For half a century, authorities in the USSR followed an ideological policy to condemn Hebrew as a "reactionary tool" of the upper classes, the ultra-religious and Zionism. In this view, only Yiddish could be considered as the legitimate mother tongue of those "toiling masses" of Jews interested in maintaining a national existence. This resulted in an almost total prohibition on any expression of thought and cultural creativity in the Hebrew language amounting to a ban on the publication of books, newspapers, magazines, films, public lectures, theater performances, poetry readings, educational courses, or radio and television broadcasts in Hebrew apart from research in restricted university libraries on the Semitic languages available to a handful of graduate students. Nowhere else and against no other language (except Esperanto in Nazi occupied Europe – the subject of a forthcoming article) was such a policy invoked by any regime to strangle a language into total silence.
by Norman Berdichevsky
To a considerable degree, this hostility was fostered and encouraged by Jewish communists who had long nurtured hostility towards Hebrew. The ultimate irony of this crusade is that for an initial period of eight years (1918-1926), the idea of a Hebrew Renaissance as an expression of Jewish national culture found among its strongest supporters, non-Jews who were sympathetic to the new communist regime, such as Maxim Gorki. This same writer who was hailed by Soviet propaganda as “The Conscience of the Era,” often condemned antisemitism in the USSR as a leftover of the Czarist regime and a disgrace to the Russian people. He even learned some Hebrew and exerted his influence to allow the leading Hebrew writers (mostly in Odessa) to receive permission to emigrate to Palestine in 1921. These included the man regarded as modern Hebrew’s greatest poet, Haim Nachman Bialik.
