SHAUL MAGID is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His two latest books are The Bible, the Talmud and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik’s Commentary to the Gospel, and Piety and Rebellion: Essay in Hasidism, both published in 2019. His new book Meir Kahane: An American Jewish Radical will be published with Princeton University Press in October, 2021. He is presently working on the political theology of Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar.
The New Hebrew movement in early 20th century Europe and Palestine was an integral part of nascent Jewish nationalism. Eliezer ben Yehuda pioneered a process of linguistic secularization in moving Hebrew from lashon ha-kodesh to Hebrew as a lingua franca. What now seems universally a good thing, in its timewas a highly contentious issue, debated among Zionists and anti-Zionists alike, in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora. Figures such as Hayyim Nahman Bialilk, Gershom Scholem and others were supportive yet worried about the secularization of Hebrew. Perhaps most extensively, Yoel Teitelbaum of Satmar polemicized against the secularization of Hebrew. In this workshop we will explore some of the views of Ben Yehuda, Bialik, Scholem and Teitelbaum on the question of lashon ha-kodesh and the new Hebrew Movement, reading texts from Ben Yehuda, Bialik, Scholem, and Teitelbaum.