> On 10/19/07, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Wasn't use of Yiddish banned, or at least discouraged,
>> in the early days of Israel, because they wanted to
>> wipe out that specific national identity in favour of a
>> pan-Jewish Hebrew-speaking one?
>
> Did the fact that it's a dialect of German bother anybody?
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The Zionists discouraged Yiddish from the beginning, long before the Nazis
came to power. Hebrew was the language of the biblical Israelites. The new
Israelites wanted to extirpate everything associated with what they regarded
as the unhealty culture of the ghetto. Their ideal was a revived Hebrew
nation of citizen-soldiers based on manual labour. But the proletarian
values were progressively discarded and the martial ones made malignant by
the logic of colonial settlement.