


For half a century, authorities in the USSR followed an ideological
policy to condemn Hebrew as a "reactionary tool" of the upper classes,
the ultra-religious and Zionism. In this view, only Yiddish could be
considered as the legitimate mother tongue of those "toiling masses"
of Jews interested in maintaining a national existence. This resulted
in an almost total prohibition on any expression of thought and
cultural creativity in the Hebrew language amounting to a ban on the
publication of books, newspapers, magazines, films, public lectures,
theater performances, poetry readings, educational courses,
instruction, or radio and television broadcasts in Hebrew apart from
research in university libraries on the Semitic languages available to
a handful of graduate students. Nowhere else and against no other
language (except Esperanto in Nazi occupied Europe – the subject of a
forthcoming article) was such a policy invoked by any regime to
strangle a language into total silence.

To a considerable degree, this hostility was fostered and encouraged
by Jewish communists who had long nurtured hostility towards Hebrew.
The ultimate irony of this crusade is that for an initial period of
eight years (1918-1926), the idea of a Hebrew Renaissance as an
expression of Jewish national culture found among its strongest
supporters non-Jews who were sympathetic to the new communist regime
such as Maxim Gorki. This same writer who was hailed by Soviet
propaganda as “The Conscience of the Era,” often condemned
antisemitism in the USSR as a leftover of the Czarist regime and a
disgrace to the Russian people. He even learned some Hebrew and
exerted his influence to allow the leading Hebrew writers (mostly in
Odessa) to receive permission to emigrate to Palestine in 1921. These
included the man regarded as modern Hebrew’s greatest poet, Haim
Nachman Bialik.

Gorki wrote of him that…”Bialik is for me a great poet, the perfect
and rare personification of the spirit of his people, like Isaiah, my
favorite prophet, and like Job, who wrestled with his God. He
expresses his sorrow and his anger in wrathful outpourings of a
prophet, but he is no stranger to the simple compassionate human word;
when he wishes, he is a magnificent lyricist.”

Gorki would later become intimately involved with a veritable Hebrew
Renaissance in the USSR when full state support was given to the
Habimah Hebrew Theater in Moscow until 1926. During tis initial
period, the theater presented successful plays and toured Russia and
the Diaspora.

Nevertheless, Jewish communists organized in their own "national
section" of the Communist Party of the USSR took an unremitting
hostile view towards Hebrew insisting that its ultimate demise was
demanded in the new socialist society of workers and toilers. They
finally achieved success and an informal but totally devastating ban
on all Hebrew activity followed the departure of the Habimah troupe to
Palestine. Thousands of Jews would be imprisoned on nothing more than
the suspicion that they had offered instruction of the Hebrew language
in their own homes. This was regarded as ipso facto proof of
subversive and counter-revolutionary tendencies leading to the search
for other evidence to bring more sereios charges and condemn the
guilty to years of hard labor and imprisonment, often combined with
exile to Siberia.

The language dispute between Yiddish and Hebrew had preceded the
communist “October Revolution" of 1917 by many years. In the official
Czarist census of 1897, 96.8% of the 5,125,000 Jews in the Russian
Empire (including Poland and the Baltic region) declared Yiddish as
their "mother tongue" although many were bilingual in Yiddish and
Russian or even tri-lingual in Hebrew as well. The competition between
these three exacerbated the political division.

It was assumed (too simplistically) that any active support in the
public sphere on behalf of Yiddish was linked to the “Bund”, the
Jewish Socialist Party in Czarist times, a “workers’ party” in favor
of socialism and cultural autonomy for the Jews as an ethnic minority
in those districts where they formed a significant part of the
population. Likewise, support for Hebrew was considered a corollary of
belief to Zionism, emigration to Palestine and a rejection of Marxism
and the class struggle. This view simply ignored the fact that several
political groups existed which favored the "wrong" language.

