Modern Hebrew’s official pronunciation was a politically crafted reconstruction, not inherited

Evidence

The spoken Hebrew on the radio embodied the contradictory and conflicted approach to the Jews’ primary heritages, East European and Middle Eastern, that lay at the roots of the Zionist project. The official linguistic style of radio broadcasts was Sephardic (Iberian, the provenance of the core of Palestine’s small, pre–nineteenth-century Jewish community) as opposed to Ashkenazic or oriental. Kol Yisrael’s official language handbook acknowledged that few Israelis employed Sephardic pronunciation but claimed that Israeli radio was simply following the practice of radio worldwide in choosing one particular dialect or form of pronunciation and making it the standard for national broadcasting as a whole. During Israel’s formative decades, according to the handbook, Palestinian Jewry agreed to accept the Sephardic pronunciation as the basis for the revived Hebrew vernacular. This description is disingenuous, as it masks the process of artful crafting of modern Hebrew speech through the political and educational institutions of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv. Zionism inherited the linguistic legacy of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, which believed Sephardic pronunciation to be closest to the phonetics of biblical Hebraic speech. Moreover, Zionists, in keeping with European Jews throughout the nineteenth century, idealized Sephardic culture as particularly dignified and ennobling. Thus there are intriguing similarities between the creation of an intricately wrought and aristocratic broadcast Hebrew and the upper-crust, but not quite Oxonian, English of the BBC. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 702

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Orwell’s and standard-language-ideology arguments (Bourdieu, Milroy) on how standardized national languages are politically manufactured. Also resonates with the ‘Grafting & Growth’ theme of constructed, engineered cultural artifacts.
• DEFINE: Defines Sephardic vs Ashkenazic pronunciation as dialect categories with political and class valence in Zionist history.