Hebrew: Modernity and Nationalism

Undergraduate / Graduate

Modernization and Nationalism are ideas that are closely intertwined with each other and with questions of language: the emergence of nationalism is a modern phenomenon to which ideas about language were central and which, in turn, had a profound effect on the languages of the world and on the study of language. How did the relation between language, nation and state emerge in a historical reality structured by enlightenment, empire, colonialism, industrialization, and globalization? How do discoveries about language influence ideas of nation, and how do ideas of collectivity such as nationhood, ethnicity, and race influence the study of language, indeed the very concept of "a language" and of "different languages"? What does it mean for a language to be modernized? Nationalized? "Revived"? This interdisciplinary class takes the revitalization and vernacularization of Hebrew as a case-study through which to explore some of these questions. Combining perspectives on language from Linguistics, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Religious Studies and Anthropology, the class looks at discourses, practices and institutional efforts through which Hebrew was modernized, nationalized and romanticized in the 19th and 20th centuries, to examine the complicated relationships between language, nationalism, and colonialism in this period.