These included young intellectuals with a Far Left revolutionary
attitude that supported the Soviet regime and espoused Hebrew, even
founding a publication entitled, “The Hebrew Communist.” In so doing,
they demonstrated their revolutionary zeal and opposition to religious
orthodoxy and its attempt to maintain Hebrew as a purely sacred tongue
to be used only in the synagogue. Another Leftwing Jewish party known
as Poalei-Zion (Workers of Zion) and especially a splinter group
Poalei-Zion Smol (Left Workers of Zion) espoused Zionism and Marxism –
with the object to create a Jewish Workers’ state (Hebrew speaking) in
Palestine to be built by immigration and the proletarian identity of a
new class of Jewish workiers. Although they accepted Hebrew as the
future language of a Jewish Workers’ Society in Palestine they
attempted to be on good terms with the Communist Party by maintaining
a fondness and nostalgia for Yiddish. By 1926 they too were forced to
cease operations.

The growing use of Russian among many Jews as a first or habitual
language was regarded as the first vital step on the road to both
acculturation and then assimilation into Russian and Christian (after
1917, Communist) society. In reality however, the issue of language
preference cut across ideological lines and many individuals had a
deep attachment to all three. Many writers, playwrights, teachers and
educators among Russian Jews were the target of intense competition
among language activists who built their careers on advancing one or
another of the three.

At the great Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference in 1908 held from
August 30th to September 3rd in a city at the eastern edge of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire but attended by many Russian Jews, Yiddish was
declared a “National Language of the Jewish People.” Advocates of
Yiddish desired above all to win respectability and  prestigious
status for their language that had long been regarded as a dialect or
"jargon" by many linguists as well as Russian and Austrian officials
who regarded the Jewish minorities in their countries as an
unassimilated and troublesome minority.

Quite unexpectedly for many of the participants, a vociferous
anti-Zionist and anti-Hebrew element used the conference to win points
by designating Hebrew as an “aged grandmother, who, having lived her
life to the full, should, in all fairness hand over the keys to the
younger housewife (Yiddish) and heiress. The latter would show her
respect by arranging an honorable funeral for her grandmother when the
time came.”

In spite of the hostility expressed by many Bund participants
including Maria Frumkin, who would later become a leading figure in
the Yevsektsia (The Jewish commissariat – i.e. the Jewish ethnic
section of the Communist Party of the USSR), a majority of the
participants were eager for some sort of compromise and stopped short
of issuing a plea for Yiddish as "The SOLE Language of the Jewish
People." Instead, it issued a resolution resolving that Yiddish be
regarded as “A national language of the Jewish People" and that every
member attending the conference have the freedom "to relate to the
Hebrew language in accordance with his personal views." Although,
seemingly a compromise, tensions between the two rivals increased and
intensified engendering true phobias.

Due to the disruptions caused by hostilities on the battlefields in
the Ukraine and White Russia during World War I, many Jews fled from
these areas known as "The Pale of Settlement" into Russia proper where
only relatively few Jews had been permitted to reside. The need to
accommodate the children of these refugees in new schools led to an
intensification of the language conflict,

Yiddishists insisted that pedagogic principles demanded teaching young
children in the language of the home and their parents (Yiddish).
Bialik responded that….”We are weary of duality. We are faced with a
dilemma: either to make the language we speak the language of our
souls, or to let our national language remain the language of our
souls and also become our spoken language. And we are convinced that
this, our national language, will live again on our mouths and those
of our children. The Yiddish language is not the language of our
souls.”

By the time of the communist takeover in 1917, the educational
authorities had reached a compromise with instruction in Yiddish and
language courses to learn both Russian and Hebrew in most Jewish
schools in predominantly Jewish areas. The eventual concentration of a
number of wealthy and successful Jewish businessmen in Moscow who
became patrons of modern Hebrew literatue made the city a world center
of Hebrew cultural creativity but this short-lived association between
Hebrew and wealthy Jews was later used by the Yevsektsia as "proof of
the reactionary and counter-revolutionary tendency of Hebrew."

