EMSAH Research Seminar - DEIFYING Zionism and DEFYING Religion: DEFINING Ideologically-Manipulative Secularization of Hebrew Terms within the Israeli Language presented by Assoc Prof Ghil'ad Zuckermann
Event Details
- Date:
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Friday, 31 August 2007
- Time:
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1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
- Room:
- 437
- UQ Location:
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Michie Building (St Lucia)
- Event category(s):
-
Event Contact
Event Description
- Full Description:
- DEIFYING Zionism and DEFYING Religion: DEFINING Ideologically-Manipulative Secularization of Hebrew Terms within the Israeli Language
Associate Professor Ghil‘ad Zuckermann
One of the problems facing those attempting to revive Hebrew as the national language of the emerging State of Israel was that of Hebrew lexical voids. The ‘revivalists’ attempted to use mainly internal sources of lexical enrichment but were faced with a paucity of roots. They changed the meanings of obsolete Hebrew terms to fit the modern world. This infusion often entailed the secularization of religious terms.
This lecture explores the widespread phenomenon of semantic secularization, as in the ideologically-neutral process visible in English cell ‘monk’s living place’ > ‘autonomous self-replicating unit from which tissues of the body are formed’. The main focus, however, is on secularizations involving ideologically-manipulative ‘lexical engineering’, as exemplified by deliberate, subversive processes of extreme semantic shifting, pejoration, amelioration, trivialization and allusion.
An example of such anti-religious transvaluation is בלורית. Mishnaic Hebrew [blorit] is ‘Mohawk, an upright strip of hair that runs across the crown of the head from the forehead to the nape of the neck’, characteristic of the abominable pagan and not to be touched by the Jewish barber. But defying religious values, secular Socialist Zionists use blorít with the meaning ‘forelock, hair above the forehead’, which becomes one of the defining characteristics of the Sabra (native Israeli). Thus, the ‘new Jew’ is ultimately a pagan!
This negation of religion complements the phenomenon of negation of the Diaspora, exemplified in the very blorít by Zionists expecting the Sabra to have dishevelled hair, as opposed to the orderly diasporic Jew, who was considered by Zionists to be weak and persecuted.
In line with the prediction made by the Kabbalah-scholar Gershom Scholem in his letter to Franz Rosenzweig (Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache, 1926), some ultra-orthodox Jews have tried to launch a ‘lexical vendetta’: using secularized terms as dormant agents, as a shortcut to religious concepts, thus trying to convince secular Jews to go back to their religious roots.
The study of Israeli cultural linguistics and socio-philology casts light on the dynamics between language, religion and identity in a land where fierce military battles with external enemies are accompanied by internal Kulturkämpfe.
About the Presenter:
Ghil‘ad ZUCKERMANN, D.Phil. (Oxford), Ph.D. (Cambridge) (titular), M.A. (Tel Aviv) (summa cum laude), is Associate Professor and ARC Discovery Fellow at EMSAH. He has been Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge; has taught in Israel, Singapore, UK and USA; and has held research posts in Melbourne, Austin (Texas), Bellagio (Italy) and Tokyo. His publications – in English, Israeli (a.k.a. ‘Modern Hebrew’), Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German and Russian – include the books Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan 2003) and Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli a Beautiful Language, Am Oved, in press). He is currently working on three further books: (1) Language Genesis and Multiple Causation, (2) Language, Religion and Identity, and (3) Language Academies. His website: http://www.zuckermann.org/
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