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Article: Hebrew, old and new.
- Article from:
- Faces: People, Places, and Cultures
- Article date:
- December 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Carus Publishing Co. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Hebrew is an ancient language. The Bible was originally written in Hebrew, and for centuries Jews called it the "holy tongue," because they believed that it was the language God had used to communicate with man. After the Jews were exiled from Israel more than 2,000 years ago, they started using other languages, such as Yiddish (a mixture of Hebrew and German), Ladino (a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish), French, Russian, and English for their day-to-day conversations. They used Hebrew only for religious purposes such as praying and studying the Bible.
In the late 1800s, a young Jewish man from Lithuania named Eliezer Perelman joined the Zionist movement and decided ...