Another Hattic passage from David Daiches’ Two Worlds (see this post):
My father seemed to take for granted that his own vast knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinics and Jewish religious philosophy would somehow filter down to us without too much active effort on his part. His own strenuous youth, in which he absorbed two different streams of education with a completeness that has always astonished me, was part of a world he had put behind him; he did not seem to expect us to emulate his own extraordinary feats of academic endurance. We belonged to the modern western world which he had trained himself to cope with and to which he had so thoroughly adjusted his own religious position without giving up anything material in Jewish orthodoxy. Our Jewish knowledge and traditions we would get as a matter of course, because we were Daicheses and his sons; our secular education we must work for. He thus took great interest in our schooling and would talk to us about our progress in Latin and Greek and mathematics, throwing Greek quotations from the Odyssey at us to see if we could translate them or asking what proposition in Euclid we were working at. True, he gave us Hebrew lessons, and as far as I can remember I was able to read Hebrew before I could read English (I suspect it was my mother who taught me to read both languages): I cannot recollect a time when the reading of Hebrew did not come automatically to me. But his lessons were unsystematic and sporadic, and were sometimes interrupted by urgent telephone calls or unexpected visitors. Every Friday night we sang, in the traditional intonation, the following Saturday’s portion of the law and the prophets, and so learned the synagogue cantillation by a gradual process of familiarisation — we never deliberately sat down to memorise it. From an early age I was able to sing any passage at sight. And I picked up biblical Hebrew by translating hundreds of passages in no sort of order and with no sort of system; I just found myself eventually able to read with understanding almost any part of the Hebrew Bible. To this day, if I am asked (as I occasionally am) how much Hebrew I know, I find it difficult to answer: it has often turned out that I know more than I think I know. Every now and again my father would decide that we did not know enough systematic Hebrew grammar and would bring in from his study a dusty copy of Gesenius’s Hebrew grammar and ask us to memorise the paradigms of verbs. But he would never stay long at this sort of thing. In the same sporadic way he would decide suddenly that it was time Lionel and I learned some Talmud, and he would appear with one of the huge volumes and take us at a galloping pace through Baba Mezia, ‘the Middle Gate’, with its famous opening deciding the proper legal procedure and judgment if two men simultaneously come across and seize upon a lost garment (‘really seize it’, comments Rashi in his commentary on the commentary on the legal core of the passage). Or he would have a spell at mediaeval Hebrew poetry, or at Rashi’s commentary on the Pentateuch (by some odd freak of memory I can still reel off the opening sentences of Rashi on Genesis): and once he thrust on me a Hebrew translation of Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. He always professed himself surprised that we did not know more than we did, forgetting that as he was our teacher the responsibility was his. Once he suddenly said to me at dinner: ‘If you were hiking in Palestine and wanted to find a place to spend the night, how would you explain yourself in Hebrew to a passer by?’ and he laughed with a mixture of good-nature and reproof when I said ‘hayesh po makom lagur’ (is there here a place to sojourn?) instead of ‘hayesh po makom lalun’ (is there here a place ‘to lodge for the night?).
At one point my mother, distressed at the lack of system in my father’s teaching of us, which she attributed to his being too busy to attend to the matter properly, insisted that Lionel and I should receive regular lessons from a professional Hebrew teacher. My father, who had refused to send us to the cheder, the regular Hebrew school attached to the synagogue, of which he was headmaster, on the grounds that we knew it all anyway and further that the rabbi’s sons should not have to go to cheder, resisted this proposal for a long time, but at length found a young Hebrew teacher who, in return for weekly lessons in rabbinics from my father, agreed to give my brother and myself regular and systematic Hebrew lessons. As far as I remember these lessons went on for about a year, and were the most systematic we ever had. We wrote regular prose compositions in modern Hebrew, and learned our grammar thoroughly. The teacher whose name was Abraham Chayim Gordon but whom my brother and I called Aby Chayim and mocked mercilessly was a small man with a dark moustache and an excitable manner, much given to extraordinary digressions on questions of law and logic. He once tried to convince us that, just as two negatives make a positive, so two positives make a negative, and this is why (he alleged), when an over-eager witness replies ‘yes, yes’ in answer to a question put to him instead of simply ‘yes’, Jewish law discounts his affirmative reply. Lionel and I tried to explain to him that logically a second affirmative could only re-affirm the first, and couldn’t possibly negate it, but he remained adamant in his conviction that ‘yes yes’ was equivalent to ‘no’. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that over-eagerness in a witness should rightly be regarded with suspicion, without the implication that a double positive makes a negative. Aby Chayim also enunciated the theory (but only as a possibility) that the name ‘Shylock’ in The Merchant of Venice derived from the Hebrew verb sha’al, to ask, presumably because people were always asking Shylock for money. When I suggested this to my father, he replied brusquely, ‘Nonsense!’ Aby Chayim was very patient with us, and took our mockery in good part, and when after a while he left for America we were sorry to see him go. But I think my father was glad when he went, not because he did not respect his ability as a Hebrew teacher, but because he resented the fact that his sons should have to have Hebrew lessons from somebody else.
Wonderful passage. That opening line both brings to mind my own father and makes me uneasily contemplate my own role as a father.
Am I correct in thinking that modern Hebrew would prefer “haim yesh…” to “hayesh…”?
once he thrust on me a Hebrew translation of Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris
wow! a bold choice!
also: what a fascinatingly wide range of varieties of hebrew and ivrit, all presented (apparently) as one and the same!
We belonged to the modern western world which he had trained himself to cope with and to which he had so thoroughly adjusted his own religious position without giving up anything material in Jewish orthodoxy.
Interesting combination of a stranded preposition with a fronted one. I think it’s better than either way of making the structures consistent.
Am I correct in thinking that modern Hebrew would prefer “haim yesh…” to “hayesh…”?
What about just “yesh…”?
hayesh…? is extremely formal or poetic. haim yesh…? is formal. yesh…? is informal.
“Yeah, right.”
I’m not getting that impression. I’m getting the impression the father wanted them to know all of them passively and, where it makes sense, actively.
lalun ‘to stay somewhere for sleeping’ is quite literary too, except in fixed derivatives like malon ‘hotel’ or meluna ‘doghouse’. lagur, as he said, is not quite appropriate either, but it doesn’t mean ‘to sojourn’, but rather to stay for a longer while and more permanently.
@M: Thanks. Either I was told wrong about haim and ha- all those years ago, or things have changed, or most likely I’m remembering wrong.
@Y: the semantics of English dwell or Spanish morar but a tad less literary, innit?
In my experience in (studying, and to a lesser extent speaking) modern Hebrew, lagur is the very-early-learned (like, one of the very first lessons, sometimes before some parts of the alphabet) verb for “to live in [place]”; it feels inappropriate for short stays, though might be valid for visits of, say, a month. I don’t recall ever encountering lalun and it’s unsurprising to me that it might be literary.
I’m not sure what I would have said for “stay for a night”. It’s an interesting question; I’m sure it must have came up in classes before. I’ll try to think about it.
Kusaal gbɛn “spend the night in” and by extension “dwell in” (a building) has the same stem as the abstract noun gbɛɛnm “sleep.” It’s also cognate with Mooré gãe “be lying down.” But probably not with Kusaal gbis “sleep” (the verb.)
Alon: exactly! I thought of dwell after I posted.
J1M: לִשְׁהוֹת lišhót ‘stay (for a limited time)’ would work, but it’s a little formal. In the informal usages I can think of, none of these would be used. You might say, “he’s with us [hu etslénu] for a few nights” or “come sleep at my place” (to a relative) or “come to my place [eláy lit. ‘to me’] for the night” (to a pickup). You might also use lihyót ‘to be’, e.g. “how long will you be with us?” At a hotel they might use lišhót, or again they might avoid a verb altogether.
Alon Lichinsky: the semantics of English dwell or Spanish morar but a tad less literary, innit?
Scand. bo/bu.
Live permanently:
Hun bodde i Norge hele livet. “She was living in Norway her whole life”.
Jeg bor i et grått hus i et gammelt nabolag. “I live in a grey house in an old neighbourhood.”
Stay for a long(ish) while:
Har du noen gang bodd i telt i dagevis? “Have you ever lived in a tent for days?”
Neste gang jeg overnatter, skal jeg bo på hotell. “The next time i stay over, I’ll stay in a hotel.”
Although these days Pa Daiches’s Hebrew would be absolutely odd, some Hebrew speakers of his day did actually speak like that, even in Israel. When the revival of Hebrew began, there was no separate colloquial register. Some people continued to converse in this, what had been late-Haskalic written register, either out of habit or out of a sense that their speech was more correct. I personally only met one person, born in 1914, who spoke in this archaic register; he was famously eccentric in other ways.
Fascinating! I love tidbits like that.
One phrase of his sticks in my mind: וְאִם תִּהְיֶנָה, כְּפִי שֶׁאוֹמְרִים בִּלְשׁוֹן יָמֵינוּ, בְּעָיוֹת ve’ím tihiyéna, kfi še’omrím bilešón yaméinu, be’ayót… ‘and should there be, as they say in today’s language, problems…’ Be’ayá was semantically expanded in Modern Hebrew from ‘conundrum’ to ‘problem’ (=’difficulty’, as in English). I had no idea that anyone considered it a “modern” word, but to someone speaking as he did, it made sense.
His future of ‘to be’ he uses, tihyéna, is the feminine 3pl form. Most speakers of Modern Hebrew (as in Mishnaic Hebrew) use the masculine form for both masculine and feminine (so one would say יִהְיוּ yihiyú instead וf tihiyéna). I adopted at some point the habit of using both as appropriate, though otherwise my Hebrew is less old-fashioned than it was when I was a child.
J1M, Y, would להישאר work in your opinion?
That would be ‘to remain’. Lehiša’ér babáyit ‘to remain at home’ would be used if one stayed at home while others left.
Y, would you say that difference maps onto the transition (at the collective scale) between spoken modern continuous-evolution literary hebrew [yeesh what a phrase, i’m so sorry] and the early stages of what’s now ivrit? (the phase, i mean, where both are around, and affecting each other, but which one is the dominant lect is shifting from the one to the other)
the be’ayót situation has that ring to me (and makes me remember a friend describing doing research at the NLI on the bilingual anarchist journal Problemen/Problemot, and being greeted by an archivist with “with you, it’s always problems, problems…”).
rozele, my understanding is that there was at first the revived Hebrew, a cluster of dialects based on late Haskalic*, which was used as a spoken language and as a secular written language. The newer, looser spoken Hebrew of the generations after the first** was very slow to find its way into literary writing.
(I’m not sure, did I answer your question?)
* By that I mean after Mendele’s revolution, where he gave up on Biblical Hebrew as the basis for the revived language in favor of Mishnaic (=Rabbinical) Hebrew, a variety with a much richer record, which had previously been scorned as not pure enough.
** There are some indications that the Hebrew of the Tel Aviv kids in particular was the earliest to shake off its attachment to the older variety.
Another example of a question with yeš in, uh, Early Modern Hebrew is the story I recounted here before, about the mathematician Fraenkel. That one uses the originally Mishnaic וְכִי vekhi, which introduces rhetorical questions. From other funny Fraenkel anecdotes I gather that he spoke this archaic vein of Hebrew in general.
This is a nice article on the early days of spoken Hebrew in 20th century Palestine. The sources for the informal spoken language of the era are sparse, which makes the article all the more interesting.
Y, thank you and it is a great anecdote. I am absolutely stealing the expression. I mean, not with וְכִי יֵשׁ, but about advancing to the back.
and hearing the bus driver shout, להתקדם אחורה lehitkadem akhora! literally ‘advance to the back!’
Hah. That was a running joke in Algeria for a long time: we say avõnsi l-laṛyar, haha, how crazy we are!
I associate “strategic advance to the rear” with Japanese WW II propaganda, and it seems to me that I maybe have read somewhere that somewhat similar expressions were used.
