"This book tells two stories: first, how Hebrew has been used in Jewish life, from the Israelites to the ancient Rabbis and across 2,000 years of nurture, abandonment, and renewal, eventually given up by many for dead but improbably rescued to become the everyday language of modern Israel. Second, it tells the story of how Jews-and Christians-have perceived Hebrew, and invested it with a symbolic power far beyond normal language"--ECIP introduction.
Index
Bibliography
Chapter 1. "Let there be Hebrew" -- Chapter 2. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome -- Chapter 3. Saving the Bible and its Hebrew -- Chapter 4. The Sephardic classical age -- Chapter 5. The other Medieval Hebrews -- The sciences and the sacred -- Chapter 6. Hebrew in the Christian imagination I: Medieval designs -- Chapter 6. Hebrew in the Christian imagination, II: From Kabbalists to colonials -- Chapter 7. Can these bones live? Hebrew at the dawn of modernity -- Chapter 8. The Hebrew state.