Revolutionizing Judaism . . . With a Dictionary

Testifying to the agenda of the Haskalah, the 18th-century Jewish Enlightenment, a rare dictionary provides translations of Hebrew words into German, written in Hebrew characters:

[T]his “German”-Hebrew dictionary was, in its time, a bold statement. . . . The express purpose of Netiv Lashon Ivrit (“Path of the Hebrew Language”), [as the dictionary was titled], was to teach Jewish children Hebrew. The anonymous author imagined the book being put to use in Jewish schools. There is no year of publication noted but it is believed that this book was printed in Dyhernfurth, Prussia (present-day Brzeg Dolny, in southwestern Poland) in the late 18th century. The town had a long tradition of Jewish printing. The dictionary only goes up to letter g and it isn’t known if any additional volumes were ever published. . . .

The Maskilim (proponents of the Haskalah) sought a new emphasis on the Hebrew Bible [over the Talmud], whose universal human values, [they believed], were a link between Jews and the wider world. Knowing Hebrew was a key to being able to read this text unmediated by rabbinic authorities.

Hebrew was considered a noble language and a link to the glorious Jewish past. The Maskilim, by and large, disdained Yiddish as a worthless jargon, a non-language. They promoted not only Hebrew but also the acquisition of elite European languages such as German and Russian. German in Hebrew characters, sometimes referred to as Jüdisch-Deutsch, was seen as a way to wean Jews away from Yiddish. It might look like Yiddish but, in fact, was a type of “anti-Yiddish.” For readers in the Russian Empire, where this copy of the book ended up, [it] provided an opportunity to learn both German and Hebrew.

Read more at YIVO

More about: Haskalah, Hebrew, History & Ideas, Language, Yiddish

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF