up, and the JJL editors, Sarah Bunin Benor and Ofra Tirosh-Becker, for hosting a special thematic vol-ume and for the immense editorial work they have invested in its publication. I am grateful to Chanan Ariel, Miri Bar-Ziv Levy, Malka Rappaport Hovav, and Yael Reshef for their help with writing this introduction.
1 Reshef, forthcoming.2 Wexler 1990, following Holm 1988; Izreel 2001.3 For the relexification view of the nature of creoles see Lefebvre 1998. 4 For more detailed information about the various stages of Hebrew, I refer the reader
to Harshav 1999 and to the relevant articles in the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics (Khan et al. 2013).
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Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language at the end of the 2nd century CE. Between this period and the time of the establishment of MH as a spoken language in Palestine, Hebrew consisted of a large body of writings contain-ing a core of scripture, liturgical and traditional legal works, and an extensive range of scholarly and literary works. The central religious works were read and studied and used in worship over the centuries in Jewish communities in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, but also as far as Central Asia, India, and China. The language of all the writings contained elements of the earliest stages of written Hebrew that emerged when Hebrew was still a language with native speakers, and also elements of the written language from subsequent periods when it was no longer spoken.5
The written texts of Hebrew that emerged when it was still a spoken lan-guage are classified into two main corpora. These are the Old Testament, com-posed before the Common Era (Biblical Hebrew) and the Mishnah and related texts (Mishnaic Hebrew). Mishnaic texts, although composed in a period when Hebrew was a language with native speakers, are traditionally classified as part of Rabbinic Hebrew, together with the Talmud and other texts which were composed after Hebrew ceased to be spoken. This joint classification is due 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 