Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon
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Название: Pilgrim in the Palace of Words
Автор: Glenn Dixon
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Путеводители
isbn: 9781770705784
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Yiddish is a Germanic language related to Old German with a smattering of Slavic thrown in. We know Yiddish for such words as putz, verklemmt, and schmooze, which evoke something of the world of those lost northern Jews, a hint of the colour, rhythm, and humour of their lives.
During the Holocaust, several million Yiddish speakers perished, and the language has never fully recovered. So in 1948, in one of the first sessions of the new Israeli parliament, a most extraordinary decision was made: the official language of the new state would be Hebrew. However, for almost two thousand years hardly a living soul had spoken that language in everyday situations. It’s true that Hebrew was well-known in its biblical context, but for people on the street it had about as much use as Latin. That meant it was a fossil language, a remnant of a long-ago time.
Nevertheless, the movement to revive Hebrew has been incredibly successful in Israel. In fact, even before the United Nations mandate, groups of people had been working on adapting Classical Hebrew to the twentieth century. They certainly had some problems describing technology. Bicycles, for example, are most definitely not mentioned in the Torah. And how about airplanes?
To deal with such modern inventions, Hebrew has adopted the word
Languages are pliable entities. They’re infinitely creative in their solutions to problems such as dealing with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Hebrew is a perfect example. Resurrected when it was all but extinct, it’s now spoken as a mother tongue by nearly six million people. Remarkable.
One reason for the success of today’s Hebrew is that the flood of Jewish immigrants to Israel hailed from many different language groups — a sort of Tower of Babel in reverse. Moreover, while the choice of Hebrew as the official language was initiated by the Israeli government, it was the heartfelt choice of the people, as well. The language is as intimately linked to the Jewish religion as Arabic is to Islam, and therefore it became one’s duty to learn Hebrew and to pass it on to children, not only as a language of religion but as the language employed for all things.
So for me this story is one of the most powerful of all in the annals of language. It is the one and only time in history that a language has been successfully resurrected from the dead, not just as a museum piece but as a fully functioning modern tongue.
In West Jerusalem, the new city, there’s a museum that holds the Dead Sea Scrolls. When I went to see them, I merged behind a group of people on a tour. Not that I like organized tours. It was just a cheap way of getting a free guided commentary.
The little guide was a passionate fellow, and at one point we stood in front of a large fragment of the Scrolls. Most of the group’s members were Israeli, I think, and could read ancient Hebrew. The guide told us to go ahead and read the fragment, and I studied it solemnly as if I could actually decipher it.
“What is this text?” he finally asked after a few moments of silence. Some keener in the crowd said it was from Isaiah, and the guide beamed. “That’s right. This piece of sheepskin is two thousand years old. It’s almost a thousand years older than any previously known copy of the Book of Isaiah. And what do you notice about it?”
Again I stood shamefaced, hoping the guide wouldn’t notice I didn’t have a clue. Those around me seemed a bit confused, as well. “Do you remember,” he continued, “when you were children and played the whispering game?”
The whispering game?
“Yes, where children get in a line and the teacher gives something to whisper in the ear of the first. That first child whispers to the next and then that one to the next. The fun is when you see how much it changes. ‘I want French perfume for my birthday’ eventually becomes ‘I wore frog pajamas that burned my dog.’ Now what do you notice here?” His hand swept over the glass-enclosed manuscript. He paused dramatically, then answered himself. “There’s no change. Two thousand years of copying and there’s no change at all. Look, you can read it yourself.”
The first Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad Ahmed el-Hamed. One of his goats climbed into a cave along the Dead Sea to escape the searing heat, and he picked up a rock and threw it in to get the animal out. When he tossed in the stone, he heard the tinkle of pottery breaking. Up there in the caves he found the Scrolls hidden in ceramic jars. This, our guide told us, happened on the same day the United Nations created the State of Israel. “Now you can believe whatever you want about such a coincidence,” he said, “but I know what I believe.”
My last day in Jerusalem was a Friday which, as it happens, is when Franciscan monks walk in procession down the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. Arno and I got our cameras ready, Berhitte sighed, and off we went.
The winding path of the Via Dolorosa leads from the Temple Mount to a Crusader church built over the site where it’s thought Christ was crucified. On July 15, 1099, the knights of the First Crusade entered Jerusalem and slaughtered almost all of the inhabitants. Forty thousand people, Jews and Muslims alike, were cut down until the streets were knee-deep in blood. And then the Crusasders built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the place where Christ was said to have died for humanity’s sins — one more profoundly ironic bit of history in Jerusalem where meanings easily become tangled, where belief sometimes obscures reality.
There are some wonderful accounts of the Muslim reaction to this First Crusade. There was a sense of confusion and dismay. The city had been open to everyone and was peaceful for five hundred years. One Muslim writer, in an attempt to make sense of these acts of barbarism, set out to understand what had happened, so he read the Christian books. In Islam, of course, there’s only one god, but in reading about the Holy Trinity, it seemed to him that the Crusaders worshipped three divinities: a father, a son, and a holy ghost. Moreover, Christians appeared to cannibalize their god — eating his body and drinking his blood. To top it off, this same god created his own mother who then created him … immaculately. No wonder the scholar was confused. All of this demonstrates how difficult it is to truly understand the nuances of another culture. It doesn’t help, either, when that new culture is intent on slaughtering you and all of your family.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is somewhat gaudy, which I admit is a terrible pun, but it’s true. The building is ornate to a fault and is run by six different sects, which is a big problem. The different sects are often not on speaking terms, and the church is strictly divided into areas of influence. Changing a light bulb or even moving a carpet a few centimetres can spark fistfights between monks from the different groups. Up on the roof, out of the fray, is the Ethiopian sect. It laid claim to the top of the church and has, in fact, lived in crumbling wooden shacks on the roof for more than a hundred years.
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