At the beginning of Hebrew school in the late ’60s, we were taught ‘ayeh for “Where”, replaced a year or two later by ‘eifoh, and chafetz for “want” (present tense), replaced at the same time by rotzeh. (Sorry about the romanization.) The teachers explained that the former words were old-fashioned. At some point I wondered how that had changed so fast, given how recently Hebrew had been revived (maybe not as recently as I though). So was that a transition in our curriculum from formal to previously informal forms?
Now I’m thinking ka’n for “here” was replaced by poh. But that was a long time ago.
@JF: What they were teaching you was definitely archaic for the late ’60s. I think people were still attached to this older register, as more ‘correct’. Just as I was taught in English classes that using will instead of shall for the first person was incorrect, probably based on my teachers’ teachers’ prescriptivist myths.
kan and po ‘here’ are pretty much completely interchangeable in all registers and lects, as far as I know.
Y, that certainly speaks to what i asked! i’m trying to better understand the replacement of (as i understand it) the cluster of hebrew lects that gained some spoken use (and more written use as a self-consciously “modern” literary language) in the 19thC – which grew out of the more-or-less continuous chain of hebrew lects in use in responsa and other rabbinic literatures – by the much more systematized, deliberately engineered, and actively taught early ivrit lects – which involve a distinct break from that continuous transmission. the complicated flows between written and spoken lects seem like particularly a interesting part of that transition; i’m excited to read the reshef article!
(and i quite like “haskalic” as a term for those earlier lects, though i’d assume they weren’t entirely limited to haskole advocates)
The other illustrative Fraenkel anecdote (that one from my mom, who I think witnessed it): when the evening guests needed to be signaled that it was time for them to leave, Fraenkel would ostentatiously pick a pill bottle, swallow a pill, and announce, רוֹפְאִי יְעָצָנִי לָקַחַת תְּרוּפָה זוֹ חֲמֵשׁ־עֶשְׂרֵה דַּקּוֹת לִפְנֵי הַשֵּׁנָה rof’í ye’atsáni lakáxat trufá zo xaméš esré dakót lifnéi hašeiná ‘my physician has advised me to take this medication fifteen minutes before bedtime.’ The possessive nominal suffix, the verbal object suffix, the lack of an article on a verb+demonstrative phrase — all those are not used in casual speech now, and were probably already little used even then.
Now I’m thinking ka’n for “here” was replaced by poh. But that was a long time ago.
I think we (in 2022/23) learned both כָּאן (kan) and פֹּה (po) for “here”, without much explanation of the distinction between them; my own interpretation was that they correspond to Russian тут and здесь respectively, i.e. that the latter is more generically “here” and the former means something more like “in this specific place”. I’m not sure if this is the actual distinction, or if they’re actually exact synonyms and I’m just making it up.
Certainly the latter is the more usual word, but both are still very common on signs, and I think I’ve heard both used.
@Y: Thanks, interesting to know.
Lucky for you that you weren’t taught the official Fowler-type rules for “will” and “shall”, and lucky for me that I wasn’t.
rozele: I don’t know how much central planning / engineering was there, especially in the pre-state years. There was prescriptivism, and later the Academy, but I can’t tell if that and whatever was taught to children or to immigrants had all that much influence on the language, beyond supplying neologisms which made the language less macaronic. To be sure, they did succeed in devaluing and suppressing other languages, Yiddish above all. But destroying is much easier than building. Modern Hebrew was mostly developing on its own by the 1930s if not earlier, beyond what any central planning could direct.
