Hebrew rediscovered – From sacred language to popular language

Some languages accompany the birth of a civilisation. Others come to embody its destiny. Hebrew belongs to the latter category. At Rome’s Il Pitigliani Cultural Center, the second event in the series Lechaim – To Life! A Journey into Jewish Identity, devoted to the rebirth of Hebrew, had the great merit of moving beyond formulaic explanations and restoring to the subject its full historical, spiritual, and intellectual depth.

Taking part in the discussion were Linkiesta.it journalist Ruben Della Rocca, Rabbi Benedetto Carucci Viterbi, principal of the Renzo Levi High School, and Sara Ferrari, Professor of Hebrew Language and Culture at the University of Milan and of Biblical Hebrew at Milan’s Protestant Cultural Center, as well as author of La lingua ebraica, published by Carocci in 2025. Held on Tuesday evening, the event wove together philology, memory, and identity without ever lapsing into academic dryness.

Hebrew

One of the first misconceptions the discussion helped dispel concerns the very notion of “rebirth.” To describe Hebrew as a dead language that was then miraculously revived is a convenient but misleading simplification. For long stretches of its history, Hebrew did cease to function as the ordinary language of daily life. But it never ceased to be a language of study, prayer, commentary, poetry, and correspondence, in other words, a language of civilisation. Hebrew was never a fossilised idiom suspended outside history. It continued to live in the consciousness of a dispersed people, in the fabric of its books, in the cadence of liturgy, in the discipline of exegesis. It is precisely this deep continuity across time that makes the Hebrew case unique.

The distinction between Theodor Herzl and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is crucial. Herzl was the architect of political Zionism, the man who grasped the historical necessity of a Jewish state. Ben-Yehuda, by contrast, was the driving force behind the linguistic revolution, the one bold enough to restore to Hebrew a domestic, everyday, familial voice. At the end of the nineteenth century, the future of Judaism was being decided not only in congress halls and institutional programs, but also in the choice to speak an ancient language at the dinner table, at home, to one’s children. In that seemingly modest gesture, an act of enormous historical consequence took place. Hebrew ceased to be merely the language of memory and became once more the language of life.

Sara Ferrari explained with great clarity that the history of Hebrew cannot be reduced to a neat, linear narrative. It is a story of layers, of gradual semantic shifts, of adaptation to changing circumstances, and of encounters with other cultures. There are many forms of Hebrew: biblical, rabbinic, medieval, liturgical, poetic, modern, and Israeli. Just as important is Hebrew’s constant interaction with the other languages of Jewish life, from Yiddish to Ladino, from Judeo-Arabic to the Judeo-Italian dialects, as well as its decisive interpenetration with Aramaic. Rather than undermining the unity of Am Yisrael, this linguistic plurality enriches it. Hebrew appears not as a monolithic monument, but as a living, vibrant reality, one that has crossed the centuries by changing, yet without ever breaking.

Rabbi Benedetto Carucci Viterbi’s intervention held the audience with its interpretive depth. To call Hebrew simply a “sacred language” risks flattening its meaning. Jewish tradition speaks instead of Lashon ha-Qodesh, the “language of holiness,” or even the “language of the Holy One.” That expression immediately shifts the discussion to another plane. By its very nature, Hebrew cannot be viewed as a neutral instrument, an interchangeable vehicle, or a code like any other, because within its millennia-old inheritance it preserves an order, a memory, and a vision of reality. It is also for this reason that the idea of transforming it into a political and popular language provoked fierce resistance in Haredi circles.

What made the evening so compelling was its refusal of the false opposition between nostalgia and modernisation. Contemporary Hebrew is not an archaeological replica of biblical Hebrew, but neither is it something wholly severed from its origins. The bond between the two remains extraordinarily strong on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic levels. Anyone who engages with the Torah, or listens each Shabbat to the reading of the parashah, still recognises in modern Hebrew words, roots, cadences, and layers of meaning that have traversed the millennia. This is one reason why the revival of Hebrew has no real equivalent in European history. The relationship between biblical and modern Hebrew is not like that between Latin and the Romance languages: the distance is smaller, and the continuity in language and thought far more enduring.

Especially illuminating was the reflection on the diaspora, understood not as a place of mere preservation but as a space of cultural creativity. A people deprived of political independence found in study, commentary, literature, and prayer an inner homeland. In this way Hebrew continued to live even far from Zion, encountering other traditions and allowing itself to be enriched by them, while tenaciously preserving its source. This was true of the great Hispano-Jewish age, which Ferrari evoked while challenging the myth of “perfect coexistence” between Arabs and Jewish communities, and it was equally true of Jewish Italy, with figures such as Immanuel Romano, Moses da Rieti, Leone da Modena, and Moses Zacuto. In each case, Hebrew reveals its ability to absorb outside forms and transfigure them, making them its own.

Rabbi Carucci Viterbi’s exegetical example drawn from Rashi was particularly revealing. Commenting on the verse in which Jacob says that he sojourned with Laban, Rashi reads in the word garti both the numerical value that alludes to the 613 mitzvot - the commandments at the heart of Jewish life - and the lexical sense of “dwelling as a stranger.” In a single linguistic detail, an entire spiritual world is condensed. Geographic distance and fidelity to identity no longer appear as opposites: one can live elsewhere without becoming someone else. It is hard to imagine a more powerful summary of the destiny of the diaspora.

Ferrari then brought the discussion into the present, invoking October 7, 2023, as a trauma before which Israel found itself, at least for a time, almost bereft of words. This lent the evening an added gravity. The question of language suddenly joined the long arc of history to the urgency of the present moment. Poetry emerges as the first form of response, because it is immediate and close to the wound of grief; narrative, by contrast, requires distance, sedimentation, and time. After the Shoah, as after the Yom Kippur War, the challenge was not simply to recount history’s darkest pages, but to find a language capable of bearing the weight of the experience itself.

The history of Hebrew is inseparable from the history of a people who, though scattered across the world, never ceased to dwell within their own words. And when those words once again became a national, political, and public language, they did not cease to carry within them the transcendence of Scripture, the spirituality of liturgy, the drama of exile, and the disciplines of study and memory. It becomes clear, then, why Hebrew continues to exert a fascination that reaches far beyond the field of linguistics. In it is reflected an entire conception of civilisation, historical continuity, and inner freedom, one that our own age, so prone to forgetting, would do well to contemplate.

Lorenzo Cianti studies Political Science and International Relations at Roma Tre University. He writes for Italy’s oldest opinion magazine L'Opinione delle Libertà, as well as for the online magazine Atlantico Quotidiano and the Mises Institute. He writes about economical, philosophical cultural and political topics. 

This article previously appeared on the website of L’Opinione magazine https://opinione.it/societa/2026/04/17/lorenzo-cianti-ebraico-ritrovato-da-lingua-sacra-a-lingua-popolare/

Image credits: Mick Haupt via Unplash