Originally Posted by
Longbowman
No worries. I watched the relevant part. It's a very long video and I don't have much time these days. Also, the 'robot voice' is really annoying to me, the author of the video should have just got a person to do it.
This is not true at all, in the Jewish community it has always been the case that a large majority of Jews studied the TaNaKH and Talmud in Hebrew and Aramaic - Hebrew has always been our lingua franca, although not our vernacular. It is actively encourage and even mandated to study the Torah and of course the Torah is read out to the community on a weekly basis so that every Jew nominally hears the entire thing every year. The rest of the TaNaKH (Prophets & Writings) is read as the Haftarah, also publically, but it takes longer than a year to go through. Yeshivah students study them both in painful (and pointless) depth and there are hundreds of thousands of Yeshiva boys and girls. Even more Jews study part-time. Torah and TaNaKH study is extremely popular in Jewish communities and always has been.
In (Modern Orthodox) school I had to study Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew and ancient Judeo-Aramaic until I was 16 (Biblical Hebrew from age 5 to 16, Hebrew from age 11-16, Aramaic more sporadically, only a couple of years when I was 12 or 13). I wager 70-80% of boys and a large number of girls who went to Jewish schools had similar if not more intensive experiences. Of course, we pray three times a day in Hebrew, all religious Jews have at least a semi-decent understanding of the language and a historically very high level of literacy in it. It is true that only the cleverest 1/3 of boys in my school had to do Aramaic but it wasn't a very religious school (and Aramaic is only useful for Talmud study, not Tanakh), and either way, everyone, even the kids from secular families, had to do Hebrew and some degree of Biblical Hebrew for at least 3 years (after all they were praying in it multiple times a day).
On the other hand the number of non-Jews that can understand Biblical Hebrew is probably in the low thousands. Probably 98-99% of the people who can understand Biblical Hebrew are Jews. Of course, there are plenty of secular, irreligious Jews today, but I would suggest a significant majority of religious, orthodox Jews understand it and a majority of those who don't are women.
When I did my barmitzvah (in which I had to read out Lekh Lekha and parts of Noakh and also the Haftarah of the day in front of the kehilla) I made two mistakes and a couple of Jews in the audience literally shouted out the corrections, because they knew even my sedra by heart or were following along in their khumash (printed copy of the pentateuch, most Jews have multiple copies at home - even I have 3 or 4! My schools both gave each of their students one as a gift).
No, Jews are extremely keen on ramming the entire TaNaKH down the throats of other Jews from a very early age until the grave, in Hebrew. You are thinking of Catholics.
BTW it's Ladino (or Djudezmo) which is the Spanish dialect but there are plenty of other Jewish languages. Even today a large number of Jews speak - as a first language - Aramaic dialects (typically Jews from Kurdish area - no Jews speak Kurdish dialects as a community language).
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