Hebrew Commas, Cocked Eyebrows, and “Settler-Colonialists”

A couple of weeks ago, Florence Hazrat, the author of On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, posted an Instagram reel with the text overlay “Zios are giving my book bad reviews now.” She finds this reaction really funny, she says, because her book is about “politics, literature, cognitive science, history—why did we invent commas, and who did that, and whatever,” and really only a few of its pages are about modern Hebrew as a nefarious settler-colonial project.

I’ll return to Hazrat’s politics (and whatever), but first a brief history of the slur “Zio” is in order. It was popularized by the former KKK Grand Wizard and neo-Nazi David Duke, in part because he found that if he spelled out the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Jew’ (not to speak of ‘kike’ or ‘yid’), he risked getting kicked off social media, so he started saying that America was “Zio-occupied,” or that the “Zios” were responsible for Sandy Hook (and whatever). The pejorative was picked up by the edgy anti-Israel left a few years later, as when the Chicago Dyke March infamously tweeted in 2017 that “Zio tears replenish my electrolytes,” and it has become especially popular in the last decade among young anti-Israel students in the United Kingdom (Hazrat went to Cambridge).

On her Instagram post, Hazrat explained how she had provoked all those Zios with her political argument about the history of punctuation:

Just to give you, like, a really brief overview . . . in the nineteenth century, Arab thinkers imported European punctuation to make Arabic more accessible to their readers . . . Also, at the same time . . . we have the first Zionist settlers from Eastern Europe, and they kind of invented modern Hebrew almost out of nowhere, and they used European punctuation to make Hebrew accessible. Interestingly though, this punctuation didn’t face from right to left like in Arabic. The punctuation was actually European-faced. By which we can see that they were European settlers bringing their European customs and kind of creating this out of nowhere. [My italics.]

Although she goes on at greater length in her book, adding further historical errors and omitting more pertinent facts, the argument in On the Mark—which Hazrat describes as “this really dense, extremely well researched and, to be honest, really well written book”—remains just as crude. Since Hebrew, like Arabic, is written right-to-left but its commas point the other way, Zionism is settler colonialism. Q.E.D.

Although Hazrat’s book has sold well and been widely reviewed, the way her argument made its way to most of us Zios was through Louis Menand’s review in The New Yorker. Menand archly describes On the Mark as an “ ‘X that changed the world’ book.” He writes:

If punctuation played a role in everything, what about, say, the war in Gaza? Hazrat finds a link. “Punctuation marks in Hebrew,” she explains, “are relics of a brutal colonial system that is far from over.” Adding punctuation turned Hebrew into a spoken language, “paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe, encouraging them to move to the land that already had people—a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations.” It seems (the reason is not altogether clear) that, had Yiddish been the official language of Israel, atrocities might have been avoided.

Menand was right to be skeptical of Hazrat’s reasoning, though he might have checked her homework and asked one of his Harvard colleagues (or Claude) about the history of Hebrew. Instead, he implicitly grants Hazrat’s premise that brutalized Jews, beginning with nineteenth-century immigrants like Eliezer Ben Yehuda (who she thinks instituted the European-facing Hebrew comma), became brutalizing colonialists—and then makes a half-knowing joke about Yiddish.

The 1950s cultural critic Robert Warshow once described The New Yorker as not trying to understand the world so much as “prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it.” The purpose, he wrote, of E.B White’s rather fatuous political writing, was “not to say anything about democracy or the nature of war . . . but only to arouse certain familiar responses in the liberal middle class reader.” Menand, who, at his best, is almost as good a New Yorker writer as E.B. White, is doing something similar. He knows that history is complicated and Hazrat’s gotcha argument about settler-colonial commas can’t possibly prove as much as she thinks it does, but he doesn’t quite contest or look into it. Instead, like The New Yorker’s avatar Eustace Tilly idly inspecting a butterfly through his monocle as he cocks his eyebrow, Menand strikes an attitude of amused detachment.

That’s actually the point of Menand’s parenthetical aside about Hazrat’s argument, “(the reason is not entirely clear).” As he says a little later, “parentheticals [are] . . . the equivalent of a raised eyebrow.” That raised eyebrow, combined with an unargued tacit assent to the blanket condemnation of Israel, is apparently the current prescribed attitude for the liberal middle class reader.

In 1612, almost two-hundred-and-fifty years before Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born, an Italian Jewish doctor named Abraham ben David Portaleone published a curious Hebrew book called Shiltei Hagibborim, in which he introduced the comma, the colon, and the period. The book used the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and its rites to teach contemporary Hebrew readers Renaissance arts and sciences, from architecture to zoology. Portaleone’s printer in Mantua probably used the same “European-faced” comma he used for the Italian and Latin texts he printed because it was a piece of movable type that, unlike the Hebrew letters, he didn’t have to specially cast.

Although it is true that neither Portaleone nor his readers routinely spoke Hebrew in everyday life, they did read it, write it, and, when they met a Jew with whom they didn’t share another common language, they spoke to each other in it. And, of course, Portaleone used the Jerusalem Temple as his organizing principle for the book because the Jewish sense of unity, which was not invented in the nineteenth century or even the ninth, was oriented around Zion long before Zionism.

The modern revival of Hebrew is a remarkable, perhaps unique, story but it is not, as some naïve Zionists and antizionists like to imagine, the story of the dry bones of biblical language miraculously (or nefariously) brought to life. It did not come “almost out of nowhere.” Modern Hebrew is built on a complex and continuous literary tradition going back to the early rabbis, carrying through the jurists, chroniclers, mystics, philosophers, and poets of the Middle Ages, and on to uncategorizable figures like Portaleone. In short, it is like the people who speak it.