During the past half-century, the language commonly known as Modern Hebrew (but more accurately termed Israeli) has become the official language of Israel, acting as the primary mode of communication throughout all state and local institutions and in all domains of public and private life. Yet, with the growing diversification of Israeli society, it has come as well to highlight the very absence of a unitary civic culture among Israeli citizens. The exalted status currently enjoyed by Israeli is, in fact, the result of an ideological process linking its historical development with the politics of national revival. Educators, scholars and politicians have contributed to the widespread but misleading assumption that the language spoken, read and written by Israeli school children is the prophetic idiom of Isaiah tout court. Historical, linguistic and literary evidence, however, reveals a far more complex reality. This book addresses the gap between the current understanding of Israeli and the actual circumstances that shaped it. It argues that Yiddish, the founder generation's mother tongue, played a crucial but expressly unacknowledged part in the self-conscious creation of Israeli, and that the survival of Yiddish in Israeli is as important a component of the language as the Hebrew revival emphasized in current scholarship and in the Jewish public mind. Thus, Israeli is a hybrid language based on both Hebrew and Yiddish.

Drawing on a broad range of material, the book explores the tension between the linguistic teleology promoted by adherents of the Hebrew revival, and the much wider spectrum of linguistic transformations that have actually shaped Israeli. Although revivalists engaged in a campaign for linguistic purity, the language they created mirrors the very cultural differences they were seeking to erase. Tracing their concerted effort to impose a nationalist narrative on linguistic reality, I analyse the ideological and cultural evidence for the former, as well as the linguistic and historical evidence for the latter. The study of Israeli offers a unique insight into the role of language as a source of collective self-perception and, more subtly, as a potential challenge to the claims of political identity.

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