Semitic Linguistics between Cairo and Jerusalem: Israel Ben-Ze’ev’s History of the Semitic Languages (1929)

The present essay is a sociopolitical reading of Israel Ben-Ze’ev’s (Wolfensohn) History of the Semitic Languages ( HSL ), which was written in Arabic and published in Cairo in 1929. It situates HSL within the academic and intellectual contexts of interwar Egypt and Mandatory Palestine. Ben-Ze’ev, who was of Ashkenazic Jerusalemite descent, went to Cairo for his higher education in 1922. He received his doctorate from the Egyptian University in 1927 and later taught Semitic languages at the same institution. Drawing on Hebrew and Arabic primary sources, this essay provides new information on Ben-Ze’ev’s intellectual biography during the 1920s and early 1930s. It describes his involvement in the formation of Cairo’s academia, arguing that HSL was part of the vision of a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew academic landscape, which was then fostered in Jerusalem and Cairo. The overarching purpose of the essay is to show how this political motivation, to draw the Jewish and Arab paths of modernization closer to each other, was translated into linguistic theory. Against the dominant scientific trend according to which Hebrew is a descendant of the Canaanite group of dialects, Ben-Ze’ev contends that it originated from Arabic dialects of the northern Hejaz. It is argued that this translation was contingent on (1) Ben-Ze’ev’s affirmation of the Arabic language, notwithstanding the Arab-Jewish conflict over Eretz Israel / Palestine; and (2) the relatively liberal academic and intellectual atmosphere of 1920s Cairo, which allowed the idea of the general good of the sciences to grow.