Haaretz
Adar2 17, 5765
Just before Esther, the
eponymous heroine of the scroll read this Purim week, enters, stage
center, King Ahasuereus is worried that the "deed of the queen shall come
abroad unto all women, so that they shall despise their husbands in their
eyes, when it shall be reported King Ahasuerus commanded Vashti the queen
to be brought in before him, but she came not." To ascertain that the man
will ever be the ruler in his own household, and that the wife - if it is
a mixed marriage - will speak her husband's lingo, "he sent letters into
all the king's provinces, [and we are talking 127 provinces here], into
every province according to the writing thereof, and to every people after
their language, that every man should bear rule in his own house, and that
it should be published according to the language of every people." King
James' translators erred here, as in the Hebrew version it says explicitly
that each man will speak in his own house in his language, meaning that
the wife should obey her husband's voice and adopt his native
language.
However, Ahasuereus can't make himself understood and
obeyed even within his palace. Esther overrules him easily and has her say
in her own language in every province of the kingdom and every roll of the
scroll. She gets Haman, the Jews' enemy, hanged. As a king's decree once
signed (instigated by Haman and ordering the annihilation of the Jews)
cannot be rescinded, the king says to Esther and her uncle (according to
some commentators, Mordecai was to her less than kin and more than kind)
"Write ye also for the Jews, as it liketh you, in the king's name, and
seal it with the king's ring: for the writing which is written in the
king's name, and sealed with the king's ring, may no man reverse."
And Esther and Mordecai send letters to the Jews telling them "to
gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy, to
slay and to cause to perish all the power of the people and province that
would assault them, both little ones and women, and to take the spoil of
them for a prey." Those letters are sent "unto every province according to
the writing thereof, and unto every people after their language, and to
the Jews according to their writing, and according to their
language."
As proud Israeli Jews, we claim today that we are
speaking and writing Hebrew, the ancient language revived along with the
Zionist movement, and decreed by the newly established State of Israel to
be Israel's national language. But the Hebrew script we use nowadays, the
square script, is in fact not Hebrew at all.
Sometime at the
beginning of the seventh century B.C.E. the emissaries of the Babylonian
king presented themselves at the court of Hezkiahu the king and wanted to
address the people. "Then said Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebna, and
Joah, unto Rab-shakeh, Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the Syrian
language; for we understand it: and talk not with us in the Jews' language
in the ears of the people that are on the wall; But Rab-shakeh said unto
them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these
words? Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may
eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you; Then Rab-shakeh
stood and cried with a loud voice in the Jews' language, and spake,
saying, Hear the word of the great king, the king of Assyria" (Kings 2,
18, 26-28).
Those who stayed in the land of Judah and were not
exiled to Babylon in 586 B.C.E. kept on writing in the ancient Hebrew
alphabet. God's name is spelled out in such letters in the Qoumran
scrolls, and the alphabet is used to this very day by the Shomronites, the
descendents of the (good?) Samaritans. As those who stayed in Judah after
the Babylonian exile did not have to obey Ahasuereus' decree sent out from
Persia about the same time, "Jews that had married wives of Ashdod, of
Ammon, and of Moab; And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod,
and could not speak in the Jews' language, but according to the language
of each people" (Nehemia, 13, 24).
Those Jews who exercised their
law of return from Babylon to the Palestine of those days brought with
them the lingua franca of the ruling administration, and were speaking in
Aramaic and writing in an Assyrian alphabet. The book of Ezra is "written
in the Syrian tongue, and interpreted in the Syrian tongue" (the Hebrew
says "Assyrian"). And the Babylonian Talmud says on the matter as follows:
"Mar Zutra, according to others Mar Uqba, said `Originally the Torah was
given to Israel in Hebrew characters and in the Hebrew language; the
second time it was given to Israel in Ezra's time, but in Assyrian
characters and in the Aramaic language; finally the Assyrian characters
and the Hebrew language were selected for Israel, and the Hebrew
characters and the Aramaic language were left to the Hediotim (Idiots).
Who are meant by Idiots? Said R. Hisda: The Samaritans"
(Sanhedrin).
The Midrash Esther Raba says apropos Ahasuereus'
decree about the language of the male lord and master spoken in his house
that "Hebrew has the speech, but has no script; The Assyrian has the
script but has no speech; Therefore they have chosen Assyrian script and a
Hebrew speech." And to make things as clear as can be, the story of the
letters is summed up: "And why are they named Assyrian? Because they were
brought from the country of Assyria." In Hebrew there is a pun here, as
the word spelled in Hebrew "Assyrian" means also "approved," in
writing.
Anti-Semitic misnomer
In 1781, the German
historian and theologist August Schloezer came up with a common name for
all the languages of the area (Babylonian, Assyrian, Amorite, Aramaic,
Canaanite, Moabite, Hebrew, Phoenician, Punic, Sabaean, Arabic, Ethiopic,
Amharic, Nabataean, Samaritan) and called them Semitic languages, based on
Genesis (10, 31): "These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after
their tongues, in their lands, after their nations." That is just before
the peoples "of one language, and of one speech" (Genesis, 11, 1) tumble
down at the hands of God (acting in self-defense of his unassailable
position as a supreme being) from the Tower of Babel, and their languages
become confounded.
In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, the
author of a book called "The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism," in step
with the swelling tide of anti-Jewish feeling in Germany, founded his Bund
der Antisemiten or "Anti-Semitic League." By 1882 there was an official
Anti-Semitic Party in Germany that won several seats in the Reichstag.
"Anti-Semitism" is a sort of a misnomer or euphemism for "anti-Jew-ism,"
which was adopted by Zionism as well. There is no "Semitic" race, nor is
it an ethnic term. There are only Semitic languages and anti-Semitic
racists. Haman was an anti-Semite, as Persian is an Indo-European
language. In theory, Arabs cannot be anti-Semites, as their language,
Arabic, is a Semitic language. In practice, some of my best friends are
Jewish anti-Semites.
Ada Yardeni, in her eye-opening "The Book of
Hebrew Script" (British Library, 2003) calls the square Hebrew letters in
use by Israelis today "Jewish script." And Jews had days of "feasting and
gladness," and a Hebrew language and an Assyrian - make that Jewish -
script.