Today, Hebrew is a thriving language—used by millions of speakers around the world to communicate all their thoughts and desires. 

That may have seemed almost impossible less than 150 years ago, when the language was thought to exist only in ancient religious texts. For some two thousand years, Hebrew laid dormant as Jewish communities scattered across the globe, and adopted the languages of their new homes. By the late 1800s, Hebrew vocabulary was limited to archaic and religious concepts of the Hebrew Bible—and lacked words for everything from “newspaper” and “academia” to “muffin” and “car.”

Here’s a look at the bumpy road to modernizing Hebrew and the debates that surround its continuing evolution today.

Hebrew never really died

The Jewish people were once known as Hebrews for their language, which flourished from roughly the 13th to second centuries B.C.—when the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament, was collected. Hebrew was used in daily life until the second century B.C. at latest, experts believe.

But beginning in the second century B.C., Jewish people became increasingly ostracized and oppressed. Through the rise and fall of Rome, the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and beyond, they were forced to migrate around Europe and adopted the language of the country they were in. They also formed new languages like Yiddish, which mixed Hebrew, German, and Slavic languages.

Still, the Jewish people were known as “People of the Book.” As part of traditions like studying the Torah and reading it aloud, Jews continued to learn Hebrew to read from the Bible and written Hebrew lived on for more than a millennium mostly through religious practice.

There were exceptions: more educated Jews exchanged messages in Hebrew, sometimes between merchants for records of business, says Meirav Reuveny, a Hebrew language historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A 10th-century trove of documents showed that some women, a group generally confined to domestic duties at the time, also wrote letters, exchanged legal documents, and recorded business in Hebrew. From the 10th to 14th centuries, there was an explosion of secular Hebrew poetry in Andalusia, Spain.

Waking the giant

In the 19th century, most Jews in Europe were still second-class citizens when a new movement emerged that looked to Hebrew as a way to inspire hope through the Jewish people’s glorious past, Reuveny says. Hebrew revivalists wanted to expand the language beyond the abstract concepts in the Bible—they wanted to use it to talk about modern events, politics, philosophy, and medicine. 

Among the leaders of the movement was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, credited as the father of Modern Hebrew.

“One person cannot invent a language,” Reuveny says. “But he makes a good hero, something important for a social movement.”

Ben-Yehuda was born in 1858 in Lithuania, where Jews were heavily discriminated against and violent pogroms terrorized Jewish communities regularly. When Ben-Yehuda traveled to Paris in 1878, he was empowered by the growing Jewish nationalist movement he witnessed there.

He believed Jews needed a country and language to flourish. He moved to Jerusalem in 1881, where he and his wife made the decision to only speak Hebrew—despite missing words for essential modern items and concepts. They raised their son Itamar Ben-Avi to be the first native Hebrew speaker in almost 2,000 years.

In the beginning, Hebrew went through growing pains: the language needed many new words. Ben-Yehuda made a dictionary of new Hebrew words (including מילון, or milon, the word for dictionary). Hebrew newspapers across Europe invented their own words, too, Reuveny says.

Many people saw this as an unwelcome change—swapping an ancient and sacred language to a new and strange one. Hebrew revivalists chose a difficult way of life by speaking only Hebrew, before it could meet the needs of modern life.

Gradually, the language was standardized in the early 20th century. The first Modern Hebrew dictionary was released in its completed form in 1922. Hebrew language schools were opened, then Hebrew became the language of instruction of all subjects in Jerusalem schools (the first in 1913). 

After the state of Israel was established in 1948, people flocked from all over the world. Many young adults learned Hebrew through the young nation’s mandatory military service, though most families in Israel became Hebrew speakers over one to two generations.

Today, of the 9.5 million people in Israel aged 20 and over, almost everyone uses Hebrew, and 55 percent speak it as their native language. Around the world there are around 15 million Hebrew speakers; in the U.S., there are 195,375.

An unstoppable force

Modern Hebrew has changed significantly but still shares clear ties with Biblical Hebrew. 

“King David and I could probably understand each other,” says Mirit Bessire, Hebrew language program director at Johns Hopkins University, who points out that it’s not all that different from modern English speakers attempting to understand someone using Shakespearean English.

The growing pains Hebrew experienced as it modernized during Ben-Yehuda’s time are echoed in controversies today. Inclusive language such as non-binary adaptations have proven difficult to adopt as Hebrew is significantly gendered, Reuveny says. Modern words and concepts like “gaslighting” also stir debate about how much outside cultures are affecting the language.

