This paper will discuss the debate, ongoing since Israel's independence in 1948, about the 'revival' (this term is itself controversial) of the Hebrew language in the period roughly between 1880 and 1920. During this period Hebrew became the spoken language of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv), first under Ottoman Turk and then British Mandate rule, and finally in the state of Israel.

Roughly speaking we may point to two mainstream viewpoints. The first stems from the Academy of the Hebrew Language and the Israeli Ministry of Education, and is therefore absorbed by the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israeli citizens as they pass through the primary and secondary education systems. According to this viewpoint the ancient Hebrew tongue was revived during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century by the colossal efforts exerted by a tiny circle of Jerusalem-based intellectuals surrounding Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922).

Alternative views, often tending to coincide with leanings toward a more socialist-Zionist viewpoint, attempt to raise the profile of the schoolteachers in the early agricultural settlements of the Galilee and the Coastal Plain, who raised the first generation of children to speak modern Israeli Hebrew. Some of the more balanced histories, among them Fellman 1973, have questioned just how great was the importance of Ben Yehuda's role in the revival. The great majority of his 40 years in Palestine were spent living in remote Jerusalem, while the greater part of the work of Zionism, including the linguistic revival, was happening elsewhere.

Seemingly related to this difference of opinion is the clash of prescriptivism and descriptivism. Conservative scholarship, centred in the Hebrew Language Academy, tends toward a highly prescriptive approach to the language, an approach still rooted to some extent in nineteenth century philology. The Academicians seek to stress an unbroken link (mediated by Ben Yehuda and his co-workers) from ancient Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew through to the language spoken in Israel today. Descriptive accounts do not take for granted the idea that Israeli Hebrew is to all intents and purposes the direct descendent of this ancient tongue.

In this paper I shall also discuss two extreme viewpoints, which may be (tentatively) characterised as extreme expressions of the two mainstream views. The extreme descriptivist, and non-revivalist, position is articulated by Wexler 1990, who claims that the language known to us as Modern Hebrew does not in fact belong to the Semitic family of languages, and should more properly be classified as a Slavic tongue. I shall go into the details in my talk. The extreme prescriptivist position was expressed most typically by the Canaanites, a very small but nevertheless influential intellectual movement whose most productive period fell roughly between the 1950s and 1980s. Mainly, although not exclusively, the Canaanites political viewpoint was in line with the extreme right of the Israeli spectrum, but with an anti-Zionist twist. This movement expressed an maximally puristic wish to return to the pre-Judaic mythic roots of Hebrew, creating an Israeli identity which would be pan-levantine rather than Jewish and which would be able to include local Arab populations and divert their support from Islamic or Pan-Arab nationalist causes. The Canaanites based a great deal of their ideas about an ancient Levantine shared identity upon the Ugaritic texts discovered in the 1920s at Ras Shamra in Syria, which for them represented a text superior to the Hebrew Bible.