Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Associations (YMHA, YWHA), organizations that promote health, social activities, recreation, acculturation of new Jewish Americans, and Jewish culture among Jews of all ages. The first YMHA was founded in Baltimore in 1854. A YWHA was organized as an auxiliary of the New York City YMHA in 1888, and the first independent YWHA was formed in 1902. During World War I, the organizations were instrumental in organizing support for Jewish servicemen overseas by enlisting rabbis for service at military posts. Out of this effort, the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) was formally established in 1917, subsuming the YWHAs and YMHAs. After the war, the JWB broadened its range of services in the United States and abroad, and was eventually renamed the Jewish Community Centers of North America. JCCs serve an estimated 1 million members (1999). Despite the name changes, some local branches retain the designation YMHA or YWHA.

Hebrew music: see Jewish liturgical music.

Hebrew literature, literary works, from ancient to modern, written in the Hebrew language.

Early Literature

The great monuments of the earliest period of Hebrew literature are the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. Parts of the Pseudepigrapha and of the Dead Sea Scrolls were also produced before the conquest of Judaea by Titus. The literature of the Jews developed mainly in the Hebrew language, although there were also works in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic.

In the 2d cent. A.D. began the Talmudic period, which lasted well into the 6th cent. In these centuries the great anonymous encyclopedic work of religious and civil law, the Talmud, was compiled, edited, and interpreted. The Midrash—a collection of halakah (found also in the Talmud) and haggadic material—likewise forms part of the Hebrew literature of that period. In the 4th cent. the Targum to the Pentateuch and to the Prophets was finished. The 6th and 7th cent. saw the development of the Masora in Palestine. In Babylonia meanwhile many valuable additions to Hebrew literature were made by the Gaonim after the 6th cent.

Medieval Literature

Commentaries on the Talmud and haggadic material continued to be written until the 11th cent., when the Babylonian academies were suppressed and the center of Jewish literary activity shifted to Spain. France and Germany became the main centers of Talmudic commentary. In Spain, and to some extent in Italy, Hebrew literature flourished for centuries. The finest work was accomplished in the realms of poetry—influenced by Arab and Indian literature—and philosophy. Philology, exegesis, and codification also flourished. By the 14th cent. the largely Aramaic mystical treatise, the Zohar, had appeared—the masterpiece of a flourishing literature of Jewish mysticism (see kabbalah).

Famous scholars and authors of Hebrew literature in the Middle Ages included Aha of Shabcha, Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayumi, Dunash ben Tamim, Dunash ben Labrat, Gershom ben Judah, Al-Fasi, Solomon ben Judah Ibn Gabirol, Rashi, Judah ha-Levi, Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Immanuel ben Solomon, Isaac Abravanel, and Joseph ben Ephraim Caro. In the persecutions following the Crusades, when the Jews were driven from country to country, they clung to their literature—which leaned increasingly to mysticism and asceticism—and especially to the Hebrew Bible.

Beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature

On the threshold of the transition from the old isolated life to a wider one was the poet Moses Hayyim Luzzatto—a contemporary of the Gaon of Vilna, Elijah ben Solomon—but the modern period of Hebrew literature really began with Moses Mendelssohn. While Nachman Krochmal and Shloime Ansky (Solomon Seinwel Rapoport) were contributing to biblical criticism and historical scholarship, writers such as Peretz (Peter) Smolenskin were devoting themselves to Haskalah, or literature of enlightenment, intended to shake the Jews of Central Europe from their medieval attitudes. Other important figures of the period are the scholar Joseph Halévy, the poet Jehuda (Leon) Gordon, and the novelist Solomon Yakob Abramovich, whose pseudonym was Mendele mocher sforim.

Zionism and Literature in Israel

The rise of Zionism, particularly reflected in the writings of Ahad Ha-am (Asher Ginzberg), gave Hebrew literature fresh impetus, and Palestine became again the center of publication in Hebrew. Hebrew was proclaimed the national language of the Jews even before the establishment (1948) of the state of Israel. The two great poets of modern Hebrew literature are Hayyim Nahman Bialik and Saul Tchernihovsky, who was strongly influenced by ancient Greek literature. The poetry of Abraham Shlonsky, Lea Goldberg, and Nathan Alterman deals with social and political themes.

Among the many writers of prose are Joseph H. Brenner, who described Jewish life in Eastern Europe and pioneer life in Palestine, and Salman Shneur, who wrote of the simple and uneducated Jews. The Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon portrayed the Eastern European milieu and pioneer life in Palestine; his works have become classics in modern Hebrew epic literature. Hebrew writers who are native to Israel seek inspiration in the classical Hebrew past or in the new life of Israel. The most outstanding writer of this group is Moshe Shamir, who in his two novels—one depicting a Hasmonean king and the other dealing with the Arab-Israeli War of 1948—gave new dimensions to Hebrew fiction.

