War of the Languages

The war of languages (Hebrew: מלחמת השפות‎; Milhemet HaSafot), also known as the fight between languages, was a debate in Ottoman Palestine revolving around the language of instruction in the country's new Jewish schools. This "language war" was a cornerstone event in the history of the revival of the Hebrew language.

In 1913, the German Jewish aid agency Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (), which had maintained schools for Jewish immigrants in Palestine since 1905, sought to establish German as the language of instruction at the first technical high school, the Technikum, in Haifa (later, the Technion), which it was sponsoring. This sparked a public controversy between those who supported the use of German and those who believed that Hebrew should be the language spoken by the Jewish people in their homeland. The issue was not just ideological: until then, Hebrew was primarily a liturgical language and lacked modern technical terms.

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