It is not like a bunch of zionists taught all the worlds’ Jews Hebrew, but if you put a German Jew and a Russian Jew in the same room, the only language they would both know is Hebrew.

Yeah, if you put a German Jew and a Moroccan Jew, your results could have been not the same.

Still analogous to Latin, though. Like if you compare Latin in Italy to Latin in Poland.

pidgin dialects like Yiddish (and others).

Yiddish is definitely not a pidgin, it's a pretty functional Germanic language, and not too much further from Standard High German than German casually spoken in Vienna.

Actually it's much less of a pidgin to German than neo-Hebrew is a pidgin to Hebrew.

It is not like a bunch of zionists taught all the worlds’ Jews Hebrew

There were competing views of the future of European Jews as a culture and what modernity will be for them. For some the modern language to be standardized etc would be, again, Yiddish.

[–] stevehobbes@lemy.lol -1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The difference between Hebrew and Latin was that only the Catholic clergy and intellectuals wrote in Latin.

The average Jewish kid could read and write in hebrew. Even if it wasn’t spoken.

Even in Morocco, the dialects spoken were often written with Hebrew characters - including a dialect of Arabic written with Hebrew characters.

They also would have more than a passing knowledge of Hebrew, obviously.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 months ago

Well, obviously, knowing the language sufficiently to pray and sufficiently to converse in it deeply on various subjects are two different things.

To pray you actually don't have to know it that well. A Russian being able to say a prayer in Church Slavic doesn't know Church Slavic, likely. Same with an Armenian and a prayer in Grabar (though that's an archaic form of Armenian, so some sense will get through).

These are bad examples, because Russian is related to Church Slavic (though it's a South Slavic language) and Grabar is the classical form of Armenian.

But you can think, again, of a Pole or a Catholic German who can say a prayer in Latin, but doesn't speak Latin.

And knowing the alphabet is not the same as knowing the language.

So nothing obvious in that. Kids from Rabbinic families and in general with good Jewish education would, of course. Just like kids from good families in European societies would learn Latin, Ancient Greek, and probably also Hebrew.

[–] MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 10 months ago

What you're missing is that anything easier, even more palettable to Palestinians and some others to learn, than straight Hebrew was thrown aside when it would have been a zero-cost, high-reward route to enabling the single-state solution that they claimed to want.

Instead, they otherized a chunk of the Jewish population that was about as large as the Palestinian population that they sought to eject, and Jews that were already closer to or in Israel no less!! Jews that would have gladly introduced new-comers to the new neighbors!! It was a nail in the coffin for any goal besides that of an ethno-state.