“Language does naturally evolve and grow. It’s inevitable. It’s not in our hands what our language does,” Bessire says. 

Language fills the needs of its users, she adds—and today we have more needs than ever as social media and email connect communities of Hebrew speakers far beyond Israel. For example, Bessire says, there are Hebrew communities in China that are not Jewish but have become fluent in the language for business purposes.

“Hebrew is a language of proficiency,” Bessire says. “It's a language that you use for your everyday life, from technology to medicine.”

From The National Geographic

He later met with researchers at the Faculty of Medicine, who shared potential experiments for outer space, as well as with inspirational students.

Lastly, Mr Stibbe delivered a fascinating lecture on his space mission to an audience of 100+ people. He was very impressed with the research and students’ curiosity.

The jar was originally discovered together with the remains of six other large jars during excavations carried out in 2012 in the Ophel area south of the Temple Mt., led by the late Dr. Eilat Mazar from the Institute of Archeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From the original inscription, only seven letters survived. Over the course of the last decade, more than ten researchers suggested various readings without reaching a consensus, but they agreed the inscription is written in Canaanite script, from which the ancient Hebrew script that used during the time of the First Temple, was developed. In the study, Dr. Daniel Vainstub determined the script is "Ancient South Arabian," the script that was used in the south-west part of the Arabian Peninsula (the Yemen region of today), where the Kingdom of Sheba was the dominant kingdom at that time.

Dr. Vainstub explains, "Deciphering the inscription on this jar teaches us not only about the presence of a speaker of Sabaean in Israel during the time of King Solomon, but also about the geopolitical relations system in our region at that time - especially in light of the place where the jar was discovered, an area known for also being the administrative center during the days of King Solomon. This is another testament to the extensive trade and cultural ties that existed between Israel under King Solomon and the Kingdom of Sheba."

According to the new interpretation, the inscription on the jar reads, "[ ]shy l'dn 5," means five " š^ǝḥēlet," referring to one of the four ingredients mentioned in the Bible (Exodus 30:34) required for the incense mixture. The " š^ǝḥēlet " was an essential ingredient in the incense that was burnt in the First and Second Temples and was called "tziporen" in Rabbinic literature. This indicates a clear connection between Jerusalem of the 10th century BCE (the days of the Kingdom of Solomon) and the Kingdom of Sheba. It appears that the pottery jar was produced around Jerusalem and the inscription on it was engraved before it was sent for firing by a speaker of Sabaean who was involved in supplying the incense spices.

The Ophel site in the Archaeological Park at the foot of the southern wall, within the area of the Jerusalem Walls National Park, includes a trail that passes between 2,000-year-old mikvahs used by pilgrims to the Temple. This is also the area where an administrative center of the kingdom of King Solomon was located.

During the 10th century BCE, the Kingdom of Sheba thrived as a result of the cultivation and marketing of perfume and incense plants, with Ma'rib as its capital. They developed advanced irrigation methods for the fields growing the plants used to make perfumes and incense. Their language was a South Semitic one. King Solomon is described in the Bible as controlling the trade routes in the Negev, which Sabaean camel caravans carrying perfumes and incense plants passed through on their way to Mediterranean ports for export.

The initial excavation led by Dr. Eilat Mazar was funded by Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman of New York, with assistance from Herbert W. Armstrong College in Oklahoma, USA, and the East Jerusalem Development Company.

According to a study published in PNAS NEXUS, applying the thin CNC coating on human skin decreases the number of mosquitoes feeding by 80%. Cellulose CNCs are a renewable raw material produced from wood, cotton or other cellulose-rich sources and are used in cosmetics, composites, food packaging and medical devices.

To read the full story visit JNS.org.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal was led by doctoral student Shai Torgeman and Prof. Dani Zamir from the Hebrew University Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment.

The researchers identified interactions between two regions of the tomato genome that resulted in a 20-50% increase in the overall tomato yield under irrigated conditions as well as in droughts.

“The unique structure of the new population, which enables precise mapping of the tomato genes, has the potential for extensive application in other plants and could increase productivity,” the researchers say.

Tomatoes grown in open field conditions need protection from pests and fertilization and must be watered over time. However, the climate crisis and the severe water shortages around the world require alternative varieties and new cultivation methods that also guarantee adequate profits for farmers.

The researchers crossbred two tomato species – a wild tomato from the deserts of western Peru and the cultivated tomato – to identify which regions of the genome affect important agricultural traits, such as yields. Individually, one genome didn’t affect the crop, but when these genome regions appeared together, there was a significant contribution to fertility even in dry conditions.