(Looking up information on the subject, I was distressed to find a mention of my grandfather, who was a high official: he had returned a letter from a citizen about something, written in German, with a note saying he could only accept letters written in Hebrew. He himself was fluent in German. I never knew him; everyone says he was a kind and decent person.)
i don’t mean that there was something equivalent to the later Academy! just that i understand the haskalic lects to have been for the most part individually and idiosyncratically developed and taught, with what overall coherence there was coming largely from editors of publications imposing and modeling their varying preferences, and from mutual stylistic criticism in reviews, salons, etc. early ivrit (proto-ivrit?), though, i understand to have had a fair amount of consistency in what was taught across the different zionist organizations/movements (in europe, and in palestine for immigrants*) and modeled in the movements’ publications.
clearly, that got much messier once there were communities using ivrit as their everyday lects, and natural/social development started banging into different versions of prescriptivism. i’d assume that would’ve started well before the ’30s, but i wonder at what point (if any), ivrit-as-spoken-in-palestine started to compete in europe with ivrit-as-taught-to-prospective-settlers.
my understandings may be entirely wrong, which is part of what trying to check against your experience and reckonings.
.
* generally, to my understanding, in the early period building on classes that people had taken before emigrating.
Oh! I get it now. I was thinking about a later era, which I have some connection to through family and other public memories. You mean an earlier time. I don’t know really. My guess is that when it came to conversing, it was hard for everyone, and one couldn’t have been too harsh about speaking this way or that. But I don’t doubt that people had opinions about language and wrote about them. I should read up some more about that.
Another passage about language:
And another:
Different times indeed.
I’m pretty sure the Hattery has already covered the Jewish community in Leeds/can’t find it pecking on the phone/apologies for repeating myself …
There’s a long-standing Jewish diaspora in Leeds North-East, Yiddish shop signs, Polish bakeries, yada yada … The constituency MP for many years was Keith Joseph “architect of Thatcherism” (and all-round bastard).
The name for these “dwellings” is terrace (U.S. row-house, I believe). Utterly unremarkable in Northern cities. I’ve lived in several around York and Leeds (including in a ‘back-to-back’), owned one even. Much better built than the thrown-up ‘council houses’ of the ’60’s/’70’s.
It’s where Charlie Stross comes from, though judging by the awful fate he inflicts on the place in the course of the Laundry Files series, he does not remember it with much affection …
Sorry, @Hat, but I’m getting a distinct feeling this author is just making shit up, to conform to some stereotype of satanic mills. Yes, parts of West Yorks are industrial, but never Leeds. Even in the early/mid C19th (before the period being talked about) Leeds was light industry and wool-processing/weaving[**]. No coal or steel. (There was a large rail works and associated trades — in Hunslet/well South of the City/a long way from the Jewish Quarter.) Leeds rapidly diversified into financial services.
Why the wool? Because Leeds is surrounded by sheep country (Ilkla’ Moor).
I’m feeling very tempted to retell the equally stereotypical tales of the Jewish community being aloof and inward-looking, and probably never getting out into the Yorkshire countryside or seaside, as stimulated by cheap rail travel.
[**] on account of the fast-flowing streams that could power the mills. But then cotton rapidly overtook: Manchester also had fast-flowing streams and was nearer Liverpool ports bringing in the raw material, and was damper so the yarn less likely to snap.
Burton gentleman’s outfitters founded by a Lithuanian Jew by 1913 manufacturing in Leeds.
@AntC
Are we forgetting about mining? Or does this not count as “industrial”?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/leeds/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8318000/8318667.stm
Sorry, @AntC, but you’re way to eager to accuse people of making shit up when they don’t say things the way you would. He’s not writing a scholarly history of Northern England and its economy, he’s writing about his childhood, and that’s presumably how he thought of the region in the early part of the century. I’m sure you’d have preferred it if he’d taken time off to bone up on the latest research and done a deep dive into the details, but nobody but you would have been interested. Not to mention that he’s not saying that about Leeds, he’s saying it about “industrial Yorkshire.” Which by your own account does not include Leeds, so where’s the problem? Chill, dude.
I agree with AntC that “industrial Yorkshire” includes Leeds, since otherwise you could not be “approaching the entrance a very different world from that of industrial Yorkshire” as you walked up the path; you’d have been in such a world since entering Leeds.
