Da Königsberg a Berlino: l’ebraico moderno in Germania

Modern Hebrew (neo-Hebrew or ‘ivrit) is not a widely spoken language in modern Germany, but the variety of its uses from 1784 onwards reflects the by no means monochrome character of its revival (or revitalisation), which affected different aspects of Jewish life in Germany. Before and alongside the use of Hebrew as a national language in the forges of Zionist thought – beginning with the work of the lexicographer Eliezer ben Yehuda – the use of Hebrew also responded to demands other than nationalism, such as secularisation, the liberal pact with the host countries, civil emancipation, the integration of Jews into modern society, universalism, the scientific method, and the Jewish-German cultural symbiosis, testifying to the essentially European character of Judaism over the last two thousand years. As early as the second half of the 18th century, philosophers and intellectuals of the Jewish Enlightenment (the so-called maskilim) in Germany attempted to revive the Hebrew language by founding journals. In the 1920s, Berlin was home to a thriving colony of Jewish writers from Eastern Europe, with their own publishing houses and magazines, while the famous novelist Shmuel Yosef Agnon lived and wrote until 1924 in the small town of Bad Homburg, which, along with Berlin, was the centre of the neo-Jewish revival in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic. The aim of this article is to discuss the dissemination and use of Hebrew in a German-speaking diasporic context, i.e. outside the Jewish Mandate in Palestine and, since 1948, the State of Israel.