Yiddish Becomes The National Languge Of Israel!

I have said in another thread that the re-establishment of Hebrew as the national language successfully was apart from survival itself, the greatest achievement of Israel! AFAIK, it is quite a hierarcical society, where the Ashkanazy ( sorry about the mispelling ) have always been number 1! So what if Yiddish rather than Hebrew was adopted as the main language?
 
How did Israel make Hebrew the official language, my inderstanding is that there is quite a difference between biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew!
 
Hebrew was favoured by many in the Zionist movement because they felt Yiddish was just the language of a small part of Judaism, while Hebrew united them all. But the Hebraists had a hard time. I think without the Shoah, the chances are good it would, at least unofficially, come to be Yiddish.
 

st.istvan

Banned
Hebrew was favoured by many in the Zionist movement because they felt Yiddish was just the language of a small part of Judaism, while Hebrew united them all. But the Hebraists had a hard time. I think without the Shoah, the chances are good it would, at least unofficially, come to be Yiddish.

I agree wholeheartedly on the first part of your post.
However, I don't think there would have BEEN an Israel if it hadn't been for the Shoah.
 
Yiddish never would have been the language of Israel, for two reasons. One is that to the early Zionists, Yiddish was seen as the language of the ghetto and of the Diaspora, while Hebrew, even though it was a dead language, was seen as a free language, and appealed to nationalism. The other reason is that the Zionist pioneers eventually wanted to attract Mizrachi and Sephardic Jews, and none of them spoke Yiddish, which was a hybrid of German, Hebrew and Polish.
 
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