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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They called it Hebrew and consciously aspired to be faithful to its historical legacy.10 A full educational system was instituted, run entirely in Hebrew, from kindergarten11 all the way to university.12 In 1922, Hebrew was granted the sta-tus of official language, alongside English and Arabic, of the British Mandate for Palestine. In 1948, Hebrew was proclaimed the official language of the state of Israel together with Arabic.
Overview of Contributions
The chapters in the present volume document syntactic structures novel to Modern Hebrew (MH) and investigate the origins of the innovation, looking for parallel structures in the contact languages and also for possible internal precursors of these structures. The results of the study have direct bearing on the controversy regarding the nature of MH. If the genesis of MH followed a creolization process, where Hebrew was but a lexifier, the novel syntactic structures of MH should not be developments of previous Hebrew structures, but should be accounted for solely on the basis of the syntax of the contact languages. The converse does not hold if the genesis of MH was based on trans-mission from previous stages of Hebrew. That is, assuming that MH results from transmission, there is still room for the influence of contact languages. Even if MH was transmitted from previous stages of Hebrew, this could not be the familiar transmission by native