>> From: "Jim Devine" <jdevine03 at gmail.com>
>>
>> The focus on
>> Yiddish was invented, not traditional.
>> --
>
> I don't understand your reference to Yiddish here. The Zionists were
> opposed to the use of Yiddish.
>
> There were different ways that Jewish nationalism developed, not all of them
> Zionist. There was the "diaspora nationaism" of Simon Dubnow, the Jewish
> Labor Bund, and so on. There was indeed a heavy emphasis on Yiddish among
> the non-Zionists, exactly because Yiddish was the language that many Jews,
> to understate the case, spoke. What was "invented" about it?
Did Jim mean Hebrew?
Wikipedia sez:
Most European Jews in the 19th century spoke Yiddish, a language based on mediaeval German, but as of the 1880s, Ben Yehudah and his supporters began promoting the use and teaching of a modernised form of biblical Hebrew, which had not been a living language for nearly 2,000 years. Despite Herzl's efforts to have German proclaimed the official language of the Zionist movement, the use of Hebrew was adopted as official policy by Zionist organisations in Palestine, and served as an important unifying force among the Jewish settlers, many of whom also took new Hebrew names.
The development of the first Hebrew-speaking city (Tel Aviv), the kibbutz movement, and other Jewish economic institutions, plus the use of Hebrew, began by the 1920s to lay the foundations of a new nationality, which would come into formal existence in 1948.
(...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
--
/ dave /