In May of 1934, Hayim Nahman Bialik, then Hebrew’s unofficial poet laureate and later Israel’s unofficial national poet, wrote a telegram to the Zionist Federation of South Africa.A year and a half earlier, Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany. The new chancellor wasted no time in enacting anti-Jewish legislation which removed Jewish people from civil service, universities, law and tax firms, and the agricultural sector; severely restricted Jewish physicians’ ability to practice medicine, and excluded Jewish people from the arts. Jewish ritual slaughter was made illegal in a bid to make Jewish life nearly impossible. In his telegram, Bialike alludes to these “waves of persecution” for his people in the Diaspora and offers his gratitude for the South Africans’ support of the Zionist endeavor. Curiously, though Bialik’s missive is in Hebrew, the script he is using is Latin letters, which would enable any Western reader to read, or at least vocalize, Hebrew. This telegram encapsulates a short-lived movement to Romanize the Hebrew language, and its context, and indeed its content, offers an insight into why such a movement existed.
The movement to Romanize Hebrew is associated mainly with Itamar Ben-Avi, the first modern speaker of Hebrew, and the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew. As early as 1895, Ben-Avi had experimented with teaching Hebrew to Christians and Muslims in Jerusalem using Latin letters and found that, in bypassing the Hebrew script, his students acquired the language more quickly.{1} Another main proponent of Romanizing Hebrew was Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Zionist Revisionism. In 1919, the two met to compare systems of Hebrew Romanization (Jabotinsky kept a Hebrew journal written in Latin letters). Before they could meet again, Jabotinsky, who had become the commander of the Irgun, served time in the Acre prison, during which Jabotinsky translated parts of Dante’s Inferno and, more famously, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” into Hebrew. Upon Jabotinsky’s release in 1920, he met with Ben-Avi again, and together they planned a trip to Europe to explore creating a custom Latin typeface for Hebrew. Over the next five years, progress was generally slow, and Jabotinsky, by nature more of a poet and journalist, was drawn into politics. Ben-Avi was more or less on his own, though he continued to receive strong support from Jabotinsky. In 1927, Ben-Avi published the first-ever Hebrew book in Latin letters – a biography about his father, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda – and went on to publish the first newspaper in the same format in 1928.
Much opposition to Ben-Avi’s efforts came from the religious community, who were already proficient and literate in Hebrew, and who viewed the imposition of Latin script as hitting a nerve in Jewish consciousness; the idea of publishing sacred Jewish texts in Latin script that would then be discarded was reminiscent of the ages-old trauma of Jewish books being defiled and destroyed. Moreover, those edicts were issued in Latin (and Cyrillic) type; the use of this script and its associations with centuries-old oppression which was enjoying a resurgence concomitantly, was too much for many of Ben-Avi’s contemporaries to bear.{2} It is surprising that Bialik wrote this telegram in Hebrew with Latin script, as he was initially vocally opposed to Ben-Avi’s project. With time, Bialik’s stance softened. He never came out in support of the Latin script for Hebrew, but he ceased to criticize it.
Proponents of using Latin script to write Hebrew were coming from a different place. As Bialik notes in his missive, “the hands of thousands of refugees from death and destruction are knocking at our door,” noting the challenges of absorbing new immigrants. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason that Ben-Avi’s project resonated with so many. Jabotinsky, who spoke Russian, Yiddish, German, French, Italian, and some Slavic languages, never got fully comfortable with Hebrew script. He knew firsthand the difficulties the Hebrew alphabet posed to learning the language: “If self-teaching is easy with respect to any other language, it is exceedingly difficult in Hebrew: not because of the intrinsic difficulties of the language but because of its orthography, which originated before the flood, which is where it belongs.”{3} Hungarian-British journalist and author Arthur Koestler, agreed with Jabotinsky in advocating “for the use of the Roman script in the service of the beginners.”{4} Koestler expressed his frustration that despite obtaining fluency in Hebrew after four years in Palestine, he was unable to read newspapers or books, and felt that “the majority of new immigrants are in the same position.”{5} Many American Jewish luminaries, such as Justice Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, were in favor of adopting Latin characters for Hebrew, as well.
Overhauling an ancient language to conform to Roman script was important not only for integrating new immigrants. During the Mandate, Ben-Avi envisioned Latin script being used in both Hebrew and Arabic languages, in Jewish and Muslim cantons respectively, that would be under the auspices of a federal government controlled by the British. Ben-Avi believed in the power of a common language, or at least a common alphabet, to unite three different interest groups into a harmonious existence. The British did not implement a uniform Latin script in Palestine, nor in the rest of their empire. Ben-Avi claimed to have suggested the utility of Latin script in the Ottoman Empire to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (then a military attache) in a Jerusalem meeting prior to the First World War. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Caliphate and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Ataturk, now president, was determined to modernize and Westernize his country. In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk took the dramatic step of creating a new Turkish alphabet in Roman letters in pursuit of those goals.
In the late 1940s, Arthur Koestler looked to Turkey when he picked up the mantle of the now-deceased Ben-Avi, who had died in 1943. Koestler felt that the “dangers of cultural isolation and stagnation” facing the fledgling Jewish republic were solvable by “the Latinization of the obsolete and cumbersome alphabet.” It was crucial for Israel to maintain its ties with the West. Indeed, Jabotinsky, Koestler’s erstwhile mentor, had wished to Latinize Hebrew as a means of signaling alliance with the West well before Ataturk Romanized Turkish.
But Hebrew proved more difficult to Romanize than Turkish. For one thing, the literacy rate amongst the Jews of Palestine was significantly higher than that of the Turks, which meant that many people were already proficient with Hebrew letters. In addition to the religious element of society that objected to replacing the traditional Hebrew text, many of the secular Zionists similarly felt that discarding the ancient script was an affront to reconstituting their national identity. In Bialik’s 1903 novella “Behind the Fence,” the protagonist is a young boy named Noah who was raised in a gentile environment and “cannot distinguish between an aleph and a cross.” Thirty years on, Bialik’s Hebrew missive foretold of the impending dangers towards his fellow Jews in the Diaspora, written in Latin script that was designed to help refugees like the fictional Noah acclimate to their new home in “the Land” despite “any adversary or obstacle.”