“Studies of complex traits in plants, such as yield and resistance to drought conditions, have been based on significantly smaller populations of 200~ species,” explained Torgeman. “This makes it impossible to identify all the interactions (epistasis) between the genes, as well as their influence on important agricultural traits. In this study, we genetically crossed two different species of tomato, and proved that by using a larger population and a genetic map that includes thousands of markers, it is possible to identify areas in the genome that have interaction between them that increases the yield.”

“Studies of complex traits in plants, such as yield and resistance to drought conditions, have been based on significantly smaller populations of 200~ species,” says Torgeman. “This makes it impossible to identify all the interactions (epistasis) between the genes, as well as their influence on important agricultural traits. In this study, we genetically crossed two different species of tomato, and proved that by using of a larger population and a genetic map that includes thousands of markers, it is possible to identify interactions that increase the yield.”

Zamir’s lab has conducted DNA sequencing and extensive data analysis of 1,400 plants over the past four years. The researchers are seeking to commercialize these new tomato varieties.

“With global warming and farmers need tomatoes that can cope with these changing weather conditions,” Torgeman says. “Global warming does not only cause higher temperatures but also extreme weather like sudden torrential downpours or drought, so we need plants that have improved capabilities.”

The research was conducted as part of the scientific cooperation with the European Union in the ‘Horizon 2020’ program.

To read the full story visit The Jerusalem Post.

French dairy giant Danone has entered into a strategic investment agreement with Israeli startup Wilk, which could lead to a collaboration with the food tech firm to develop cultured breast milk components for infant formula based on its cell technology.

Danone Manifesto Ventures (DMV), the corporate venture arm set up by the Paris-based food giant, will invest $2 million, leading a $3.5 million financing round announced by Wilk, in a filing to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange on Monday.

Following the investment, the venture arm of the dairy company, which makes Activia yogurt, Aptamil infant formula and Evian water, will hold at least 2% of Wilk’s share capital.

Dr. Nurit Argov-Argaman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem founded Wilk (as Biomilk) in 2018, and has since developed cell-based technology to produce cultured human breast and animal milk. Argov-Argaman took it public on the TASE in 2021 in a SPAC (special-purpose acquisition company) merger deal.

For the animal-derived cultured milk, Wilk isolates the milk-producing cells from cows’ udders and transfers them to a bioreactor, where they are exposed to materials patented by the firm to produce milk ingredients, but without needing a cow in the final milk-producing process.

The process is also applied to the lab production of human breast milk — complete with the fats and proteins that make up important parts of the nutritional value — using cells from breast reduction surgeries.

As part of the strategic agreement between Danone’s venture arm and Wilk, the parties will examine strategic cooperation for the development of breast milk substitutes that will include lab-grown breast milk components.

The agreement also stipulates that Danone and Wilk will examine possibilities for joint commercial cooperation and operations, which may include agreements for joint development and grants for projects in Europe and the US, Wilk said in a statement.

Wilk CEO Tomer Aizen said that DMV’s investment will help the firm continue in the development of its cultivated milk products.

Wilk is one of several Israeli food tech companies developing cultured, animal-free milk, each at a different development stage. Rehovot-based Remilk, for example, last year raised $120 million for cow-free milk, cheese and yogurt, and with production capabilities already off the ground. The developer of cultured milk and dairy has also announced plans to open the “world’s largest” facility for the production of cow-free milk in Denmark.

However, Wilk is one of few companies on the world stage in the cultured breast milk sector. Wilk’s offering could be a welcome alternative for those who prefer to give human milk, but face difficulties breastfeeding, for babies born prematurely, and for those who cannot consume commercial infant formula.

Wilk said it is not necessarily looking to replace infant formula, but to contribute to a product that is better nutritionally and with a cost comparable to formula.

As such, the Rehovot-based startup has been focusing on developing cell-cultured human milk fat for infant formula to replace vegetable fats currently contained in formula. The nutritional benefits of cultured human milk fat play a central role in maintaining an infant’s digestive system, as well as the development of its brain and nervous system, according to Wilk.

Other investors in the latest funding round, include Rehovot-based Steakholder Foods (formerly Meatech), an Israeli maker of cultivated meat products, which will purchase $450,000 in ordinary shares of Wilk at a 15% discount below their 45-day average closing price, giving the company a 2.5% stake in the Israeli startup. Steakholder Foods said it seeks synergies with Wilk, including strategic cooperation on its proprietary biology and printing technologies.

