This Country Is a Volcano: On a Letter About Hebrew I Never Printed

by Gershom Scholem, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

In December 1926 Franz Rosenzweig turned forty. His friends put together a collection of tributes in his honour. By then he could no longer speak or write with his own hand. The paralysis that would kill him three years later had already taken his voice, and he spelled out his sentences with the help of his wife. I was in Jerusalem, three years into a country whose language I had chosen, and I sent him a letter. I dated it the way one dates things in Jerusalem, 7 Tevet 5687, and then, for the Germans, 26 December 1926. I gave it a title that was more solemn than I usually allowed myself: Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache, a confession about our language.

I never printed it. I wrote many hundreds of pages about the Kabbalists' theory of language and did not print the three paragraphs that had driven me to that theory in the first place. Some people will say this was modesty. It was not. I did not print it because I did not know whether it was scholarship, prophecy or panic, and I had spent my life insisting that these three should be kept in separate rooms. The letter puts them in the same room. Now that I am asked to write on a subject of my own choosing, I want to open that room again and see what is left in it.

I. What the letter says

It begins with a sentence I still think is the best one I ever wrote: Dies Land ist ein Vulkan: Es beherbergt die Sprache. This country is a volcano: it houses the language.

The rest follows from it. People in Palestine in 1926 talked about many dangers that might wreck the Zionist enterprise, and more than anything else they talked about the Arabs. I wrote that there was a threat more uncanny than that, one which the Zionist undertaking had called up by its own nature: the "actualisation" of Hebrew. A holy language was being lowered into our children. Must not its abyss break open again one day?

The builders of the new Hebrew believed that they had secularised the language. I called that belief a façon de parler, a phrase. It is simply impossible, I wrote, to empty words that are filled to bursting, except at the price of the language itself. The ghostly Volapük we spoke in the street was the only kind of language in which "secularisation" could have happened at all, a language without expression. But if we handed on to our children the language that had been handed to us, if we, the generation of transition, brought the language of the old books to life in them, then the religious power of that language would break out one day. And which generation would it find?

Then comes the passage about blindness. We live in this language above an abyss, almost all of us with the sureness of the blind. Will we not fall in, we or those who come after us, once we see? The founders of the language movement believed blindly, to the point of obstinacy, in the miraculous power of language, and that was their good fortune. Nobody who could see would have had the demonic courage to bring a language to life in a place where only an Esperanto could have come into being.

The core of the letter is a single short sentence: Sprache ist Namen. Language is names. The power of language is enclosed in the name, and its abyss is sealed in it. It is no longer in our power to call up the old names every day without waking their potencies. And at the end comes the sentence that people have since read either as theology or as the overheated nerves of a twenty-nine-year-old: God will not stay silent in a language in which He has been conjured back into our lives a thousand times.

That is the letter. I translate from my own German, which is more feverish than my Hebrew and more feverish than my English. I will not soften it.

II. The official story and why I did not believe it

The official history of the revival of Hebrew is a beautiful story, and like most beautiful stories in Jewish historiography it was told by the people who had an interest in its being told that way.

It goes like this. Hebrew was a dead language, preserved like a fly in amber in the liturgy and in the rabbinic commentaries. Then a man of iron will, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, came to Jaffa in 1881. He swore that his household would speak nothing but Hebrew, and he raised his son as the first native speaker in nearly two thousand years. He compiled a dictionary, coined the words that were missing, and fought the religious authorities of Jerusalem, who considered the whole enterprise a profanation. The schools followed, then the newspapers, then the streets. A dead language was raised from the grave by the will of a people, and that people became a nation.

I have no quarrel with the facts in this account. My quarrel is with the word dead. The whole account rests on it, and it is false.

Hebrew was never dead. It was not spoken in the market, but this is a different thing. For eighteen centuries it was the language in which Jews prayed, studied, wrote responsa, wrote poems, wrote contracts and letters to one another across the whole diaspora, and wrote their mysticism. Above all it was the language in which the Kabbalists thought about language itself. A dead language does not produce the poetry of Spain, the treatises of Gerona, or a library of Lurianic manuscripts. What the revivers took for a corpse was the most heavily charged language a people has ever carried, and they took it for dead because they had been taught to see only what was spoken in the market as alive.

This is the same error that I spent my life fighting in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, transferred from history to philology. Zunz and Geiger looked at Jewish history and saw a rational, ethical trunk with a few unfortunate mystical growths. Ben-Yehuda and his successors looked at Hebrew and saw a lexicon: so many roots, so many forms, a grammar, a stock of words that could be cleaned, extended and put to work. In both cases a nineteenth-century European idea of what a respectable thing ought to look like was laid over a Jewish reality that did not fit it. The Wissenschaft wanted a Judaism the Prussian state could accept. The language movement wanted a Hebrew in which you could order bread, sign a lease, and report on the cabinet. Both got what they wanted. Both paid a price they did not see.