In the first issue of the Jewish communist newspaper in Yiddish Emes
(Truth),  the author speaking for the editors stated :

“In these times, every Jewish worker must be on his guard. Weapon in
hand, a soldier of the revolution, he will stand on his guard to the
end…In these times, we should not forget that we have a Jewish street
of our own – a  dark reactionary street, where we must conduct a
bitter and protracted struggle, where there awaits us a great battle
against traditional reaction, which is nurtured and cultivated by our
bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie.”

Jewish support for the first revolution in March which overthrew the
Czar and established the democratic republic of Kerensky unleashed a
great enthusiasm for Jewish national and cultural identity that openly
looked to the Zionist settlements and achievements in teaching Hebrew
in Palestine. A major organization Tarbut (Culture) was established to
strengthen this association and unite all pro-Hebrew forces in Russia
but the ensuing communist revolution in November that brought Lenin to
power meant that the Yevsektsia would argue successfully that the
Yiddish speaking Jewish community supported communism in the "here and
now" while the Hebraists longed to create a future "then and there"
(in Palestine).

Hillel Zlatopolsky of Tarbut argued in support of his position that
the small Central Asian area of the Caucasus mountains where
approximately 2% of the Jewish population of the empire resided were
influenced by Turkish and Persian culture and had  long used Hebrew as
a national language and not just a liturgical one for the synagogue
services. It would be totally improper to impose Yiddish upon them.
The delegates from Samarkand who used an “oriental" sounding Sephardi
pronunciation (including the guttural letters) resembled that being
taught in Palestine by a majority of teachers. Zlatopolsky exclaimed,
"If you give us two languages we will be separated from you forever
and we will never be able to understand and know one another….In our
city of Samarkand there are twelve thousand Jews and all of them are
Zionists, and I believe that all of the Jews of Turkestan are
Zionists. We did not even know that in Russia there are Jews who are
not Zionists and are not in favor of the Hebrew language.”

>>From 1917 until at least 1956, the official status of Hebrew in the
USSR was in limbo. Although no document or law specifically forbade
Hebrew, the use of the language in all official areas was prevented.
It was burdened in every way by massive red tape. Soviet apologists
would continually argue that every nationality including Jews had the
right to instruction in their own national language if they so wished,
but that 'Hebrew was not the mother tongue of anyone' and parents
would be endangering  their children’s future employment and career
chances if they received instruction in a "dead language." Officials
became used to rejecting any application for Hebrew books, newspapers
and journals (all the Hebrew presses had been seized after the
revolution and were under government control) proclaiming that there
was no need for such publications and that the language had always
been the tool of anti-Soviet 'reactionary', 'clerical' and Zionist
elements. Moreover, experts in the Yiddish language were required to
change the orthography of spelling so that words did not resemble the
original Hebrew word from which the Yiddish term was derived.

Sporadic efforts to teach Hebrew to adults at night schools for a few
years continued  after the revolution but were eroded and finally
ended by 1926 with the argument that no officially sanctioned Soviet
textbooks were available and that this meant textbooks from Czarist
times had to be used. In public schools in Jewish areas  "where
parents demanded it," some teaching time was allotted to approved
teachers for instruction in Hebrew (in the old Ashkenazi
pronunciation) from the 2nd to the 6th grades but this too was ended
quickly.

In the field of modern Hebrew culture however, the regime, unmoved by
the Yevsektsia arguments supported the enormously successful Habimah
Theater, all of whose works were in Hebrew. It often played to
non-Jewish audiences as well who were provided with Russian language
translations. Press reviews on the professional achievements of the
theater were enthusiastic. In addition, the government even permitted
a few Zionist and Hebrew speaking collective farms in the Crimea run
by the far Leftist HeChalutz (the Pioneer) organization, which
provided training for eventual emigration and settlement in
Palestinian kibbutzim. These too all came to an end by 1927. The
universal praise accorded HaBimah and its support by Maxsim Gorki were
an embarrassment to the Yevsektsia. The regime found it useful to be
granted recognition abroad for its efforts to sponsor avant-guard art
and theater before Stalin’s deadening hand eradicated all creativity.

