Before 1948, David Ben-Gurion used to joke about Zionism's future: How will we know when we have become a real country like the rest of the world? When Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew—and Hebrew-speaking policemen arrest them. Nowadays, the joke, possibly apocryphal, falls a bit flat. The State of Israel is a reality, and more people read and write, argue and pray, think and dream in Hebrew than at any other point in Jewish history. Nor are crime and punishment in Hebrew something exceptional. Indeed, they are all too familiar as Israel grapples with its local mafia kingpins and struggles against Palestinian terrorists, many of whom speak fluent Hebrew. The dramas of Israel's future seemingly lie elsewhere in the realms of religion and politics, security and statecraft.
And yet the very success of the Hebrew revival obscures its broader consequences for the relationship between the Jewish people and Israeli statehood. The ideal of a Hebrew-speaking country, after all, derives its force from the image of Jewish autonomy, a self-contained world enclosed in its own Hebrew domain. Yet language always functions as a double-edged sword: In one stroke it unites a national community by severing their cultural ties to the world around them.
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