Babel in Zion: The Politics of Language Diversity in Jewish Palestine 1920-1948

"Babel in Zion" is a cultural history of language ideology and practice in the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, during the British mandate period. The Zionist adoption of Hebrew and marginalization of other tongues epitomized a nationalist project to recreate the Jewish nation, sever ties with the diasporic past, and assert self-sufficiency. A scholarly emphasis on a trajectory of increasing monolingualism, however, has obscured this mainly immigrant community's continuing contacts with diaspora Jewry, the majority Palestinian Arab population, and the British authorities in Palestine. These contacts were fundamentally multilingual and they drew the reflection of observers even as Hebrew-language institutions flourished. Moreover, reflections on the persistence of the Jewish multilingual condition were not always negative. In confronting the language diversity created by interethnic contact, foreign rule, immigration, and globalizing markets, the Yishuv engaged in protracted and often conflicted reflections about their community's relationship with outside entities and the feasibility of ethno-linguistic separation.Drawing on archival material, memoirs and oral histories, and journalistic pieces in several languages, the five chapters of the dissertation explore a tension between a widely-shared commitment to Hebrew and an inclination to flexibility and accommodation in practice. The first chapter reads Zionist concerns about language practices in the Yishuv's commercial sphere---both street peddling and high-end commerce---in light of a long-standing historical association between aberrant Jewish linguistic behavior and deviant commercial practice. The second chapter focuses on three spaces regarded as quintessentially non-Hebrew---the home, the coffee shop, and the cinema. This chapter argues that leisure became both a space of contest and a realm of escape in which a critique of Hebrew norms was possible. The third chapter looks at Zionist uses of English in bureaucratic contexts, arguing that the notion of accommodation rather than activism helps us understand the nature of quotidian Jewish engagement with the British authorities. The fourth chapter considers the range of settings in which Jews encountered, imagined, or deployed Arabic, the main local language of Palestine: urban contacts, language courses, Arabic propaganda newspapers, and intelligence operations in and around Palestinian Arab communities. The final chapter moves to the educational sphere and shows how English and Arabic, regularly taught in Zionist schools, were construed not only as practical tools but also as ways to cultivate values deemed desirable for Hebrew culture itself.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2011.School code: 0031