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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 337

Part of Session 116: God in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

The language of Jewish worship in the city

Authors: Spolsky, Bernard
Submitted by: Spolsky, Bernard (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)

Even before the expulsion from Palestine by the Roman, Jews had developed a triglossic patterns, with Hebrew as the sacred language, Judeo-Aramaic as a daily language and language of contact with non-Jews, and Greek as language of government and secular elite. This pattern continued in the Diaspora, with Hebrew maintaining its role commonly for worship and study, a Jewish language (such as Yiddish or Ladino or Judeo-Arabic) developing for community use (and in some cases for literacy), and co-territorial vernacular being used for external contacts. Jews migrating to a new city (they were commonly barred from land ownership and agriculture) would join or form synagogues with others who shared customs and language. In the Venetian ghetto for instance, there were separate synagogues for speakers of Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo-Venetian. But Hebrew remained the common language of prayer; a sixteenth century Haggadah for Passover printed in Venice had a Hebrew text accompanied by translations into the three other Jewish varieties.  With the return to Zion in the 19^th century, the same pattern continued, but the revernacularization and revitalization of Hebrew at the beginning of the 20^th century meant that for the first time for two thousand years, there were worshippers able to speak and understand a modified version of the sacred language. Nonetheless, the preference continued to be to establish synagogues following the traditions of Diaspora communities, although there was a tendency to standardization making possible the printing of three major editions of the prayer book, Ashkenazi (German, Polish, Lithuanian), Sephardi (Hungarian, Hassidic), and Oriental (Jews expelled from Arabic speaking countries). As well as synagogues following these three traditions, there are others in Jerusalem with more precise focus – an Italian synagogue which follows the practice of either Rome or Milan, North African communities with Moroccan or Tunisian customs, specific Hassidic communities associated with the east European towns of their founding Rebbes, for instance. With all the variety, the bulk of worship (prayer and Bible reading) in these synagogues is in Hebrew, and most use Modern Israeli Hebrew as the language for sermons, teaching, and announcements.  But some, with more recent immigrants, use a traditional co-territorial language.  Thus, there are a few synagogues which have sermons in Russian, French, or English, in breach of the generally accepted Israeli practice of using only Hebrew in public. How long this will last is hard to predict, as the children of congregants are increasingly native speakers of Hebrew and the immigrants themselves gradually develop proficiency in the language.