The Central Bottling Company, also known as Coca-Cola Israel, is also participating in the funding round. The owner of the Tara dairy cooperative, Israel’s second-largest milk processing company, invested $2 million in Wilk back in 2021 as part of an agreement to develop products based on the startup’s cultured milk technology.

As part of the financing round, Wilk will issue a total of 13.6 million ordinary shares in a private placement at a price of NIS 0.91 per share. The startup’s shares closed 10% lower on Monday at NIS 105.1 per share.

from: The Times of Israel

Otmazgin: Welcome, Yuval, it’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to interview such a distinguished member of our faculty. Many thanks for joining us today.

Harari: It’s an honor, Nissim. As you know, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been my home for most of my life, since the age of 17 when I first began my BA studies in history. I’m thrilled to be here.

Otmazgin: Yuval, what do you think is the greatest challenge faced by institutions of higher education today?

Harari: I think that the challenge I’m most concerned about is the politicization of science – the manner in which scientific theories and debates have rapidly become political debates – and how it creates new threats to our academic freedom and our freedom of speech.

We see this trend in history departments all over the world. Many politicians feel that history is much too important to be left to the historians, and politicians frequently distort historical evidence in the name of ideology. This, of course, isn’t new. History has always been a political subject, and has always struggled with censorship and political repression by those who dislike what historians have to say.

Otmazgin: Would you say that this challenge is limited to historians and the humanities?

Harari: More and more disciplines are being politicized, including disciplines that thought they were completely immune to this problem. People in the natural sciences sometimes think that politicization is a problem limited to the humanities and social sciences. They are wrong. We saw it most recently during the pandemic – in epidemiology and medicine – when Covid-related research became highly politicized, and professors found themselves neck-deep in fierce political debates and threatening confrontations. The same has happened in the field of environmental sciences, as climate change has shifted from scientific theory to a hot political topic. We also see it in computer science, which is changing the job market, daily life, and the geopolitical balance of power in the world.

Otmazgin: Would you say that the politicization of academia is inevitable?

Harari: I would say that it is not accidental. It’s the result of science having become the most important change factor of the 21st century. The theories being developed within the university, and the technology emerging from the labs, are changing the world. For better or for worse, scientific debates just cannot be confined within the walls of academia. Nowadays there’s a direct line from the computer science department to the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and the military. It’s therefore unreasonable to expect that the research remain immune to politics. I’d actually like to see political parties drawing up an agenda about algorithms, about AI, about which technologies to develop or not to develop, etc.

Otmazgin: Another pressure we feel within the university is the expectation that we equip our graduates with skills relevant for the global job market, ones that will make them more employable and help them cope with the challenges that await them. What transferable skills do you think our students will need to successfully navigate the job market once they graduate?

Harari: Well, the key problem is that nobody has any idea what the job market will look like in 20 years. This is the first time in history that we are unable to anticipate this. The only thing we know for certain is that it will be completely different from what we see now, and will probably be very surprising. But, what types of jobs people will do in 20 years, and what kind of skills they will need for them, we simply don’t know.

Throughout history, while it was never possible to predict the future, the job market was always relatively stable. 1,000 years ago, in 1022, people couldn’t predict wars and epidemics, but they could confidently anticipate that 20 years forward there would still be a need for farmers skilled in growing food, and soldiers who would know how to ride horses and shoot bows. Those that worked in the royal administration would need to know how to read and write. Yet, when we consider what to teach students today so that they have the relevant skills for 2040 or 2050, we really have no idea. This is a first.

A lot of jobs will completely disappear, a lot of new jobs will emerge, and many existing jobs will evolve. It’s almost impossible to predict how exactly they will change, and therefore we don’t know what particular skills people will need. Take, for example, a skill such as coding. We can comfortably assume that, with the advancement of technology, a lot of code will need to be written over the next few decades. But who’s to say that 20 years from now artificial intelligence won’t be doing the bulk of the coding for us?

Otmazgin: Even if we cannot predict the future job market, how do you think the humanities will fare?

Harari: I believe that philosophy, in particular, will become much more important and applicable in this century. Many complex philosophical questions that, for most of history, had no practical implications for how people actually lived their lives, are becoming practical questions of engineering. The example everybody gives is self-driving vehicles and the need to program ethics into the algorithm. If the vehicle has to compromise the safety of the car owner in order to spare a pedestrian in the middle of the road, how should it proceed? This type of debate turns very old philosophical dilemmas into extremely relevant questions. And, as opposed to philosophers who rarely applied their teachings to reality, algorithms behave precisely as they are programmed. The responsibility is therefore much greater.

