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new way.
The importance of song to the South African resistance also needs to be mentioned in
this context. There were songs for every occasion and aspect of the struggle: rage, sadness,
elation, pride, battle, loss, defeat, victory, hope, despair, funerals, executions (sung by the
victims), arrests, detainees, pauses in the struggle, self-criticism, etc. The songs were sung in
indigenous languages, sometimes in a mixture of these languages in order not to exclude
anyone or at least to exclude as few as possible, and sometimes with phrases in English. The
songs were not as much composed by individuals as by collective efforts. Music, indeed, was
a weapon of the resistance, which the apartheid government underestimated and was unable to
disarm. Radio, television, and recording studios were in the hands of the white elites, and so
the songs only spread orally, but they did spread. More than that, the songs of South African
freedom fighters and apartheid victims were a non-violent and effective kind of resistance
against the White-led cultural and linguistic apartheid and genocide. 565
8.3. Hebrew and Yiddish, English, Arabic, and Russian
At the end of the 19 th and beginning of the 20 th century, Zionism to a large extent still
consisted of the revival of the Hebrew language. Hebrew had never died, but it had become a
chiefly liturgical language long before the Romans had ended Israelite political independence
in ancient times. By then, Palestinian Jews typically spoke Aramaic, which had spread as a
lingua franca in the region six centuries earlier. Egyptian and other Jews spoke Greek when
the Romans first invaded.
Modern cultural Zionists had a whole range of motivating factors behind their move to
revamp Hebrew for secular use for the first time in over 2,000 years. Afraid of an impending
death of the language, and hence of a distinct Jewish culture – due to anti-Jewish pogroms in
Eastern Europe as well as to secularizing tendencies in society in general throughout 19 th
century Europe – they soon joined forces with political Zionists to claim the land of Palestine,
or, rather, parts of it. For Zionists, there was also a perceived need to displace and dismiss the
Yiddish language – a basically Germanic mixture of Middle High German, Hebrew, Aramaic,
English, Hungarian, Slavic and Romance languages – as a ‘ghetto language’. Yiddish was
spoken by more than 11 million Jews prior to World War II. Today it is a language struggling
to survive. Many Jewish people do not seem to care about this loss of cultural diversity in
general, and of Jewish cultural diversity in particular. Yet there are ongoing Yiddish revival
projects, especially perhaps as this becomes a way to claim Jewish identity outside of overtly
religious or Zionist circles.
The modern Israelis, the ones that Zionism wanted and wants to nurture, were to be
physical and practical types, sun-tanned workers on the land, sportsmen and sportswomen and
soldiers, rather than citified, pale intellectuals and small business owners. These were the
kinds of people who were typically (and stereotypically) associated with Yiddish. In 1893, the
first secular school using Hebrew as the language of instruction was opened in Yaffa in
western Palestine. Hebrew then came to play roughly the role in Palestine and Israel that Attic
Greek had played in Ptolemaic Egypt, and Afrikaans in South Africa. 566
Today, Arabic is the second official language of Israel, yet it is not taught as much in
schools as English is, and it is only rarely learned sufficiently – despite a few compulsory
years of Arabic classes in Israeli state schools – nor used much by the Jews. It should not be
forgotten in this context that Spanish is taught in the schools of Texas, too, or that Chinese
was taught in the English schools of colonial Hong Kong. (In some cases it might be in the
interest of the ‘big bosses’ (see previous chapter) to learn the language of the employees, as
well.)
565 Hirsch (director): Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony, 2002
566 Avishai 1985: 45ff; See also Weinreich: College Yiddish: An Introduction to the Yiddish Language and to
Jewish Life and Culture, 6 1999 (1949); N.N.: Dreaming of Altneuland, December 23, 2000