De Lange_The Hebrew Language in the European Diaspora_Ramot_1996.pdf (original) (raw)
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Hebrew Language. Judaism. Second Temple, Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception
In this entry I clarify that a distinction must be made between the history of the language as a linguistic system and the history of its written forms. I argue that, due to this fact, whenever we deal with language similar to Mishnaic Hebrew, it is crucial to consider its diglossic situation.
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present, 2018
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present Editors: Benjamin Hary and Sarah Bunin Benor In the series: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin), November 2018 Since Joshua Fishman’s seminal work in the 1980s (e.g., Fishman, Joshua A., ed. 1985. Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: Brill), there has been a good deal of research on languages in Jewish communities. This research has mostly been either structural or sociological but not both. Our volume brings together these two research traditions, offering sociological and structural descriptions of languages used in about 20 Diaspora Jewish communities, along with synthesizing descriptive and theoretical articles about the structure and sociology of languages in these and other communities. Using the construct of the continuum of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness, we posit “Jewish languages” as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. With a few exceptions, including Yiddish in Slavic lands and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish/Judezmo in Ottoman lands, Jews have tended to speak variants of the local non-Jewish languages. The distinctiveness of these variants has ranged from minor to major, depending on the degree of Jews’ integration into the surrounding populations, their orientation toward rabbinic texts, and other factors. While much previous research on Jewish languages assumes that the phenomenon essentially ended with modernity, this volume highlights its 21st-century manifestation.
Contributions to the History of Concepts, Vol. 7, Issue 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 1-27
The article aims both to present the great potential of the field of modern European Jewish history to those who deal with conceptual history in other contexts and to demonstrate the potential of the conceptual historical project to those who deal with Jewish history. The first part illuminates the transformation of the Jewish languages in Eastern Europe–Hebrew and Yiddish–from their complex place in traditional Jewish society to the modern and secular Jewish experience. It then presents a few concrete examples for this process during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part deals with the adaptation of Central and Western European languages within the internal Jewish discourse in these parts of Europe and presents examples from Germany, France and Hungary.