Israel Was Built on Myth, Part II: Modern Hebrew is a Made-Up Language

The official language of the State of Israel is an artificial invention that did not even exist before 1900.

Joe Brunoli
11 min readJun 16, 2024

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Note: this is a follow-on article from my original post:

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Modern Hebrew, the official language of Israel, is an artificial construct that did not even exist before 1900. Spoken and written Hebrew became extinct as a language around 200 A.D. (CE).

According to Wikipedia:

“[Hebrew] was supplanted by Western Aramaic, a dialect of the Aramaic language, the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages. Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy…it became extinct as a spoken language.”

The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language is mostly due to the travails of one committed Lithuanian Zionist named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Like most early Zionists, Ben-Yahuda was a secular Jew who did not practice Judaism, but rather saw Zionism as a way to “embrace Hebrew without religion.

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Joe Brunoli

Joe is a Yank with dual US-EU citizenship and comments on trends, politics and more. Buy Joe a coffee here: https://ko-fi.com/euroyankee