National Surge of Interest in Arabic Language Study

Written by Ilana Sichel

Jewish Students’ Political Commitments Guide
According to the Modern Language Association, the number of American college students studying Arabic rose by 92 percent between 1998 and 2002, a range that includes the spike in interest since September 11, 2001. This interest has made Arabic the fastest growing language of choice in colleges across the U.S., and the LA Times recently reported that it is taught at more than 230 colleges nationwide.

Though figures for Jewish students in particular are unavailable, anecdotal evidence suggests that Jews are at the forefront of the trend, with even some Jewish day schools offering Arabic classes to their middle and high school students.

Bolstering the surge of interest in Arabic is President Bush’s January 5th launch of the National Security Language Initiative, a plan to financially “strengthen national security and prosperity in the 21st century [especially] through developing foreign language skills,” according to the State Department fact sheet.

Though the Bush Administration’s motivations are clear, those of Jewish students stem from a variety of places: seeking a connection to their own Middle Eastern heritage, concern for national security, and working for Palestinian-Israeli coexistence.

Taoufik Ben Amor, a celebrated Arabic teacher at Columbia University who has taught since 1991, said classes have long been comprised of a mix of people: those who were looking to get into the foreign service or into think tanks, those who were interested in the Middle East because of their politics, second-generation students from Arab-American communities, and those interested in strictly scholarly pursuits.

Regarding Jewish students, “there are students who want to speak Arabic because they are Hebrew speaking, because they’re involved politically or becuase they have family there [in Israel],” he said.

The difference of the current trend is “a matter of extent,” not type, of interest.

Motivations and Intentions
For Alex Gladstein, a sophomore at Tufts, the motivation to study Arabic came from long-term career aspirations of understanding American foreign policy in the Middle East and the Islamic world.

“I wanted to be involved in the Middle East,” he said in a phone interview. “I would never come to realize certain things about the history and reality of the Middle East unless I studied Arabic.” For Gladstein, studying the language is about learning how, “the Middle East can really be changed through soft power.”.

Arabic would be an invaluable tool for him, he said, whether he goes into international business or another related field later on. But being a secular Jew, he doesn’t believe that his interest in Arabic stems from his Jewishness but rather simply from being American.

For others, learning Arabic is inherently tied to feelings of specifically Jewish political interests and affiliations.

Shifra Mincer, who has been learning Arabic since the fall, as a first-year at Harvard, hopes that Arabic can give her more direct access to understanding Palestinians and Islam.

“My first few classes were so cool and exciting that I just had to take it, even though I’d already fulfilled my language requirement with Hebrew,” she recalled in a phone interview.

University of Michigan sophomore Naamah Paley’s interest started off in “want[ing] to know what they were saying about us,” she said. While undertaking the study of Arabic, she also began teaching elementary school students in nearby Dearborn, home to a large Arab-American community. This experience shifted her interest from abstract political ideas linked to the study of Arabic to what she called “actual human interaction” with the particular people who speak the language.

Identifying herself as “pro-Israel,” Paley’s experience studying Arabic at Hebrew University in Jerusalem complicated her view of the conflict. The “cultural learning in the classroom,” she said, “forced [her] to look at the other side in a different way,” she remarked in a phone interview.

Of students studying Arabic out of political motivation, there is a significant sector who are committed to working toward ending the Israeli occupation.

“As a person concerned with human rights and peace in Israel,” said Benj Kamm, a senior at Brown, “I have to learn Arabic…it is an obligation toward a marginalized population.” It allows him, he said in a phone interview, to “speak to people [he] couldn’t have access to before.”

Jews Speaking Arabic, Through the Ages
Though American Jewish students’ motivations for studying Arabic often have more to do with contemporary politics, the language has a unique place in Jewish history.

Liora Halperin, a first-year doctoral student at UCLA studying modern Jewish history points out that Arabic has been a native language for Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa, and is a cornerstone of Jewish collective history.

Some of the most prominent Jewish poets from the Middle Ages, including Yehuda Halevi who famously lamented, “my heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West,” found a home in both languages.

Jews spoke Arabic, wrote in it, and translated their writings from Arabic into Hebrew, and from Hebrew into Arabic, often writing out Arabic in Hebrew script.

Most of the writings of Maimonides (Rambam), the famous Spanish Jewish Golden Age philosopher, were written in Arabic, except for the Mishneh Torah, his comprehensive code of Jewish law.

