The notion of Hebrew has several uses recognized by the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) in its dictionary. The term can be used to refer to an individual who was part of the Semitic people who managed to conquer the region of Palestine . In this framework, Hebrew is used as a synonym for Jew or Israelite .
A Hebrew or Jew is also called someone who, according to the RAE , professes the so-called law of Moses . The Hebrews, therefore, practice Judaism , the oldest monotheistic religion .
The practices of the Hebrews are based on the teachings taken from the Torah , one of the books that is part of the Tanakh . Also very important is the Talmud , the work that compiles the rabbis ' discussions of the narratives, customs and traditions of Judaism.
Hebrew, on the other hand, is a Semitic language that is estimated to be written, read and spoken by more than six million people. Most of them reside in Israel , where Hebrew is one of the official languages, although Jewish communities living in other countries also use Hebrew.
Judaism has Hebrew as the language of prayer and liturgical language. Their tradition even indicates that God transmitted his message to humans in this same language.
Among the main contemporary writers in Hebrew, David Grossman (winner of the Man Booker International Prize , the Israel Prize and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade , among other recognitions) and Amos Oz (distinguished with the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature) stand out. Literature , the Goethe Prize , the Israel Prize , the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and other awards).
With respect to the Hebrew alphabet , it is correct to affirm that it belongs to the Phoenician set, in the same way as Syriac and Arabic. Its development took place in the 3rd century BC, and since then it has not gone through many changes. Broadly speaking, we can say that it is made up of twenty-two letters, the smallest number of all the alphabets used in the Mediterranean. Like Syriac and Arabic, Hebrew is written to the left.
In the Hebrew language we can distinguish two graphic systems : cursive and square. The first is used in handwriting, although it also appears in various advertisements, signs and posters on public roads or in magazines. The second has more angular shapes, and that's where its name comes from. Although both originated from the same root, studying the square root is not enough to understand cursive.
Today, the pronunciation of Hebrew closely resembles the phonetics of Yiddish , a variant of German that Ashkenazi communities have used since the 15th century in Eastern Europe. For this reason, the letters of its alphabet have sounds closer to those of German than to the Hebrew phonemes that gave rise to them; This is not the case in the case of Jews of Arab culture, the so-called Mizrahim . Curiously, although the Hebrew Academy maintains the eastern pronunciation as the most correct, it is the least used today.
It is important to note the antiquity of the Hebrew language, since its diffusion began more than two thousand years ago . It was initially used by the Israelite people who inhabited Palestine and the Jewish communities spread it throughout much of the Mediterranean over the centuries. Few languages have kept their structures and alphabets almost intact throughout their history. In the particular case of Hebrew, given the importance of the sacred texts, which are also found in Aramaic, it is really essential to learn it in order to read and copy them.