Overview

For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew belonged to the realm of the sacred. A written liturgical language used primarily by rabbis and scholars, it was not spoken in everyday contexts. A revival process in the late nineteenth century brought Hebrew back into daily use, adapting sacred texts as the foundations for a new vernacular. A ""mother tongue"" emerged. Keren Mock provides a strikingly original multidisciplinary account of this transformation of Hebrew from an ancient sacred tongue to a secular spoken language. Bringing together psychoanalytic, semiotic, and comparative-literature perspectives, she provides deep insight into key moments in this history. Drawing on extensive, revealing interviews, Mock offers critical readings of two major Israeli authors, Aharon Appelfeld and Sami Michael, focusing on their struggles to write in Hebrew as immigrants. She delves into the archives of the lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the creator of an all-embracing dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew, and considers Baruch Spinoza's little-known Hebrew grammar in light of his philosophical works. In reflecting on the making and meaning of a mother tongue, Mock addresses questions of memory and forgetting, mourning and restitution, and the sacred and the secular. Through the exceptional history of Hebrew, this book uncovers the workings of language in the social and psychological realms. Hebrew features forewords by Pierre-Marc de Biasi, an artist and scholar of literature, and Julia Kristeva, a renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, speaking to the significance of the book.

Full Product Details

Author:   Keren Mock (Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies) ,  Armine Kotin Mortimer
Publisher:   Columbia University Press
Imprint:   Columbia University Press
ISBN:  

9780231217118

ISBN 10:   0231217110
Pages:   360
Publication Date:   23 December 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock  
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Language:   French

Table of Contents

Foreword: Keren Mock, a New Voice in Critical Thinking, by Pierre-Marc de Biasi Foreword: The Signifying Nature of Language, by Julia Kristeva Introduction Part I. The Age of the Pioneers Appelfeld and Michael: Edification of a New Mother Tongue 1. Hebrew as a Mother Tongue Among Languages 2. Hiatus and Reconstructive Narration in the Work of Aharon Appelfeld 3. Sami Michael’s “Literary Fall” Through Translation Part II. The Ben-Yehuda Worksite: Literary Excavations and Lexicographical Matter 4. The “Resurrection” of Hebrew? 5. Spectra and Corpus of a New Mother Tongue: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s Vision 6. Words as Language “Bricks” Part III. Spinoza’s New Concept: The Philosophical Foundations of Secular Hebrew 7. To Be Jewish and Multilingual in Amsterdam in the 1660s 8. From Scriptures to Writing 9. Regularity as the Foundation of Immanence 10. The Nature of Words: The Omnipotence of the Noun 11. Hebrew as a Mother Tongue Acknowledgments Notes Index

Reviews

Keren Mock's book offers a new and illuminating perspective on the modern revival of Hebrew. Working in reverse chronological order, she begins with two contemporary Hebrew writers who came from the background of another language, then proceeds to the foundational enterprise in renewing the language of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda at the beginning of the twentieth century, and concludes with Spinoza, who extracted Hebrew from its status as a holy tongue. This is a work of exemplary scholarship. -- Robert B. Alter, translator of <i>The Hebrew Bible</i> In this fascinating and innovative book, Mock examines the revival of the Hebrew language and the roots of its secularization. Bringing together philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literary studies, she provides a thought-provoking reflection on how a language becomes a mother tongue. -- Clémence Boulouque, author of <i>On the Edge of the Abyss: The Jewish Unconscious before Freud</i>

Keren Mock's book offers a new and illuminating perspective on the modern revival of Hebrew. Working in reverse chronological order, she begins with two contemporary Hebrew writers who came from the background of another language, then proceeds to the foundational enterprise in renewing the language of Elizezer Ben-Yehudah at the beginning of the twentieth century, and concludes with Spinoza, who extracted Hebrew from its status as a holy tongue. This is a work of exemplary scholarship. -- Robert B. Alter, translator of <i>The Hebrew Bible </i>

Author Information

Keren Mock is a research associate at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes, a research unit of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the École normale supérieure de Paris; adjunct faculty at Sciences Po Paris; and a clinical psychologist. Armine Kotin Mortimer has translated many works of literary fiction and nonfiction from French, including Julia Kristeva’s Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death (Columbia, 2023).

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