Another example is surveillance. Governments throughout history dreamed of monitoring their citizens, but due to technological limitations, it was impossible to monitor everybody all the time. Now, for the first time in history, it is becoming possible to completely annihilate privacy. The surveillance tools developed by researchers and students in our university are applied just a few kilometers away – in Issawiya, Anata, and the Shuafat refugee camp – to create an unprecedented surveillance system. These tools are then exported by Israeli security companies to all kinds of regimes throughout the world, sometimes in order to spy on journalists, minorities, human rights activists, and opposition parties. What is our responsibility in this?

At the very least, I think our university should mandate that every student who learns how to develop such technologies be obligated to take courses on ethics, similar to the requirements for medical students.

Finally, in the 21st century we are likely to learn how to use biotechnology to engineer, reengineer, or even manufacture bodies and brains. This is an extremely dangerous development that raises many philosophical, ethical, and spiritual questions, some of which have been pondered by humans for thousands of years without any practical implications. And now that they are becoming so urgent, I believe that in the 21st century the humanities will be more important than ever before.

In a cover story published in The Plant Journal, researchers used genetic engineering methods to produce new potato varieties that produce special proteins. These proteins act as a biological sensor that can be sent, for example, to the chloroplasts in the plant’s cells, where photosynthesis occurs.

The researchers used sensitive cameras that can detect sensor signals that obtain spatial information about the entire plant and monitor the plant’s physiological state throughout the development of late blight in the potato.

The study was led by doctoral student Matanel Hipsch under the supervision of Dr. Shilo Rosenwasser of Hebrew University’s Robert H. Smith Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics in Agriculture. They collaborated with Dr. David Helman from Hebrew University’s Department of Soil and Water Sciences, who developed an AI-based algorithm capable of analyzing the fluorescent images and distinguishing between healthy and infected leaves.

The research also revealed that the protein detected diseased areas of the leaves even during the first invisible stages. Another fascinating finding suggests that the areas infected with late blight are characterized by higher photosynthetic activity compared to the rest of the leaf. This indicates how the pathogen maintains and even improves leaf productivity in the early stages of the disease to ‘disguise’ its development in the plant, according to the researchers.

“The development of advanced biotechnological tools for early plant disease detection can lead to a future research breakthrough in understanding the pathogenicity process and minimize agricultural damage,” Dr. Rosenwasser says.

Hebrew University researchers Dr. Nardy Lampl and Omer Sapir of the Institute of Plant Sciences, Dr. Yaron Michaeli of the Advanced Institute for Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Agriculture, and Prof. Yigal Cohen from the Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University also participated in the study.

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (No. 827/17) and ICA in Israel foundation.

“I am excited and honored to receive this significant award as the first global recipient,” says Amal, a professor at the Hebrew University School of Pharmacy, Institute for Drug Research, Faculty of Medicine. “This grant will enhance our research initiatives to develop ASD therapeutics that will help millions of children and families around the world.”

The grant is funding Amal’s groundbreaking research on the role of nitric oxide (NO) in ASD pathology. Amal published the first paper linking nitric oxide with ASD, a key step toward identifying a drug target for the disorder. NO is a multifunctional signaling molecule and a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in physiological and pathophysiological processes.

Recently, Amal co-founded and is Chief Scientific Officer at Point6 Bio Ltd, a computational biology company for the diagnosis and treatment of ASD. He is also partnering with a NASDAQ-traded U.S. pharmaceutical company to research and develop ASD drugs.

In his Laboratory for Neuromics, Cell Signaling, and Translational Medicine, Amal leads a group of scientists whose goal is to discover therapeutics and biomarkers for ASD, Alzheimer’s, other brain disorders, and diseases.

He has received many awards including the Wolf Foundation’s prestigious Krill Prize, the Prusiner-Abramsky Research Award in Clinical and Basic Neuroscience, the Kaye Innovation Award, the Golda Meir Lectureship Award, and the Brettle Center for Research Award. Among the numerous grants he has received include funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israel Science Foundation. Prof. Amal was listed among the 40 under 40 most promising people in Israel by The Marker Magazine, a major business publication.

Prior to joining Hebrew University, Amal was a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT and an affiliate in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the MIT Broad Institute and Harvard. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Nanotechnology and Chemical Engineering. Amal received his M.S. in Pharmacology at Tel Aviv University in 2009 and a B.S. in Pharmacy from Hebrew University in 2007.