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Hebrew by Keren Mock
£25.00
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9780231217125
Published:
23 Dec 2025
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
360 pages
Dimensions:
234.95x155.57mm
Weight:
0.000kgs
Author:
Keren Mock provides a strikingly original multidisciplinary account of the transformation of Hebrew from an ancient sacred tongue to a secular spoken language.
For nearly two thousand years, Hebrew belonged to the realm of the sacred. A written liturgical language used primarily by rabbis and scholars, it was not spoken in everyday contexts. A revival process in the late nineteenth century brought Hebrew back into daily use, adapting sacred texts as the foundations for a new vernacular. A "mother tongue" emerged.Keren Mock provides a strikingly original multidisciplinary account of this transformation of Hebrew from an ancient sacred tongue to a secular spoken language. Bringing together psychoanalytic, semiotic, and comparative-literature perspectives, she provides deep insight into key moments in this history. Drawing on extensive, revealing interviews, Mock offers critical readings of two major Israeli authors, Aharon Appelfeld and Sami Michael, focusing on their struggles to write in Hebrew as immigrants. She delves into the archives of the lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the creator of an all-embracing dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew, and considers Baruch Spinoza's little-known Hebrew grammar in light of his philosophical works. In reflecting on the making and meaning of a mother tongue, Mock addresses questions of memory and forgetting, mourning and restitution, and the sacred and the secular. Through the exceptional history of Hebrew, this book uncovers the workings of language in the social and psychological realms.Hebrew features forewords by Pierre-Marc de Biasi, an artist and scholar of literature, and Julia Kristeva, a renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, speaking to the significance of the book.
About the Author: Keren Mock is a research associate at the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes, a research unit of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and the École normale supérieure de Paris; adjunct faculty at Sciences Po Paris; and a clinical psychologist.Armine Kotin Mortimer has translated many works of literary fiction and nonfiction from French, including Julia Kristeva's Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death (Columbia, 2023).
| Number of pages | 360 |
|---|
We will despatch your order as quickly as we can. If, for whatever reason, a product is out of stock we will contact you to discuss the likely delivery time or an alternative product.
| First Item | 2 Items & Over | |
|---|---|---|
| UK | £3.75 | £5.00 |
| EU | £15.00 | £30.00 |
| USA & Canada | £30.00 | £50.00 |
| Rest of the World | £45.00 | £60.00 |
| Collect in Store | free | free |
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