Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Scott W. Hahn and Jeffrey L. Morrow, "The Death of Hebrew"

 

The Death of Hebrew

 

One key notion implicitly embedded within the modern biblical scholarship that emerged in Michaelis’s wake was that Hebrew was a dead language. The death of the Hebrew language and of the Hebrew culture of biblical times was a position assumed by Michaelis, and Legaspi rightly underscores this facet of Michaelis’s work, clarifying for us the import of this starting point for the study not only of Hebrew philology but of biblical studies more broadly speaking. Thus, when Michaelis utilized Arabic language and literature for Hebräistik, he did so not only as a n important cognate field for understanding Hebrew better, but rather as a necessary philological tool supplanting earlier views concerning the superiority of living Jewish knowledge of Hebrew. Viewing Hebrew as essentially dead created an enormous gulf between the ancient Israelite and Jewish communities from the time of the Bible, for whom the Hebrew biblical traditions were their lived traditions, and Michaelis’s contemporary European Jews, whom Christians had previously envisioned as intimately tied to this tradition, indeed for whom these Christians believed this tradition remained a living Jewish tradition. Thus, prior to Michaelis, there had been a long history of Christian recourse to Jewish learning in order to understand the Hebrew language, Jewish traditions of interpretation, and the Bible itself. This was the case with Saint Jerome (347-420), Nicholas of Lyra (1270-1349), Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), and, a bit closer to Michaelis’s time, both Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1664). Before Michaelis, there existed a tradition of Christian exegetes searching out Jewish teachers to learn Hebrew and Jewish interpretations. What Michaelis initiated was a tradition of Christian Hebrew scholarship that made no attempt to consult living Jewish authorities. Michaelis saw no need to consult living Jews who read the Torah in Hebrew. He believed that scholarship, ostensibly pure Wissenschaft, alone could be master of Hebrew, which was essentially dead, a thing of the past.

 

Michaelis therefore regarded his own knowledge of Hebrew as superior to that of living Jewish authorities. In his mind, the Hebrew knowledge and learning of his Jewish contemporaries was in some sense corrupted from what it had been during Jesus’s time and before. This became exemplified in the disparities of pronunciation, for example, of Hebrew between later German Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars, who bequeathed the standard pronunciation of Hebrew still taught in most Western university classrooms, and the different living traditions of Hebrew pronunciation among Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews to this day. The Sephardic pronunciation, like that spoken in the modern state of Israel, which has also become the standard liturgical pronunciation to Reform and Conservative Judaism in the United States, differs in many ways from the standard pronunciation Christians tend to be taught in the academy.

 

Legaspi mentions a further pont that often goes unrecognized but remains of the upmost importance for understanding both Michaelis’s own work and what comes later in modern biblical criticism—namely, this periodization of the history of Israel and of the Jewish people, which Michaelis initiates. As Legaspi indicates: “Michaelis also introduced what became an important element in his program of study: the periodization of Israelite and Jewish history. A separation between the pre-exilic and subsequent periods, especially the modern Jewish one, allowed Michaelis to dispense with the latter” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 88). Elaborating, Legaspi explains how “Michaelis took pains in his programmatic writings to marginalize Jewish scholarship, discredit rabbinic exegesis, and sever any connection between the language of the Old Testament and the degraded ‘Euro-Hebrew’ of contemporary Jews” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 96).

 

Michaelis’s shift to cognate languages, and to the living Arabic language in particular, must be understood in this context. His “genealogical maneuver” as Legaspi puts it, of overemphasizing the proximity of Hebrew to Arabic and related Semitic languages, “allowed him to experience Hebrew as a living language through its sister Arabic, while ignoring Jews, the most obvious living speakers of Hebrew” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 91). Michaelis’s emphasis on philology was, moreover, not merely for philology’s sake. Michaelis argued that the very words that make up a language are culture bearers; words carry, hidden within themselves, the very culture form which they arise Words are veritable repositories of culture. For Michaelis, then, “The philologist . . . gains access not only to a group’s text but also the ethos, the mindset, and the collective wisdom of the culture. He encounters its history and its Geist” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 92).

 

As we later see flourish among nineteenth-century scholars like Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith, Michaelis saw his contemporary Arab culture which flourished in the Middle Easter as nearly identical to ancient Israelite culture. Thus, his contemporary Arab culture represented the living culture of the Old Testament, in sharp contrast to his contemporary Jewish culture, which was corrupt and which departed drastically, through foreign and various historical influences shaping it, from their Old Testament forebears. Legaspi asserts that “[t]he systematic effort to interpret the Hebrew Bible ethnograpically, in terms of present-day Arab language and culture, then, was one of the most distinctive features of Michaelis’s program for Hebrew study and biblical interpretation” (Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 95). We would add that this effort continued in modern biblical criticism after Michaelis’s time, and perhaps reached its highest point in the work of Robertson Smith (e.g., in his Religion of the Semites). (Scott W. Hahn and Jeffrey L. Morrow, Modern Biblical Criticism as a Tool of Statecraft (1700-1900) [Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Academic, 2020], 89-93)

 

 


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