Hebrew

From Sacred Language to Mother Tongue

Keren Mock (Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies), Armine Kotin Mortimer

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English

Columbia University Press
23 December 2025

Psycholinguistics; Historical & comparative linguistics

Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

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.

By: Keren Mock (Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies)
Translated by: Armine Kotin Mortimer
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780231217125
ISBN 10: 0231217129
Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Pages: 360
Publication Date: 23 December 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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).

Reviews for Hebrew: From Sacred Language to Mother Tongue

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>