The price, in the case of the language, is what my letter is about. The words were not neutral when the new Hebrew took them up. Each one came out of the old books, and each one still carried its old meaning inside its new one. The new speakers did not hear this, and that was their luck and their danger. Take kodesh, the holy, or geulah, redemption, which turns up in the names of streets and neighbourhoods. Take korban, sacrifice, which became the word for the victim of an accident. A people that says korban every day about traffic on the road to Haifa has not emptied the word. It has only stopped hearing it.

III. Why "language is names"

I owe the reader the source of my sentence, because it did not come out of nowhere, and it did not come from Zionism.

It came first from Walter Benjamin. In 1916 he wrote an essay, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, which grew out of our conversations and began as a letter to me. In it he argued that the essence of human language is naming. Adam names the animals, and in the name the thing is communicated to God. Every later human language is a fall from that naming into judgement and chatter, into what he called Geschwätz. I did not accept everything in it, and Walter would not have wanted me to. But I took from it the conviction that a language is not a tool for passing information from one head to another. Something else speaks in it, and the speaker is not its master.

The second source was the Kabbalists, whom I was then reading in manuscript, badly, without the help that later generations of students would have. Everything in my letter is already in them, in their own terms. Nahmanides says in the introduction to his commentary on the Torah that the whole Torah, read in another division of its letters, consists of the names of the Holy One. The Kabbalists of Gerona and Castile took this further. The Torah is not a book that contains names of God. It is the Name of God, woven out of His names, and the meaning a child learns in school (that Abraham went down to Egypt, that the cows came up out of the Nile) is the outermost garment of a text whose inner substance is the Name itself, and has no meaning in our sense at all.

I wrote about this at length many years later, for the Eranos meetings, in the essay on the name of God and the Kabbalistic theory of language. There I tried to be the historian. I traced the doctrine from the Sefer Yetzirah, where the world is created out of the twenty-two letters, through Abraham Abulafia, who made a mystical technique out of combining them, to the Zohar and to Safed. I was careful not to say whether any of it was true. That is the historian's discipline, and I held to it.

In the letter of 1926 I did not hold to it. In the letter I wrote as if the Kabbalists might be right. If they are right, if the names really do carry powers that do not depend on whether the speaker believes in them, then the Zionists have done something without precedent. They have taken the names out of the synagogue and the house of study, where they were guarded, approached with fear and spoken in their proper order. Then they have scattered them through the streets of Tel Aviv. You cannot do that and expect nothing to happen.

IV. Was I right?

This is the question a scholar is supposed to put to himself in old age. I have had longer than most to put it.

On one point I was wrong, and I will say so plainly. I underestimated the ghostly Volapük. I thought that the street-Hebrew of 1926, the Hebrew of the bus conductor, the advertising placard and the party newspaper, was a stage that could not last. Either the language would sink into a lifeless jargon, an Esperanto with a long pedigree, or the old power would break through and something terrible or holy would happen. I did not foresee that a language can live for decades, perfectly well, in a condition between the two. Children were born into it who had no other language. They dreamed in it, quarrelled in it, made love in it and wrote very good poetry in it, and almost none of them heard the abyss. The sureness of the blind turned out to be a much more durable condition than I had thought. Most people, in most languages, live their whole lives in it. I had mistaken a permanent human state for a temporary Zionist one.

I have to set something against that error, though. Agnon wrote in the same Hebrew, in the same country, at the same time. He was my friend for half a century, and I read nearly everything he published, much of it before it was published. In Agnon the abyss is visible on every page. He wrote a modern Hebrew prose that is almost entirely made out of the old books, in which every phrase carries a rabbinic or liturgical echo. The effect is not pious. It is uncanny, and often very funny, because the reader hears the sacred meaning and the trivial occasion at the same moment and cannot reconcile them. Agnon did not secularise the language. He let the reader see that it had not been secularised. He was the one writer of his generation who walked over the abyss with his eyes open and did not fall in. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1966, the world honoured him for a charming folk-teller of Galician Jewish life. I had the feeling that nobody in Stockholm had any idea what he had done.

On the main point, the eruption, I cannot say that I was wrong.

I wrote that God would not remain silent in a language into which He had been conjured a thousand times. I meant something more exact than a pious hope, and something more frightening. The religious force of the language would not come back as quiet piety. It would come back as politics. A people does not keep using the word for redemption in its daily speech without someone, sooner or later, taking the word at its word.

I spent the second half of my life writing the history of what happens when the messianic idea leaves the realm of hope and enters history. Sabbatai Sevi is the great example. Messianism in Judaism has always been a theory of catastrophe, and it has always been dangerous at the moment when people believe the time has come. The rabbinic tradition knew this. That is why it built so many fences around the end of days, why it forbade "forcing the end", and why it postponed redemption into a future that was always to be hoped for and never to be acted on. The Jewish people lived in deferral, and the deferral had its own dignity and its own sterility. Zionism broke the deferral. It was meant to be a secular movement. It said: we will return to history, and we will not wait for the Messiah. I was a Zionist and I still believe it was right to say this. But a people that returns to history in the language of the prophets and the Psalms is not going to stay secular for long. The vocabulary is too strong for the intentions of the speakers.

