DB AH Challenge: Revive Hebrew as a widespread spoken language

With a POD not before 1882 (the beginning of the first wave of Jewish mass immigration to the Middle East) your challenge is to make Hebrew a thriving spoken language with speakers numbering in the millions. Bonus points if you can make it one of the official languages of a sovereign nation -- super-bonus points if it's the only official language of that nation.

To start you off: apparently there were a few attempts at reviving Hebrew as a commonly spoken language, most recently around the beginning of the 20th century, but they all petered out for one reason or another.
 
Isn't Hebrew spoken by million at this particular moment AND an official language of a state as well?

OOC: Oh damn... disregard it, i didn't notice the DB in the thread. Excuse me.
 
hm Zionism was and is very secular, owing more to modern nationalism than religion, Hebrew is a holy language thus never had much appeal to Zionists, on top of the fact it was a dead language not something the hyper modern Zionists of the early movement would like, also religious Jews would be enraged if the holy language were to be just used out on the streets, the religious Jews in fact mostly live in the Sinai so they can not offend God by moving into the Holy Land before called by Him, any ways if the Zionists used Hebrew I think they'd be much less successful, why would any Eastern Jew want to move and give up Yiddish and learn a new language that wasn't useful outside of Zion? :confused:
 
You might as well ask that Latin become a widespread spoken language. Just as ASB.

I dunno. If you had the Israeli's adopt Hebrew instead of Yiddish as the official language you might do it, but what with the Ottomans cracking down on the language in the 20s and later during the Great War...
 
Have a genocidal madman seize power in a European country with endemic anti-Semitism, a national humiliation, and an economic crisis with the political establishment discredited. That madman will then gradually institutionalize anti-Semitism and eventually start a Napoleon-like war to conquer all of Europe, while slaughtering Jews and other undesirables in an industrialized, methodical fashion. If/when he's defeated, there is no other choice by the victorious powers but to permit the formation of a Jewish state in the Levant by Jewish survivors of the war. And even then, they'll have to make Hebrew and not Yiddish the language.

How many levels of ASB does that take?
 
Isn't Hebrew spoken by million at this particular moment AND an official language of a state as well?

OOC: This is a DBWI, my friend, or a 'Double Blind What If'. Basically, you take an OTL event, like the Civil War, for instance, and you try to ask a question from the perspective of someone in another timeline where it didn't happen. Hopefully, that explains it well enough for ya. :)
 
I dunno. If you had the Israeli's adopt Hebrew instead of Yiddish as the official language you might do it, but what with the Ottomans cracking down on the language in the 20s and later during the Great War...

I don't think there was an Israeli Zionist split till the modernists took Tel Aviv and the northern coast in 1960 to form Israel, which as far as I know speaks English, rather then the Yiddish in Zion
 
OOC: This is a DBWI, my friend, or a 'Double Blind What If'. Basically, you take an OTL event, like the Civil War, for instance, and you try to ask a question from the perspective of someone in another timeline where it didn't happen. Hopefully, that explains it well enough for ya. :)

OOC: Yes, yes i just noticed and i know what a DBWI is but by the time i was writing my idea about a certain ASB anti-semetic leader that tears the world apart in Napoleon-style, EternalCynic apparently had the same idea and was faster in writing it... :p
 
Have a genocidal madman seize power in a European country with endemic anti-Semitism, a national humiliation, and an economic crisis with the political establishment discredited. That madman will then gradually institutionalize anti-Semitism and eventually start a Napoleon-like war to conquer all of Europe, while slaughtering Jews and other undesirables in an industrialized, methodical fashion. If/when he's defeated, there is no other choice by the victorious powers but to permit the formation of a Jewish state in the Levant by Jewish survivors of the war. And even then, they'll have to make Hebrew and not Yiddish the language.

How many levels of ASB does that take?

At least Mussolini knew the limits of dictatorship and did not persecute (or ethnically cleanse) the Jewish community in Italy.

Italo Balbo came to power after Mussolini died in 1959. When he recognized the State of Israel the next year, the other countries followed suit.

Balbo did work behind the scenes to convince Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Hashemite Arabia to leave Israel alone (after all, Italy buys 90 percent of their oil).
 
I don't think there was an Israeli Zionist split till the modernists took Tel Aviv and the northern coast in 1960 to form Israel, which as far as I know speaks English, rather then the Yiddish in Zion

Mostly English. Second commonly spoken language In Israel is Esperanto. Leftover from the overambitious plan to have a unifying language for all Zion citizens. I honestly think it was a great idea, but the implemntation was lacking. It was one of the reasons for the split IIRC. Trying to have a unifying language that has nothing to do with the local Arab population and upsets the more conservative Jews is just ASB IMHO.
 
I could see this happen in a context where Jewish nationalism to some extent favors the ancient past over the medival/early modern Ashkenazi culture a là Greek nationalism and antiquity. Wasn't there a Jewish-socialist group called the Bundists that sought a "New Jew"-y thing? Them doing well could be a good starting point for this.
 
Wasn't there a Jewish-socialist group called the Bundists that sought a "New Jew"-y thing? Them doing well could be a good starting point for this.

as I pointed out early Zionists were very modern, I doubt they'd like the idea of using a language from 3,000 BC, as I remember they pushed learning English, German and French as those were seen as "modern" not that many rank and file Zionists bothered
 
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