ヘブライ語は預言者と賢者の言語 : ユダヤ思想のロゴス化について

Abstract

In the modern reality of Jewish people, the observance of the Torah, the Jewish laws (Judaism) is no longer the exclusive criterion by which one can determine who the Jews are and what are Jewish thoughts. Modern Jewish identity has been fundamentally transformed by the rise of secularism and humanism which have weakened the hold of religion on many Jews. Responding to the difficulties involved in the definition of Jewish Thought as the expression of Judaism, the paper argues for a possibility of Hebraism as a criterion for the distinctiveness of Jewish thought, a way of thinking that transcends the differences of the secular and the religious perspectives. The maskilim of the 18th century in Germany such as Moses Mendelsshon and Naphtali Herz Wessely were keenly aware of Hebrew as a symbol of Jewish distinctiveness in enlightenment, and were opposed to the blurring of idiosyncratic qualities of Hebrew and German as in the Yiddish language. For them, Hebrew not only symbolizes the freedom and liberty of expression against old fashioned regime of the rabbis, but also the ideal of the restoration of the original power of Jewish thought as Hebraism. The fact that the language of Israel is called in the Hebrew Bible as yəhūdīt (Jewish) and that there is no occurrence of 'ibrīt (Hebrew) as a label for the language before the Hellenistic time (2 BCE) is important for the paper's efforts to establish two historical stages; the old name yəhūdīt stands for the biblical stage which sees no separation of holy and secular in language, while the new name 'ibrīt represents the idealization of the biblical language as the Holy tongue (lāšōn qodeš), as distinguished from human languages such as Greek and the vulgate dialect of the sages (lāšōn mišnāh). Drawing on this distinction between "Jewish" and Hebrew, the paper intends to demonstrate the potential of the term Hebrew as a new and more inclusive way of categorizing "Jewish Thought", transcending the differences of the pre-modern and the modern as well as the secular and the religious.