In 1926 I could see only the possibility. By the last years of my life the possibility had become a fact. After the war of 1967 there were people in the country who spoke of the conquered territories in the language of the geulah, the redemption. They spoke of the hour of the Messiah and of the beginning of the flowering of our redemption, a phrase from the prayer for the state that most of the people who recited it had not stopped to hear. They had heard it now. They were not speaking metaphorically, and they were not speaking a dead language. They were speaking the language of the old books, alive in the children, exactly as I had warned, and it had turned against the secular framework that had revived it.

I said in public in those years what I thought about this. I said that messianism was not a programme for a state, and that to mix the messianic idea with the politics of the day was to invite the catastrophe I had described in my book on Sabbatai Sevi. I said it as a historian. But I knew, privately, that I had already said it in 1926, as something less respectable than a historian, and I knew that the earlier statement had the better diagnosis. The historian of the 1970s could describe the danger. The young man of 1926 had seen where it came from: not from the religious parties, not from this or that rabbi, but from the language itself, which nobody in the secular state had thought to fear.

V. Against my own letter

I want to stop now and argue with the young man, because a confession that is not examined is only a mood.

The letter says that the power of the names does not depend on the speakers' belief. Taken literally, this is magic. It is the Kabbalists' doctrine, not mine. I do not believe that the letters of the Torah act on the world like electricity. What I believe, and what I can defend as a historian, is something more modest and, I think, just as disturbing. A language carries its history in its words. A word that has been used for two thousand years in prayer has been charged by the attention of millions of people who meant something absolute when they said it. That charge does not disappear because a generation decides to use the word for something trivial. It lies dormant, and it is available to anyone who wants to call on it. The demagogue, the prophet and the poet all know this. The founders of the language movement did not know it, or decided not to know it, and so they left it lying in the street for whoever would pick it up.

That is the defensible version of my letter. I notice, however, that I did not write the defensible version. I wrote about the names, about the abyss, about the Voice that would be heard. And I notice that the indefensible version has been the more accurate one. The modest sociological account explains why religious nationalism finds the old words convenient. It does not explain the fear: the moment, which I described in the letter and which everyone who lives in Hebrew has experienced, when an ordinary sentence in the mouth of a careless speaker suddenly lets through a word of religion, and one is startled. The sociologist has no place for that moment. The Kabbalist has.

This is the old problem of my life, and I have never solved it. I insisted on the historian's distance from the mystics. I would not let myself become one of the people I studied, and I mocked those, Buber first of all, who blurred the line. But the reason I studied the mystics at all is that I suspected, in a part of myself that I kept out of my footnotes, that they had seen something true. The letter of 1926 is the one place where that suspicion is written down without the footnotes. That is why I kept it in a drawer. It is also why I am taking it out now.

VI. The children

The last part of my letter speaks of the children, and that is where I want to end, because there I was most frightened and most right.

I wrote that our children have no other language, and that they, and they alone, would have to pay for the encounter we had arranged for them without asking them and without asking ourselves. I meant that the generation of transition, my generation, at least knew that the words had another life. We had come from the synagogue and the yeshiva, or from German universities where we had learned the old language as scholars. We could hear the double meaning even if we chose to ignore it. The children would not. They would inherit the words without the warning. The first generation speaks with irony. The second speaks with innocence, and innocence is the condition in which the abyss opens.

There is a question in the letter that I left unanswered: whether we would have a youth able to stand when the holy language rose up. I still do not know. I know only that the question was the right one, and that nobody in the country at that time wanted to hear it. Rosenzweig would have understood it. He was the one German Jew of my acquaintance who knew that Hebrew could not be made into a language like other languages, and who did not want it to be. He and Buber were translating the Bible into German so that the Germans, and the German Jews, would hear the strangeness of the Hebrew through the German. I was doing the opposite, living in the Hebrew and hearing the danger. It was right that the letter went to him.

He died three years later, in December 1929, in Frankfurt, almost entirely paralysed. I do not know what he made of my confession. I do know that I chose him for it because he was the only reader who would not take it as a political argument against the Zionist programme or as a mystical rhapsody. He would take it as I meant it: as a report on a fact that the founders had made inevitable and had not wanted to look at.

Let me say what the fact is, without the fever. Hebrew was revived. It is spoken by millions of people, many of them children, in a state that the young man of 1926 did not expect to see. It is a triumph. And every day, in every school in the country, a child opens a book whose words are the same words the child speaks. The child reads that God spoke and it came to be, and these are the words of the playground. The words are the same. There are very few languages on earth in which this happens. One day the child will look up from the page and hear it.

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Gershōmō Scholem per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Gershom Scholem, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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