Battalion of the Defenders of the Language

The Battalion of the Defenders of the Language (

Formation

Many early

Zionists

felt that the revival of the Hebrew language was a critical part of their endeavours. By the 1920s, Hebrew was already a well-established language in Mandatory Palestine.

However, with the arrival of thousands of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Palestine as part of the

olim

.

Many of the activists came from the

Technion

institute.

Activities

The Battalion campaigned against the use of other languages under the slogan עברי, דבר עברית (Ivri, daber ivrit; "Hebrew [i.e. Jew], speak Hebrew!")[2]^: 40 Among its most prominent supporters were Mordechai Ben-Hillel Hacohen, a Hebrew writer, Zionist and one of the founders of Tel Aviv, and Zvi Yehuda Kook, the son of the chief rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.^[3]

The Battalion put up posters and neon signs around Tel Aviv encouraging the use of Hebrew and instructed its members to use only Hebrew in their day-to-day lives. Members of the Battalion also went out onto the streets replacing Russian and Yiddish shop signs with Hebrew ones and fixing grammatical errors in existing Hebrew signs. One member even publicly reprimanded the poet

for speaking Yiddish in the street.

A number of members of the Battalion were involved in a march to the Western Wall in 1929, which was used as the pretext for the 1929 Palestine riots.

Reaction

The Jewish (mostly Yiddish) press tended to portray the group as "a gang of fanatic, insolent hoodlums". However, the battalion was seldom involved in any real violence.^[4]

Ghil'ad Zuckermann has pointed out that the Battalion's efforts were concentrated exclusively against the use of non-Hebrew words, whereas they were perfectly content with words and phrases calqued into Hebrew, such as the expression מה נשמע ma nishma ('How are you?', literally 'what is heard?'), a calque from Yiddish and other European languages.^[2]: 39

See also

• Hebrew language
• Revival of the Hebrew language
• Pro-Wailing Wall Committee
• Association for Palestinian Products
• War of the Languages

Notes

References

• Frank, Mitch (2005). Understanding the Holy Land: Answering Questions About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Viking.
  ISBN 978-0-670-06032-0
• Meyers, Nechemia (2002). Yiddish Lives - A Language That Refuses to Die. The World and I, February 1.
• Segev, Tom (2000). One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Abacus.
  ISBN 978-0-349-11286-2
• Segev, Tom (2009). When Tel Aviv was a wilderness. Haaretz, 10 May.