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This lecture is one of a series of ten lectures that will focus on education in times of national disasters and calamity in Jewish History. These online lectures are held in conjunction with Sydney University’s Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies and Mandelbaum House.

This week’s lecture will focus on the challenges surrounding the revival of Hebrew as part of the Zionist enterprise .

The Hebrew Bible is one of foundation stones of the world’s monotheistic religions as well as Western society. Yet Hebrew, the language it is written in, has, throughout history, remained a language used in daily life only by small groups of people. This lecture will begin with a brief overview of Hebrew in its non-liturgic forms. Namely, evidence – from the Tanakh, the Mishna and Talmudim, and the Cairo Genizah – of spoken and/or written Hebrew as it was used in everyday life. It will then focus on the revival of Modern Hebrew.  An enterprise which Theodore Herzel famously stated: ‘Who among us has sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language? Such a thing cannot be done’.

Dr. Yona Gilead is a senior lecturer of Modern Hebrew at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses in the acquisition of Modern Hebrew as an additional language, as well as on schools’ impact on students’ identity development.