But I’ll point out that light industry is still industry. And maybe there was heavy industry. Wikipedia mentions iron foundries and later says, “Marshall’s Mill was one of the first of many factories constructed in Leeds from around 1790 when the most significant were woollen finishing and flax mills.[31] Manufacturing diversified by 1914 to printing, engineering, chemicals and clothing manufacture.[32] Decline in manufacturing during the 1930s was temporarily reversed by a switch to producing military uniforms and munitions during the Second World War.”
the equally stereotypical tales of the Jewish community being aloof and inward-looking, and probably never getting out into the Yorkshire countryside or seaside, as stimulated by cheap rail travel.
Was that a stereotype? The stereotype I’ve seen of New York Jews, once they had some money, was “Should we go to the mountains or the beach this summer?” Founded in fact, I feel sure.
I defer to the better-informed commentary of my learned colleague JF.
if he’d taken time off to bone up on the latest research and done a deep dive into the details,
I knew that stuff because I lived there, walked/worked around the place and talked to people.[**] The quotes don’t ring true as from someone who lived there; making a big deal about terraced housing, for example.
[**] Before the Jewish diaspora arrived, there was a steady stream of Irish Catholic immigration. So Leeds Loiners of note would include Peter O’Toole (and Jimmy Saville unfortunately). Then I’ve talked to Catholics who as lads went to Jewish houses to light the fires/stoves on Friday evening. Does that appear as a reminiscence?
@AntC: You can see the whole passage in Google Books if it’s available to you. You might find less (or more) to object to. I’ll just say that Daiches is describing things for non-British readers, he emphasizes the sameness of the terraced/row houses to contrast with the difference of his grandfather’s house’s interior (and its possibly numinous emanations), and he explicitly says there’s nothing unusual about the street.
@PP Or does this not count as “industrial”?
I think they count as not Leeds. A quick look at the map shows Rothwell/Garforth/Middleton miles outside Leeds.
@JF Daiches is describing things for non-British readers, …
Thanks. I think more to the point is Daiches never lived anywhere near Leeds, going by his biog. He was born in Sunderland — which should have familiarized him with terraced housing — except “He moved to Edinburgh while still a young child.” So he visited his grandfather’s house only fleetingly? That would explain the vibe I’m getting of being helicoptered-in.
@Hat He’s not writing a scholarly history of Northern England
(To reiterate my earlier point.) I don’t know how it goes where you are, but in Britain, there’s nothing “scholarly” about the history: it’s all around you; you can’t help tripping over it just walking about. In walking distance around the City there’s Kirkstall Abbey founded 1152, ruined by Henry VIII; Leeds Liverpool Canal 1770; the Minster 1842; the wonderful Corn Exchange 1863; Kirkgate market, where the Jewish business Marks & Spencer started 1884; …
Another passage of interest:
Reb Daiches Senior apparently believed in the maxim “Arbeit ist Arbeit und Schnaps ist Schnaps” (or he just hated precocious children). Does the grandson say if he was offered a puff on the cigar and if he inhaled, if he was?
He later writes:
Dienst ist Dienst und Schnaps ist Schnaps, where im Dienst sein means “being on duty” or “being on the clock” – you have your obligations and your pleasure, and the two don’t mix.
Huh. No-one else pinged on “sojourn” like I did, I guess.
While I of course recognize “lagur” in Modern Hebrew means “to live (at)/reside”, that term juxtaposed with the word “sojourn” immediately reminded me of the Maxwell House Haggadah.
The passage is this one from the Magid portion:
In Hebrew:
Transliterated (ALA):
(bolding mine)
Now, the Sefaria site has the translation “resided”/”to reside” for the terms, but the Maxwell House Haggadah (PDF, pg 15) has this:
And it had that from 1932 to at least 2011 (when a new translation was was commissioned), if I’m reading WikiP right. I don’t actually know if the newer translation uses “sojourn” or not.
The bible verse that uses “lagur” and is referenced in the Haggadah is Genesis 47:4,
https://biblehub.com/genesis/47-4.htm
And I see that the KJV, Douay-Rheims, and JPS translations (as well as others I omit) all use/used “sojourn” as well.
Strong’s also uses “sojourn” as the first translation:
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1481.htm
I don’t know what David Daiches was influenced by, but there’s plenty of classical Hebrew-English translations using “sojourn” for “lagur”.