Aron David Gordon (1856-1922) was one of the greatest social and political essayists of Hebrew literature; significant Hebrew language literary critics include David Frishman (1861-1922) and Yosef Klausner (1874-1958). In recent years the Israeli novelists Amos Oz, Abraham B. Yehoshua, and Aharon Appelfeld, and the poet Yehuda Amichai have been widely translated and have achieved international distinction. Outside Israel, the writing of the Jews is ordinarily in the language of the countries in which they live or in Yiddish, whose literary use developed rapidly after the middle of the 19th cent.

Hebrew language, member of the Canaanite group of the West Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages). Hebrew was the language of the Jewish people in biblical times, and most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. The oldest extant example of Hebrew writing dates from the 11th or 10th cent. B.C. Hebrew began to die out as a spoken tongue among the Jews after they were defeated by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. Well before the time of Jesus it had been replaced by Aramaic as the Jewish vernacular, although it was preserved as the language of the Jewish religion. From A.D. 70, when the dispersion of the Jews from Palestine began, until modern times, Hebrew has remained the Jewish language of religion, learning, and literature. During this 2,000-year period, Hebrew has always been spoken to some extent. At the end of the 19th cent. the Zionist movement brought about the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, which culminated in its designation as an official tongue of the state of Israel in 1948. There it is spoken by most of the 4.5 million Jews of that country.

Grammatically, Hebrew is typical of the Semitic tongues in that so many words have a triconsonantal root consisting of three consonants separated by vowels. Changes in, or omissions of, the vowels alter the meaning of a root. Prefixes and suffixes are also added to roots to modify the meaning. There are two genders, masculine and feminine, which are found in the inflection of the verb as well as in noun forms. Modern Hebrew has experienced some changes in phonology, syntax, and morphology. Pronunciation of various orthographical forms has changed, as well as the rules for prefixing and suffixing prepositions to nouns and pronouns. Ancient Hebrew seemed to favor a word order in which the verb precedes the subject of a sentence, but in modern Hebrew the subject typically precedes the verb. Hebrew vocabulary has been updated by the addition of many new words, especially words of a scientific nature.

The earliest alphabet used for Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite branch of the North Semitic writing and is known as Early Hebrew. Later the Jews adapted the Aramaic writing and evolved from it a script called Square Hebrew, which is the source of modern Hebrew printing. Most modern Hebrew handwritten text uses a cursive script developed more recently. Today the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, all consonants. Symbols for the vowels were apparently introduced about the 8th cent. A.D. and are usually placed below the consonants if employed. Their use is generally limited to the Bible, verse, and children's books. Hebrew is written from right to left.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at Mt. Scopus, Givat Ram, Ein Karem, and Rehovot, Israel; coeducational. First proposed in 1882, formally opened 1925. It is the world's largest Jewish university and is noted for its work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The university has faculties of humanities, mathematics and natural science, law, agriculture, and social sciences, as well as schools of education, social work, library and archive studies, and business, and operates the Hebrew Univ.-Hadassah School of Medicine. The Jewish National and University Library (1892) contains over 2 million volumes. The university maintains numerous research institutes in agriculture, business and finance, energy, law, medicine, and historical and contemporary Jewry. The Harry S. Truman International Center for the Advancement of Peace is affiliated.

Semitic language that is both a sacred language of Judaism and a modern vernacular in Israel. Like Aramaic, to which it is closely related, Hebrew has a documented history of nearly 3,000 years. The earliest fully attested stage of the language is Biblical Hebrew: the earlier parts (“Standard Biblical Hebrew”) date before 500 BC and include even older poetic passages; the later parts (“Late Biblical Hebrew”) were composed circa 500–200 BC. Post-Biblical Hebrew, variously termed Rabbinic or Mishnaic Hebrew (see Mishna), is characterized by an early period when Hebrew was still probably to some degree a vernacular and a later period, after circa AD 200, when Aramaic became the everyday speech of Jews in the Middle East. The 6th and 7th centuries marked a transition to Medieval Hebrew. The resurrection of Hebrew as a vernacular is closely linked with the 18th-century Haskala movement and 20th-century Zionism. Contemporary Israeli Hebrew is spoken by about five million people in Israel and abroad. Seealso Ashkenazi; Sephardi; Hebrew alphabet.

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