Zionist Language Policy
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There is an inherent problem with counter-factual history in that, to be able to talk about it at all, you have to assume that some things that happened had to be that way and some things could have been different, but there’s no obvious philosophical grounds for making that distinction. Some people had free will, and others didn’t. For example, one of the most frequently discussed questions is whether there was a way of avoiding the world-historical catastrophe of WW2. What if the Allies had been more forgiving at the Treaty of Versailles? What if they had intervened to block the reoccupation of the Ruhr? What if England had not given guarantees it couldn’t enforce to Poland? However, there’s a really obvious way WW2 could have been avoided which is that, after unification with Austria and the conquest of the Sudetanland, Hitler had decided that all legitimate German grievances had been sufficiently addressed and concentrated on economic development through peaceful cooperation with neighbouring countries. Everyone senses instantly that such an answer is cheating, but whatever the grounds for that assumption are, they aren’t epistemological. Which is all to say that I’m aware that what I’m going to say now isn’t philosophically coherent, but there’s not much I can do about it either. No-one forces you to read this nonsense.
Some things are cool simpliciter, and some things are cool in the ‘it’s cool that someone did that’ sense, but they are not themselves cool. It’s impressive that someone put so much effort into making the world’s largest tower of pennies, but it would have been better had he put his efforts into something else. Hebrew is like that. People can argue about whether it clears the technical threshold of a resurrected language, but it’s definitely the closest anyone has ever come. It’s objectively cool that a bunch of OTDs from Volozhin decided to make up a new language just to stick it to their Rosh Yeshiva and now millions of people actually speak that language (we’ll get back to this). Nowadays, OTDs just write memoirs about being OTD and their feelings. This is a yawning chasm of human accomplishment. However, the fact is that Israeli Hebrew just kind of sucks. It’s probably not the ugliest language anyone in the world speaks - there are a lot of languages - but it’s ugly and also mildly comical. All the predictions of cultural revival promised by the prophets of the new Hebrew fizzled out after early promise. Bialik is good, Shai Agnon is good, Amos Oz is OK. After that? No-one cares. Certainly Israelis don’t care. They have Hidabrut. To the extent that something that could be called culture happens in Israel, it is mostly conducted in English. The most widely-studied author today from the Hebrew Renaissance is Rabbi Kook and literally no-one has the foggiest clue what he was trying to say (don’t lie). As their last resort, people say that it’s so wonderful that Israeli children can open up the Tanach and understand it, but this is not actually true. Take a child and check. Yes, there is something kind of grimly impressive about the Israeli determination to win the prize for the fewest consonants by endlessly whittling down the alphabet (screw you! ה), as well as somehow having both the largest number of clumsy loanwords and most restricted vocabulary of any language all at the same time, but, again, it’s impressive because they do it, not inherently.
But what should the language of the new state have been? Nothing, check the name of the blog, but, if we take Zionism as a given, I think it’s obvious that Israel should have been a bilingual Yiddish-Arabic state. The reasons for this are as follows:
First of all, Yiddish was spoken, at the time, as a first language by the overwhelming majority of Jews in the world, and, more specifically, by the Jews of the Russian empire for whose predicament Zionism was a proposed remedy. The second most common first-language was Arabic, and between them they accounted for at least 90% of the global Jewish population. In a Yiddish-Arabic speaking Yishuv, therefore, the massive amounts of resources spent teaching new immigrants a new language could have been spent on just about anything else. Yiddish is an easy language to learn because of its grammatical anarchy, and easy adoption of lexis from other languages. The majority dialect of Yiddish today, American-Chassidic, is about 30% English as measured by vocabulary,1 and probably something quite similar would have happened with the adoption of Arabic vocabulary, aiding adoption by the minority population of Jews from MENA countries. The removal of the large barrier to successful assimilation posed by learning Hebrew would likely have lowered the rate of yerida in the pre-state Yishuv from the staggering 30-50% estimated by historians, substantially easing the main problem of Zionism, namely its failure to outnumber the Arabs as per the original plan
There is a somewhat deeper level to this too. Everyone knows that the best Jews are Chassidim. They are just much more comfortable in their own skin, possessed of an authentic and deeply-rooted Jewish identity that everyone else lacks and tries to compensate for in increasingly pathological ways, and just generally more chilled and based and awesome. People assume that this is because of Chassidic ‘thought’ in some way, hence the cancer of neo-Chassidism and proliferation of literature explaining stuff like deveikus, but this is just obviously and provably wrong. Leaving aside Chabad and Breslev, which you can claim are kind of sui generis, Gerrer Chassidim are the absolute worst Jews: dirty, rude, perverted, and sick in the head. The actual difference is that the good Chasidim speak Yiddish and the bad Chassidim speak something else (usually Hebrew). Indeed, the minority of Yiddish-speaking Gerrers left are, to this day, almost completely normal except for trying to tuck regular trousers into their socks. Language is not just a tool for communication; it’s an instrument of group identity through which innumerable things only partially or not at all understood at the conscious level are passed from generation to generation, and across the group. The sad truth that we have to admit is that an Ashkenazi Jew who doesn’t speak Yiddish is an abortion, a spiritually hobbled and deformed creature, fatally detached from the culture of his ancestors and trying to fake it (I don’t speak Yiddish by the way).
