this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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More than a couple centuries - but dead isn’t quite right. While it wasn’t spoken in most Jewish enclaves, it was still used in all religion and quite a lot of commerce and literature. Most practicing Jews knew Hebrew, even if they did not use it in daily life. Jews from different countries often used Hebrew to communicate - mostly in writing because it was the common language they would both know.
Books have been published in Hebrew more or less continuously, including the first printing press in in the Middle East (now in what is Israel) in 1577 printed books in Hebrew.
Hebrew has never been dead - it just wasn’t used because most Jews lived in countries that spoke other languages that Jews learned and often created pidgin dialects like Yiddish (and others).
It is not like a bunch of zionists taught all the worlds’ Jews Hebrew, but if you put a German Jew and a Russian Jew in the same room, the only language they would both know is Hebrew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language
I'm aware of that all, also yes it has been dead. Like Latin or Ancient Greek.
Yeah, if you put a German Jew and a Moroccan Jew, your results could have been not the same.
Still analogous to Latin, though. Like if you compare Latin in Italy to Latin in Poland.
Yiddish is definitely not a pidgin, it's a pretty functional Germanic language, and not too much further from Standard High German than German casually spoken in Vienna.
Actually it's much less of a pidgin to German than neo-Hebrew is a pidgin to Hebrew.
There were competing views of the future of European Jews as a culture and what modernity will be for them. For some the modern language to be standardized etc would be, again, Yiddish.