Professor Aharon Maman is confident that the Minve, the new home of the Academy of the Hebrew Language he heads, will soon take its rightful place alongside Jerusalem’s principal institutions in the Government Quarter near the Knesset and within sight of the new National Library of Israel.
Maman believes Israelis sometimes take Hebrew for granted. “We speak it every day, but few know the story behind it,” he told JNS in a recent interview. “We want the next generation to appreciate the miracle of its revival.”
In the 72 years since its inception, the institution charged by Israeli law with preserving and adapting the Hebrew language of the Jewish state has never had a home worthy of its mission.
The Academy, as it is often called, now seeks to bring Hebrew’s story to the public in a more tangible way—a museum dedicated to the 3,000-year journey of the Hebrew language.
Prof. Maman, the president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, told JNS, “We currently have a small museum, but we want to build something bigger, with sound, sight, and historical objects—something that tells the story not just to Israelis, but to the world.”
The proposed Minve building will help promote the dual goals of elevating and expanding the study of Hebrew while exploring its cultural significance, Maman said. He explained that the name “Minve” (pronounced Meen-vé) is an example of the work of the Academy. It’s a new Hebrew word derived from navé, meaning home or abode, as well as pleasant and beautiful.
In addition to its public spaces, the Minve will also house the dozens of lexicographers who work in the Academy’s research institutes and on its Historical Dictionary Project.
Maman described the Historical Dictionary as a monumental, ongoing project to trace the history of every Hebrew word from its earliest usage to today.
“Just to give you a general idea of what we accomplished in the first fifty years of work, we have about twenty million words. So if you take that as one single dictionary, it means that you have 20 million examples. Twenty million, of course, is not a dictionary. It’s a gathering of many concordances of many texts,” he said.
In addition to the Historical Dictionary, the Academy publishes an average of one new dictionary per year, listing current Hebrew terms related to a particular field. Wine, diplomacy and computers are recent topics addressed by the Academy.
Maman noted that these were relatively small dictionaries. The fields of psychology and philosophy are still waiting to be completed, he said. More than a hundred different dictionaries are now accessible on the Academy’s website. A recent example: words associated with COVID-19.
Despite its biblical roots, Hebrew has never existed in a vacuum. Foreign influence has shaped its lexicon for millennia. Words like sus (horse) hail from Egyptian, heikhal (temple) from Assyrian and Sumerian, and Sanhedrin—the supreme religious body during Temple times—comes from Greek.
Modern Hebrew, too, has absorbed influences, especially from English. English words that have filtered into common Israeli usage include oto, (car), kurs, (course) and internet, despite the Academy’s attempt to get people to adopt mirshetet ( derived from “reshet”, meaning “net.”)
Over the years, the Academy proposed Hebrew alternatives—for “babysitter” and “supermarket,” for example—that just never stuck with the Israeli public.
None of that bothers Maman, who says it’s a natural process of an evolving language. “Even the word academy is Greek,” he explained. “We considered replacing it, but kept it for international recognition.”
The word toda (thank you), he said, “appears over a thousand times in the sources, but its meaning shifts from ‘offering’ in the Bible to ‘thanks’ in modern Hebrew. Tracing that journey is the essence of our work.”
What Hebrew lacks in word volume—it has roughly one-third the vocabulary of English—it makes up for in precision and resonance, Maman said. “We never feel limited,” he said. “We have a word for everything we need.”
Born in Morocco, Maman spoke the local Arabic dialect as a child and first encountered Hebrew at the age of four in a local Talmud Torah. After making aliyah at age 16 with a desire to study math, Maman switched to the study of Hebrew language when he realized, “Hebrew is a central part of the definition of the Jewish identity. Any Jew anywhere in the world should be aware that Hebrew is part of not only his culture, but of his identity.”
He won the Israel Prize for the year 2009 for his contribution to the study of Hebrew language and literature.
“Hebrew is the glue that connects us all together,” Maman concluded, reflecting on the miracle of a language that returned dramatically from near extinction. “There’s nothing like it anywhere else.”