The same thing is also true of MENA Jews who don’t speak Arabic. The Mizrahim are always moaning about how they were treated in the early days of the state. A lot of this is pretty ridiculous. Yes, they were in shabby camps, but Israel was dirt poor and coming out of years of gruelling war. There wasn’t some obvious better option. In fact, a lot of Mizrahi Jews got to live in a house in Ramle or Lod from which an Arab had been recently expelled at gunpoint. Some of the other complaints are even more ridiculous, like the idea that there was a thriving trade in stolen Yemenite babies being smuggled to America to go to families willing to pay any price and commit any crime to procure the inestimable treasure of a Yemenite child as a conversation starter at dinner parties or something. However, at the end of the day, the fact is the Zionists did indeed mess them up good and proper and I think the main way they did it (apart from the obvious of getting them kicked out of their home country) was the mass trauma of putting them in schools in an alien language that half of the teachers were also in the process of learning. Transitioning from one language to another can work, but it needs a lot of cultural scaffolding and should preferably happen over a few generations. Not enough research has been done on the mass hazing ritual that was the early state education system - and that which has been done is usually ruined by race leftism - but it’s easy to intuit how it resulted in the mutant freak that is Israeli ‘Sephardi’ culture. Were it not for Rav Ovadya’s heroic efforts in promoting a kind of franchise pastiche of elite Iraqi Jewish culture borrowing heavily from the European Yeshiva movement, it would likely have been a whole lot worse. There’s a whole genre of hasbara posting that is showcasing the rich cultural heritage of MENA Jewry to prove we are indigenous to the region, but it’s all rendered silly and moot by the fact that there is more of this indigenous Judeo-Arabic culture in New York than there is here. Superstition, credulousness and adulation of criminals are not, in and of themselves, a culture.
The second reason is geopolitical. The language of this region is Arabic. For the purpose of espionage and diplomacy, Israel has managed to get by OK, though one suspects there was a stark drop in quality from the era of Eli Cohen after the first wave of immigrants died out. However, for more mundane day to day matters, the lack of broad-based Arabic competency - an entirely self-inflicted disability - has been consistently debilitating. For me, the penny dropped when watching the following video, in which Shimon Peres took a visit to support the pro-cooperation Mayor of Bethlehem against a PLO-supporting challenger:
Isn’t that just so awful? Communicating in broken English as a shared second language, of sorts, is just obviously not an effective way of ruling a group of people, and, whether by choice or necessity, Israel has spent a great part of its history ruling over Arabic speakers. Some of these were hostile from the off, some of them weren’t.
Wherever they started, though, they always ended up very hostile indeed. Israelis have an excuse for this. Better, they have a handful. It’s anti-semitism, it’s the Koran, it’s Soviet propaganda etc. It’s never entirely false, but the only common denominator in all your spectacularly unsuccessful military occupations is you. Probably the single most important factor in avoiding stressful encounters that leave everyone resentful thousands of times a day is frictionless communication. Language incompetency also means you can’t rule effectively by proxy either. One of Ariel Sharon’s more reasonable ideas was to tool up the Maronites through the instrument of the South Lebanese Army, but half of the money was allocated to literally non-existent units and then used to start up catering businesses in Buenos Aires because no-one could keep track on it.
Thus concludes the inoffensive part of the article. I think that’s more than enough justification for preferring Yiddish-Arabic bilingualism, but I also have some offensive reasons too.
Take, for example, this headline from a while ago:
