Multilingual Anxiety and the Invention of the Hebrew Native: A Reading of a Hebrew Feuilleton by S. Ben Zion

This article explores the relationship between multilingualism, the attempted revival of Hebrew speech, and the sense of muteness that accompanied Hebrew literary production in the first decade of the twentieth century. It does so through a close reading of a Hebrew feuilleton, written by Simhah Ben Zion and published in 1907 in the first issue of the Palestine-based Hebrew journal Ha-’omer. At the center of the feuilleton is a living wonderment: an eight-year-old girl—the narrator’s daughter—who speaks no fewer than eight languages, one for each year of her life. Although the narrator and his wife, both ardent Zionists, struggle to maintain a Hebrew-speaking home, they soon learn that their sociolinguistic reality does not coincide with the monolingual fantasy of imposing Hebrew as an exclusive, isolated language. The article argues that in the midst of an endeavor to reterritorialize Hebrew creativity in Palestine and constitute the Hebrew-speaking native, Ben Zion’s feuilleton satirically narrates Hebrew revival as a chaotic Babel, revealing not only the failures of this project but also its latent anxieties.