" There is no language without words. In the case of Hebrew there would be no language without texts. At the end of the 19th century, Hebrew re-established itself as a mother tongue after nearly seventeen centuries of having been employed almost exclusively as a written and liturgical language. This book explores the processes and foundations of this linguistic event. How does the transition from a sacred language to an everyday spoken language take place? What are the necessary materials to construct such a language? What is the nature of the process whereby speakers adopt a "new mother tongue"? This book reflects upon the nature and status of a mother tongue as such, while addressing issues of memory and forgetting, mourning and restitution, and the sacred and the secular. An everyday secular language whose basis is spiritual, cultural, and religious, Modern Hebrew provides an excellent case study in exploring the genesis of a contemporary mother tongue. Mock examines the experience of establishing and adopting a new mother tongue through interviews with, and critical readings of, two of the most important contemporary Israeli authors, Aharon Appelfeld and Sami Michael. She also considers materials that were used to create Modern Hebrew--particularly groundbreaking research by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who is considered the father of modern Hebrew. Then she examines the foundations of secular Hebrew through an analysis of Spinoza's Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae, which radically reevaluates the significance of this long-neglected text to Spinoza's work as a whole. This book was published by CNRS in French in 2016, with a preface by Julia Kristeva."--