The Politics of Language

Last updated on: September 12, 2012 at 6:51 pm by Andre E. Johnson

The Politics of Language 2012-09-12T18:51:00-05:00 Andre E. Johnson

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My attention was riveted by a story in The Jerusalem Report of September 10, 2012, because it dealt with a topic that has fascinated me since my childhood (for a reason I will briefly mention momentarily). The story reports on a move to revive the Aramaic language in a Christian Arab village in Israel. Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, has a very long history, during which it was for a while the official language of the Persian empire and then the spoken vernacular throughout much of the Middle East, also by most Jews after Hebrew had become a “dead language” used only for religious purposes. It was of course the language of Jesus. Aramaic itself became mainly a “dead language” after the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, spoken by a few scattered minorities but, like Hebrew for Jews, continuing as the language of worship for Orthodox Christian churches in the region.

The Jerusalem Report story occurred in the village of Jish in the Galilee, sixty-five percent of whose inhabitants are Maronites (Orthodox in communion with Rome), the rest mostly Melkites (Orthodox in communion with Constantinople), with a sprinkling of Muslims. Both Maronites and Melkites speak Arabic in their daily lives, but use Syriac, a version of Aramaic, in worship. The leader of the Aramaic movement in the village is a young man, Shadi Khalloul, who has been pushing for the teaching of spoken Aramaic in the village school. His advocacy finally succeeded after it was supported by a new principal, who is himself a Muslim. The Aramaic instruction has now been approved by the Israeli ministry of education. The story in an Israeli publication naturally emphasized the similarity with the rebirth of Biblical Hebrew by modern Zionism. Khalloul only speaks Aramaic with his two-year old son—just as Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who led the Hebrew revival in the late 1800s, only spoke Hebrew with his son. There is a story about an elderly Hebraist who came from Europe to the then brand-new town of Tel Aviv. He was jostled and obscenely insulted by a young boy, and afterward turned to his companion with sheer delight—“how wonderful – he can swear in Hebrew!”

Khalloul has an openly stated political purpose in mind: to unite all the Christians in the Middle East as “one strong nation”. A nation, it is supposed, needs a unifying language. Aramaic is a plausible candidate. This is understandable in the contemporary context—Christians threatened by militant Islam in all the Middle East, and as a double minority in Israel, Christians among the Muslims and non-Jews in the Jewish state. But the politics of language has a very old history all over the world, though it flared up virulently with the emergence of modern nationalism. Very often conflicts over language have had a religious dimension.
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