Jabotinsky sought to distance Hebrew pronunciation from Arabic toward Mediterranean sound

Evidence

In a 1934 letter to Leone Carpi, the leader of the Revisionist movement in Italy, Jabotinsky asked Carpi about recent studies of Etruscan civilization, specifically to find out whether there were any linguistic or cultural similarities between the ancient Etruscans and the ancient Hebrews. Presumably Jabotinsky hoped that such similarities did exist, as he frequently tried to associate Hebrew culture with the Mediterranean world. As part of his criticism of the orientalist tendencies of some Zionists, Jabotinsky objected to the notion that modern Hebrew should sound like another Semitic language, Arabic. He felt that ancient Hebrew had very little in common with a language that originated in the Arabian peninsula. In an essay titled “The Hebrew Accent,” he claimed that in the attempt to rediscover the original and pure Hebrew sound, an aesthetic principle must be employed. According to Jabotinsky, the European sound, particularly that of Italian and other languages that developed along the shores of the Mediterranean, is the pure sound that modern Hebrew must emulate. Jabotinsky claimed that the Semitic sounds of Arabic were but a series of noises without distinction or character. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 527

Categorization

• QUESTION: What became of the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew — did the eventual Israeli Hebrew pronunciation follow any of Jabotinsky’s Mediterranean ideals?
• XREF: Interesting parallel to language-purism movements generally — the search for ‘pure’ origins whose evidence is aesthetic and ideological rather than philological.
• SHARE: Send to a linguist interested in language revival debates.