Landman, Patrick

Can a language be desacralized? - 2017.


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From the hypothesis that the death of a language entails its possible sacralization, this article poses the following question: can the revival of a language in turn lead to its desacralization? The example of Hebrew shows that, after a phase of desacralization, the reborn language carries a religious charge that Gershon Scholem had planned since the thirties of the last century. The risk of passing from the theological-linguistic domain to the sphere of theological-politics is through elective affinities and is favored by historical circumstances.