Though often hailed as a miracle, the modern revival of the Hebrew language—reserved historically, like Latin, for liturgy, legalistic reasoning, and the intellectual speculations of a male, religious elite—is perhaps more properly understood as a ghost story. The efforts that began in the middle of the nineteenth century at creating first a modern literary language, and a spoken vernacular about a generation later, involved rummaging through centuries of idiom, allusion, and social registers in search of an ageless word to signify a newly created concept, technology, or social situation. When, at the turn of the century, this linguistic revival became tied to a political ideology of territorial reclamation, the sifting and shifting through contested buildings, human settlements, and whole cities made the spectral revivification of a language a literal trafficking in spaces haunted by corpses both long dead and freshly killed. The manifestation of these ghosts in the development of...
