This piece will focus on how and why some Ashkenazic Jews—both religious and (later) secular—adopted the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew because they deemed it superior to the Ashkenazi one.

Controversy in Hungary

Hungary never had a strong tradition of pronouncing the prayers in the Sephardi pronunciation. Hartwig (Naphtali Hirtz) Wessely (1725-1805), who initiated the reform of Hebrew pronunciation, referred precisely to the fact that the Sephardi people read out every phonetic symbol, even semitones of traditional texts, clearly, and claimed that their language sounded nicer than the Ashkenazi reading. In Hungary, Joszef Rajnis (1741-1812), a Jesuit teacher and poet, made a similar statement with an offensive anti-Semitic overtone. In his opinion, the accent (“barking” as he called it) of rabbis differed significantly from the original sounds of the ancient Jewish language.

In Hungary there was an attempt to introduce Sephardi pronunciation already in the 19th century.^. In 1828, Moses ben Menachem Kunitz (1774-1837) of Obuda, the rabbi of the Buda community from 1828 until his death, author of some valuable Talmudic works and a Zohar analysis, published a rabbinic decision (psak) that announced that the Sephardi pronunciation should be used in the synagogue instead of the Ashkenazi one. His main argument was that seven-eighths of the world’s Jews prayed using the Sephardi pronunciation (this figure was obviously exaggerated). Kunitzer was in favor of reforms in general; he even supported the efforts of the radical reformer Aron Chorin. He studied in Prague and was held in high esteem.

The activity of Kunitzer had no real result, but in spite of its failure, it indicates that representatives of the haskalah were unanimously convinced that the Sephardi pronunciation preserved by certain isolated Jewish groups throughout centuries was closer to the original sound of the Hebrew language than the Ashkenazi one, the common language of European Jews altered under German influence.

It is interesting to note that in the 1950s, the leadership of the Hungarian Jewish community strictly forbade the Sephardi pronunciation, which sounded similar to modern Hebrew. It was even forbidden at the Rabbinical Seminary, lest they be accused of Zionism and thus invite political or police intervention (Hungary was a Communist dictatorship at the time). Those who study Hebrew these days may learn both pronunciations, yet the attraction and impact of the Israeli intonation is powerful. In synagogues, the Ashkenazi pronunciation is still in use, but younger people, including students of the Rabbinical Seminary, switch to the Sephardi-Israeli reading they became accustomed to during their stay in Israel.

Zionism and the Rebirth of Hebrew

Eliezer ben Yehuda is considered the father of “modern Hebrew.” Ben Yehuda left his native Lithuania and sailed to Palestine in 1881 where he settled in the Jewish quarter of old Jerusalem. In 1890 he helped create the Hebrew Language Council (Va’ad Ha Leshon Ha Ivrit) whose stated purpose was to disseminate works in Hebrew and establish Hebrew as the official language of the Yishuv.

Although Ben-Yehuda was not a religious Jew, he initially dressed as a traditional Sephardic Jew, sported a long untrimmed beard and regularly attended the local synagogue. It wasn’t long, however, until he managed to arouse the ire of the Jerusalem Sephardic Rabbinate, who responded with three separate bans against him and his newspaper “Hatzvi.”

Ben-Yehuda particularly disliked the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yaakov Shaul Elyashar and considered him to be from the old generation of Jews who were hopelessly stuck in the “galut [exile] mentality.” He did, however, form close ties with Elyashar’s successor, Rabbi Yaakov Meir, who was highly sympathetic to Ben-Yehuda’s ambitions, and the former was instrumental in introducing the modern Hebrew language into the schools of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem.

Ben-Yehuda Chooses the Sephardic Pronunciation

Ben-Yehuda, although displaying an attitude of contempt for the older generation of traditional Sephardic rabbis, harbored a strong admiration for the traditions of Sephardic Jewry; the “golden age in Spain” was especially cherished by Ben-Yehuda, who called it “this most fruitful period.”

As Jack Fellman put it:

“…[T]he Sephardim as a whole were less inclined to religious fanaticism and more receptive to new ideas from the outside world. This fact can be attributed to various sources. First, unlike the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim had never been directly exposed to the new climate of thought as expressed in the ideas of the enlightenment that were sweeping across Europe during the 19th century and therefore did not recognize as deeply the possible anti-traditional, anti-religious consequences of these beliefs.”

It is known from historical records and had also been clear to Ben Yehuda before his arrival in Palestine that the various Jewish groups in the city, while speaking their own languages among themselves, used Hebrew as a lingua franca when it became necessary to meet together, for example in the marketplace, or to work together, as in the collection of taxes for the government authorities. This situation was particularly applicable to the two major sections of the community—Ashkenazim and Sephardim—when they met together, but was also the case when groups consisting only of Sephardic Jews gathered, as these people had no other common means of communication but Hebrew, since Ladino was restricted in use and Arabic was splintered into several dialects. As Ben-Yehuda observed: “When, for example, a Sephardi from Aleppo would meet a Sephardi from Salonika, or a Sephardi from Morocco would come into the company of a Jew from Bukhara, they were obliged to speak in the holy tongue… [Of] all the centers of Jewish population in the world, only Jerusalem could boast a spoken Hebrew tradition that had been preserved until Ben Yehuda’s time. As Ben Yehuda noted: “For me the matter was a little easier, because the Sephardim who knew I was not a Sephardi were already used to the fact that with an Ashkenazi they must speak in Hebrew. As for the Ashkenazim, some of them did not know who I was, and the question of whether I might not be a Sephardi made it acceptable to them to speak with me in Hebrew.”

This Hebrew was not, of course, the Ashkenazic (European) Hebrew that Ben Yehuda had learned in his youth. In the first place, it was a Hebrew spoken with the Sephardic accent, inasmuch as the Sephardim were numerically and culturally superior to the other groups in Jerusalem and had enjoyed this status for over 300 years and therefore their accent too had become dominant…It should also be borne in mind, as a factor initially aiding Ben Yehuda and his ideal, that certain groups of Jews in Palestine already spoke only Hebrew, in particular Kabbalists and chasidim especially in Safed, at least on Sabbaths, but also, it would seem, on weekdays.

The author is an independent scholar of history and translator of Hebrew text. Please contact [email protected]. Check out Channeling Jewish History on Facebook for daily updates in your inbox.

By Joel Davidi Weisberger