Ironically, no successful Hebrew language theater had got off the
ground in Czarist times. Habimah’s success stemmed in part from the
enthusiasm of the highest actors, directors and designers for a modern
Hebrew theater. Raphael Zvi, one of the Habimah founders proclaimed
that the communist revolution had set off a revolutionary storm that
had “ignited our Hebrew rebellion,”. The Theater had no hint of any
anti-Soviet activity and on the contrary was a showcase for the
regime. Amazingly and ironically there was no national Yiddish theater
at the time in the USSR that could compete with it, yet in the
libraries and schools, Hebrew had already been extinguished and
labeled as reactionary by Jewish communist activists almost everywhere
in the USSR.

In Palestine, Zionist Labor Party leader David Ben-Gurion, remarked
how incredible this fleeting contradiction seemed during a visit to
Moscow in 1923 when he visited the theater on Nizhni-Kislovsky Alley
which proudly bore the huge Hebrew lettered signs “HaBimah” and
“Kupah” (box office in Hebrew). He wrote in the Labor Party’s journal
upon his return to Palestine…”Does all this exist in the Moscow of
1923 where the state library does not allow Hebrew newspapers and
conceals many of its Hebrew books, where study of the Hebrew language
is not permitted? A sense of miracle grips me, a feeling of wonder, of
rebellion against the laws of reality. Can it be? This acting, this
stage, under these conditions, in our time, in the Russian Communist
Moscow among the Yevsektsia?

It was also almost mystical that the Habimah directors and crew of
actors decided that the theater would adopt the Sephardi-Oriental
pronunciation of Hebrew, then only tentatively accepted by most
teachers of modern Hebrew in Palestine. This move facilitated the
essential unified character of modern Hebrew.

All this time, the Yevsektsia apparatus was gritting its teeth,
confident that this aberration would not last. Yet in spite of
internal divisions and immense pressure to also perform plays in
Yiddish and in so doing tour the USSR as well as the Yiddish speaking
Diaspora, the Theater refused. R. Ben-Ari, a leading actor of Habimah
wrote about the decision to remain purely a Hebrew language
theater…"We were acting in Hebrew not in order to create provocation
but because this was our mission…to bring to the stage a language
which, despite all that has happened, has not died out over thousands
of years. We must revive it. We must learn how to express in this
tongue ideas for the entire world, not only for the Jews. It is of
course, easy to swim with the current, but we want to express out
thoughts in language emanating from our national struggle.”

The abrupt end came in January, 1926 when the theater troupe left for
a tour of the Diaspora. All those who had come to the railway station
in Riga to see the actors off sensed they would not return and this
was the end. Days before, the Theater had performed its 300th
performance of the Dybbuk in Moscow to rave reviews. The decision not
to return was taken abroad and caused much soul-searching. The
decision to locate to Jerusalem (and later Tel-Aviv) meant the
realization of the Zionist goal and a great transfusion of European
culture to Palestine but it also meant the end of the twilight zone in
which the Soviet Union turned its back on Hebrew language and culture
for fifty years and henceforth regarded it as a sign of dual loyalty
and the standard epithets of adjectives strung together before the
word Zionism: anti-Soviet, reactionary, clerical-bourgeois, Fascist,
Titoist, racist, collaborationist puppet of British colonialism and
imperialism. No such policy existed towards any other language,
certainly not towards German, the language of the ethnic minority of
the Volga Germans and a language of major importance for scientific
research and great literature.

In spite of a half century of persecution, the underground teaching of
Hebrew persisted and came out into the open in the 1970s as the life
blood of the "Refusenik" movement and helped educate and train more
than a million emigrants from the USSR to the State of Israel. Many
American Jewish college students taking elementary Hebrew are wholly
unaware that the subject they take so much for granted lived a
precarious existence in the underground of a tyrannical state and that
its study brought with it the risk of imprisonment, hard labor,
banishment and social ostracism.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/98079/sec_id/98079

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