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What's in a name
Hebrew
The Hebrew for ‘Hebrew’ is ‘Ivrit’. That’s the feminine form of ‘Ivri’ (languages are feminine in Hebrew). A Hebrew person, such as Abraham, was an ‘Ivri’ (see Genesis 14: 13). The plural is ‘Ivrim’—Hebrews.
The name ‘Ivri’ may have come from ‘Eber’, one of Abraham’s ancestors. The root meaning of ‘ivri’ is ‘crossing over’ or ‘passing through’, either in time or place, or sometimes in an abstract sense. That name for the ancient Hebrews indicates that the founding families of the people (Abraham, Sarah, their relatives and others who journeyed with them) crossed a huge distance to reach the land that God had promised them (about 1800 BCE). They also crossed over to another way of life and form of belief—from polytheism to monotheism. It could also signal that they were a people in transition.
Today ‘Hebrew’ is mostly only used as a name for the language. It is the unifying language of Jewish prayer and of most textual study. It has also been revived as an everyday spoken language and is the first of the two official languages in the State of Israel, the other being Arabic.
Israel, Israelite and Israeli
The word ‘Israelites’ is equivalent to ‘The Children of Israel’ or ‘The House/Family of Israel’. It refers to the Hebrews after the time of Jacob, two generations after Abraham and Sarah. (Somewhat confusingly, ‘Hebrews’ continues to be used in some parts of the Bible after this point, however, for example, by reference to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt at the beginning of the Book of Exodus.) As a noun, ‘Israelites’ is usually in the plural. The English word ‘Israelite’ is mostly an adjective.
‘Israel’ means “struggles with God”. God gave Jacob this name (Genesis 32: 28), after he struggled in a dream or vision, on the night before he was to meet his brother Esau again, the brother he had wronged in the past and run away from. Jacob’s descendants are therefore called ‘Children of Israel’ and they made up the Twelve Tribes. The people since that time—even those not biologically descended from Jacob—are also called ‘Children of Israel’. The name appears frequently in the prayer book.
The land that the Children of Israel were promised and which they settled in was Cana’an was renamed ‘The Land of Israel’.
‘The State of Israel’ is the name for the modern country established by international agreement in 1948, on some of the territory that comprised the ancient Land of Israel.
An Israeli is a citizen (Jewish or non-Jewish) of the State of Israel today. ‘Israeli’ can also be used to describe things and places in and from Israel (such as ‘Israeli oranges’ or the ‘Israeli government’). ‘Israeli’ is not used for other Jews.
Jews and Jewish
‘Jewish’ (‘Yehudi’) comes from ‘Judah’ (‘Yehudah’) who was one of Jacob’s sons and the ancestor of one of the Twelve Tribes. After King Solomon died (about 900 BCE), the country split into two—Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The northern kingdom was later conquered by another nation and the Israelites were ‘lost’. From that time onwards, the only identifiable members of the original people were in Judah and the name ‘Jews’ was used.
It can also be said that ‘Yehudi’ means ‘people of God’ because its first three letters in Hebrew are the same as the first three letters of God’s name. The remaining letters might also be a conflation of the Hebrew for ‘thank’, yielding the meaning of ‘Jew’ as ‘thanking God’.
‘Judaism’—the name of the Jewish religion—is a slightly artificial construct because it seems to separate religious beliefs and practices form the believing and practising people: peoplehood is a key motif in Jewish life. ‘Judaism’ is, however, widely used and has become acceptable.
In time it became possible to become Jewish through converting to Judaism, without being biologically descended or related to any of the original members of the people. ‘Jews’ is the word used for the people today, whether ‘born’ or ‘become’.
Today there is sometimes well-meaning sensitivity to the use of the word ‘Jew’. Some non-Jews, aware that ‘Jew’ can have negative connotations, avoid saying it directly: they instead use a phrase such as ‘a Jewish person’ or ‘a person of the Jewish faith’. Jews, however, call themselves ‘Jews’ or ‘Jewish’ and there is a case for reclaiming these terms. ‘Jewess’ has passed out of use as a word for ‘Jewish woman’: Jewish women should be referred to as ‘Jews’.
Aramaic, Yiddish and Ladino
Aramaic was the language of Babylonia and was spoken on an everyday basis by the Jews deported there in 586 BCE. Over the centuries that Jewish community became strong and significant, and many texts were composed in Aramaic. The Jewish prayer book is mostly in Hebrew but contains some Aramaic prayers.
In the Middle Ages, Jews in Germany spoke ‘middle high German’, which they continued to speak when they were expelled east of the Rhineland. They peppered this language with Hebrew terms and in time it acquired words from Polish, Russian and other languages of Eastern Europe. This Jewish dialect is called ‘Yiddish’ and was written with the Hebrew alphabet. ‘Yiddishkeit’ came to be a word for ‘Jewishness’. A substantial proportion of Yiddish-speaking Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
A Jewish dialect from medieval Spain and Portugal went with the Jewish community that was expelled, starting in 1492. Known as Ladino, it was spoken in some of the places that Jews were able to settle, such as in the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire; it was never as wide-spread as Yiddish.
Today, most Jews have English as their first language and the second largest language group is Hebrew-speaking.