Robert Smith, a professor of Aramaic and Arabic at Yeshiva University cites a combination of family heritage and contemporary interest in Maimonides as one of his students leading motivations to study Arabic. “Particularly among Sephardi students who may have heard it at home,” he said in a phone interview, “which is, to some extent an interest in their own personal heritage.”

The purely scholarly interest in Arabic is not new. Some of the first Jews who studied Arabic as a foreign language discovered that some of the most important works on the “Jewish bookshelf” required knowing the language, Halperin said in a phone interview. They wanted to read Yehuda Halevi and wanted full access to Maimonides’ work, and thus “studied Arabic as a language of Jews,” she said.

Jews have long oscillated between seeing Arabic as familiar and as foreign. For those who became early Zionist agitators, the question of Arabic was not as simple as self or other.

Some 19th-century German Jews “were drawn to the study of Arabic and developed their interest in part from their sense of being Orientals themselves,” said Halperin. “So in a way they were, at once, both Orientals and Orientalists.”

As Zionist theory turned into actual Jewish settlement in Palestine in the late 19th- and early 20th-century, the dichotomy played itself out in the academy and in the Knesset.

Whereas “intellectuals, particularly at Hebrew University, saw Arabic as part of a scholarly project to understand the Arab world and Middle Eastern history,” Halperin explained, “the Labor movement was more interested in the practical uses of Arabic to understand, outwit, or negotiate with Palestinian Arabs.”

Understanding Through Arabic
Only in the last couple of generations have Arabic-speaking Jews become an endangered minority. If until recently, Arabic was the language of the self for millions of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, since their mass migration to Israel, it is now largely the language of the other. Particularly in Israel, among Middle Eastern Jewish communities, Arabic has for decades been degraded and Hebrew encouraged as the new language for the new Jew.

Though Arabic is the second official languages of Israel, the Ministry of Education does not require students to study it in school. Israeli students learn English as a mandatory second language, and then have the choice of learning Arabic, French, and, recently, Spanish, which many owe to the popularity of South American soap operas among Israeli teens. Among Israeli students, French is seen as worldly and more valuable than Arabic, the language of Israeli’s residents and neighbors, not to mention the fifth most popular language in the world.

Cultural biases and perceptions of Israel as a European country have been culturally challenged since the late 1980s, partially influenced by the popularity of late Yemeni-Israel musician Ofra Haza. Since then, Middle Eastern Jews have started reclaiming Arabic as part of their cultural heritage. The surge of Arabic-language and Middle-Eastern-influenced music is testament to the rising consciousness that Arabic is both the language of self and other in Israel.

But “even though Arabic could be a bridge to understanding,” remarked a recent graduate of a Masters program in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Hebrew University, “it is not approached that way in Israel.” Elena, who wished to be identified by her first name, says that her experiences studying Arabic were very different in the two countries.

While “in the U.S., Arabic is learned, much like other languages, as a language that is linked to a rich cultural, historical and literary heritage, [in Israel] Arabic is taught much more as a tool to understand those people,” she emphasized.

Academicians take note of the politicized nature of classes in American universities as well. Ben Amor said the tone depends on the students in the class. He tries to make the classroom environment intellectual, not ideological

“I told the students that texts we read necessarily have political dimensions, but in the end we were always able to have a good, open discussion.”

The difficulty of teaching Arabic comes when former students put their knowledge to use for purposes he does not personally support. “But this is the nature of my job,” he reasoned. “I have to just teach.”

But students appreciate the Arabic classroom for more than its political possibilities. Kamm and Mincer both consider their Arabic classes to be “close-knit communities.”

As spring semester classes wind down, more signs of Arabic’s popularity are seen as students start packing up for intensive immersion programs like that at Middlebury College in Vermont, and the American University in Cairo. Middlebury’s prestigious summer program stopped accepting applications by February of this year, though in 2002 they considered applicants until April. The number of applications to the popular Cairo program has tripled since 2000.

Just this year, the State Department started a program with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) to send American students and recent graduates abroad to study Arabic and five other “strategic languages.” According to CAORC, their number of applicants was “larger than expected.”

All signs indicate that Arabic will continue its upward popularity climb for the foreseeable future. For Jewish students committed to political work in Israel and Palestine, it will be a necessary path.

“Before I knew Arabic,” Kamm recalled, “I didn’t relate to the Palestinians, and now I can, which has changed my relations to the Israelis as well.” By learning Arabic, he said, “I put myself in dialogue.”

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.