The Crime of Speaking Hebrew

The ejection of an Israeli musician, Amit Peled, from an Italian restaurant at Vienna for speaking Hebrew is a warning for what lies ahead. Vienna is no backwater of Jewish history. It is the city where a journalist named Theodor Herzl dreamed of a Jewish state and the place central to Hitler’s nightmares of extermination. One need not be another Viennese, Sigmund Freud, a neighbor of Herr Herzl, to grasp a return of the repressed. Mr. Peled, a virtuoso of the cello — he plays a 1695 Grancino — reports on Instagram, “After taking our order, the waiter returned and suddenly asked what language we were speaking. I replied casually, ‘English and German.’ ‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘What were you just speaking now?’ I answered, ‘Hebrew, of course.’ He looked me directly in the eye and said, without hesitation: ‘In that case, leave. I’m not serving you food.’ Just like that.”Mr. Peled reflects, “The initial shock and humiliation were profound. But what struck us even more deeply was what came next — or rather, what didn’t. The people around us were clearly startled, some offered sympathetic glances … and then, quietly, they went back to their dinners, their conversations, their wine — as though nothing had happened. Welcome to Europe, 2025.” He and his compatriots played Dvořák’s Dumky Trio that night. The rough treatment of Mr. Peled and his fellow musicians came on the heels of the removal from a Vueling flight of some 50 Jewish campers from France for what the airline calls “highly disruptive behavior.” Vueling contends that the children tampered with emergency equipment and were disruptive to safety procedures. Parents allege that the ejection followed the singing of Hebrew songs. They vow to lodge a lawsuit against Vueling. A French minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, has expressed concern “about the removal of a group of young French Jews from one of the company’s flights.” Israeli’s minister for diaspora affairs, Amichai Chikli, posted to X a video of the group’s 21-year-old leader apparently being pinned to the ground. Spain’s minister for transportation, Oscar Puente, in a since-deleted post on X, called the French Jewish children “a couple of Israeli brats.” Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, responded to that tirade by observing, “They are French Jews. Europeans.” We doubt, though, that the likes of Mr. Puente will be chastened by such a rebuke. In Greece, also over the weekend, an Israeli tourist, Stav Ben-Shushan, on an Athens beach had a portion of his ear bit off by a man “screaming Free Palestine, f— Israel, I am Hamas.” The man attacked after he heard Mr. Ben-Shushan speaking Hebrew.Just days before that assault, a group of Israeli teenagers were set upon by a mob on Rhodes. The day before that, an Israeli cruise ship was blocked from docking at the island of Syros and rerouted to Cyprus due to an angry crowd. There were between 300 and 400 children on board, and it was thought their safety was at risk by the protesters who sought to “raise their fists in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.” The revival of Hebrew, the Biblical language of kings and prophets, is perhaps a more stupendous achievement even than the return to Zion. Nothing like it has ever been achieved — certainly not by the nations of Europe, whose children do not speak, say, Latin, Greek, or Old English as their mother tongues. Every Israeli child kvetches in Isaiah’s tongue, and Israel’s vitality, even as the war in Gaza rages, is remarkable. It is more than Herzl could have hoped.

The Crime of Speaking Hebrew

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