to both corpora together forming the legal (halakhic) basis of orthodox Jewish life and to their close linguistic affinity, clearly distinguished from Biblical Hebrew. Both corpora were committed to writing in Hebrew in Palestine and Babylon, by people whose native language was Aramaic, a language that greatly influ-enced the Rabbinic stage of Hebrew.
The following period, Medieval Hebrew, starts around the 7th century with the Arab conquest, when Arabic replaced Aramaic as the native language in many Jewish communities. Vast religious, philosophical, and scientific cor-pora, and a lot of poetry and liturgical hymns were written during this period in lands under Islamic rule in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, and in adjacent lands under Christian rule. The corpus created from the 15th cen-tury onward is sometimes called Late Rabbinic Hebrew. It consists of halakhic writings, but also administrative documents relating to the life of communities in Europe and some literary work. In the 18th century in Eastern Europe schol-ars identify Hasidic Hebrew as a distinct corpus, which was rich in hagiogra-phy and homiletics typical of the Hasidic branch of Judaism.
5 There is, however, evidence of very rare circumstances where Hebrew was sometimes spo-ken, e.g., Tirosh-Becker 2015.
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Modern publications in Hebrew start appearing in the middle of the 18th century in Central and Eastern Europe, the manifestation of a new cultural movement expressing Jewish secular aspirations for emancipation and integra-tion into the surrounding culture. The language of these publications is known as the Hebrew of the Haskalah (Enlightenment), also called Maskilic Hebrew. Under the influence of the neo-classical trend of the times, some of the nota-ble literary oeuvres were written in Biblical Hebrew. However, most writings (political, scientific, newspaper articles),6 and even some literary work, kept up the tradition of utilizing a mixture of all the historical stages of Hebrew. This conscious linguistic mixture of different historical periods turned into the mainstream style of written Hebrew during the second half of the 19th century. At the end of the century, in the aftermath of widespread pogroms (massa-cres of Jews in the Russian empire), Jewish refugees and others who supported the ideas of Jewish nationalism emigrated to Palestine, bringing along their Hebrew (sometimes called Revival Hebrew) as part of the foundation for a projected autonomous political entity.
Palestine at the end of the 19th century was a province of the Ottoman Empire, with a population of about 500,000 Muslims, 5,000 Christians (mostly German), and 40,000 Jews.7 The Jewish inhabitants, who formed what is known as the Old Yishuv, were the descendants of Jews who had immigrated over the previous millennium for religious reasons. They lived in Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias, where they constituted the majority of the population, and in other ancient towns such as Hebron, Peqiin, and Shefaram. The old-est communities of the Old Yishuv spoke Arabic, and others were divided into communities speaking different languages according to their land of ori-gin: Judeo-Spanish in the case of Sephardic communities, and Yiddish (also Hungarian, Rumanian, etc.) in the case of Ashkenazi communities. Members of the Old Yishuv used Hebrew as a lingua-franca when they interacted among themselves. They spoke it according to the traditional phonology in which the Sephardic communities, which were the majority, conducted their tradi-tional readings of the Bible and other religious rituals.8 The newcomers from Europe adapted this pronunciation in some ways to Ashkenazi phonology9 and became the first community of Modern Hebrew speakers. The subse-quent large waves of Jewish immigration eventually adopted this language.
6 Newspapers in Hebrew were published from the mid-1800s in various cities, e.g., Berlin, Warsaw, Cracow, St. Petersburg.
7 Lewis 1954, Ben-Aryeh & Bartal 1983.8 Fellman 1973.9 Ofer 2007.
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