We have things in common because we are different and language is no different. A common feature of languages is that they divide, with varying degrees of formality, into a high and a low. The high is usually the language of the priest and the lawyer; its written form tends to the formal and is the language of our sacred texts and our legislation; Hindi, Mandarin, English and Arabic each has some of this quality.
Within the commonality of the Abrahamic religions, language comes and goes. In Muslim regions, Arabic has a centripetal quality; there may be many dialects but there is a level of received Arabic which has a special and holy status. In Christian regions, the story is more mixed; the experience of western Christianity is often centrifugal; over and behind the more overtly political battles of the reformation and the counter reformation there is a shadow battle of the vulgate Latin and the necessarily local vernacular. As for the Jews… well, I’ll come back to them.
All of which is curious; if a visitor from another planet sat in a cafe in Damascus a century after Mohammad’s death and listened to a conversation between a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian, the likely lingua franca would have been Aramaic.
And the Jews? They had their own curiosity as Zionism rose and rose in the nineteenth century. The rise and rise meant that Palestine locals, often Aramaic speakers, had to find a way to chat with immigrants who spoke Yiddish, Russian, English or something else.
A number of Jews decided that neither centripetalism nor centrifuge rose much above tinkering; rather than reinventing the wheel of high and ancient Hebrew, they decided simply to lift it and place it into the modern world. Just as the modern state of Israel is, in most Jews’ eyes, a renationalisation, so too Hebrew is a rediscovered form of daily communication.
On 13 October 1881 the legend goes that lexicographer and a force in the rediscovery Eliezer Ben Yehuda had the first modern conversation in Hebrew, again at a cafe but this time in Paris.
The contribution of Jews to language goes well beyond the reinvention of Hebrew. New York City Jew Paul Simon is one of the most popular of pop songwriters ever; he was born on 13 October 1941. New York State Jew Lenny Bruce made a career out of the offence in language; he managed to get arrested for using the word “schmuck”, now commonly a fool but still a Yiddish penis; Bruce was born on 13 October 1925. For a Christian interlude, those who listen to Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News / Silent Night” will hear the newsreader report Bruce’s death.
Of course, offensiveness is itself a form of communication. Speechlessness is a different thing altogether. Whether any of Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters make that final leap from miscommunication is a matter of taste; the Kazakh of his antisemitic Borat is in fact Hebrew; Baron Cohen was born on 13 October 1971.
