In the Middle Ages, Jews spoke the languages of the countries in which they lived. So in Spain they spoke the Hebrew dialect of the Spanish language, otherwise called "Ladino". After the expulsion from Spain, many Jews migrated to the Ottoman Empire, where they continued to use the Ladino.
Some of the former Spanish Jews (Sephardic) settled in Morocco. Here the Judeo-Spanish dialect began to be called "Hakitiya". Some Sephardim left for Portugal, where they switched to Portuguese or its Hebrew dialect. After being expelled from Portugal, the Sephardim settled in Holland, where they switched to Dutch.
In medieval France, Jews spoke Judeo-French (Corfu), a dialect of the Oil languages that were widespread on the French side in the old days. After the expulsion from France, the Jews in their new place of residence in Germany for some time retained Judeo-French, but soon forgot it and adopted the Yiddish language - a variant of the German language. Eastern European Jews, the Ashkenazi, also spoke Yiddish.
This is not a complete list of Hebrew languages. There were over three dozen of them in total. The Jews began to think about creating their own language almost simultaneously with the emergence of the political movement Zionism, which aims to create the Jewish state of Israel.
The process of creating a new language was called the Hebrew revival. Eliezer Ben Yehuda played a key role in it.
Eliezer Ben Yehuda.
Yitzhak Perlman Eliezer (real name Ben-Yehuda) was born in the Russian Empire, on the territory of the modern Vitebsk region of Belarus. Ben-Yehuda's parents dreamed that he would become a rabbi and therefore helped him get a good education. As a young man, Eliezer was imbued with the ideas of Zionism and in 1881 he emigrated to Palestine.
Here Ben-Yehuda came to the conclusion that only Hebrew can revive and return her to her "historical homeland." Influenced by his ideals, he decided to develop a new language that could replace Yiddish and other regional dialects as a means of everyday communication between Jews.
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His ideals were so strong that Ben-Yehuda sought to shield his young son Ben-Zion from the influence of languages other than Hebrew. There is a known case when Eliezer loudly shouted at his wife, finding her singing a lullaby to her son in Russian. It is believed that Ben Zion Ben Yehuda was a native speaker of the Hebrew language.
Eliezer Ben Yehuda was the main figure in the creation of the Hebrew Language Committee, and then the Hebrew Academy, an organization that still exists today. He was also the author of the first Hebrew dictionary.
The introduction of Hebrew into life was much more difficult than its creation. Its distribution was carried out through children's schools in which teaching was conducted in Hebrew. The first such school appeared in the settlement of Rishon de Zion in 1886. The process was slow. Parents were opposed to their children learning in an impractical, in their opinion, language, which would be useless in obtaining higher education. The process was also hampered by the lack of Hebrew textbooks. And at first, the language itself did not have enough vocabulary to describe the world around us. In addition, for a long time they could not decide which pronunciation in Hebrew is correct: Ashkenazi or Sephardic.
The process went faster after the second wave of Jewish emigration from Europe arrived in Palestine in the early 20th century. Representatives of this wave were already familiar with literary Hebrew. In Europe, Jewish writers were already publishing their books on it. The most famous among them were Moikher Mendele (Yakov Abramovich), poet Haim Bialik, Mikha Berdichevsky and Uri Gnesin. The classics were translated into Hebrew by David Frishman, Shaul Chernyakhovsky and others.
Soon, the World Zionist Congress adopted Hebrew as its official language. The first city where Hebrew was made an official language was Tel Aviv. In 1909, the city administration here switched to Hebrew. Signs in the new language appeared on the streets and cafes.
Simultaneously with the introduction of Hebrew, there was a campaign to discredit the Yiddish language. Yiddish was declared "jargon" and "non-kosher". In 1913, one of the writers declared: "Speaking Yiddish is even less kosher than eating pork."
The peak of the confrontation between Hebrew and Yiddish was 1913, when the so-called "war of languages" broke out. Then a group decided to create the first technical university in Ottoman Palestine to train engineering personnel from among the Jews. It was decided to teach in Yiddish and German, since there were no technical terms in Hebrew. However, Hebrew supporters opposed the decision and forced the group to admit defeat. After this incident, it became clear that Hebrew would become the official and spoken language of Israel.
Create Hebrew - created, implement - implemented. Now, scholarly philologists are faced with the difficult task of how to classify Hebrew. It is not clear where and what Ben-Yehuda copied. Most scholars see modern Hebrew as a continuation of the biblical "Hebrew language." However, there are also alternative points of view.
In particular, Paul Veksler argues that Hebrew is not a Semitic language at all, but a Jewish dialect of Slavic Serbian. (By Serbs, we mean the Slavs-Serbs-Lusatians living in Germany). In his opinion, all the basic structures of the language and most of the vocabulary are purely Slavic.
Ghilad Zuckermann takes a compromise position, between the views of Wechsler and the "majority." He considers Hebrew to be a Semitic-European hybrid. In his opinion, Hebrew is a continuation of not only the “biblical language”, but also Yiddish, as well as having much from Russian, Polish, German, English, Ladino and Arabic.
Both linguists are criticized. In which the arguments are mostly political, religious and Zionist, rather than scientific.