Why Don’t Israelis Like the Word “Aliyah” as Much as They Used to?

A headline on November 22 in the Hebrew edition of the left-wing daily Haaretz announces that “[Jonathan] Pollard Expected to Immigrate to Israel after Removal of Restrictions.” The restrictions’ expiration, said an article in the same day’s English edition of the newspaper, “will allow Pollard and his wife finally to immigrate to Israel.” Two versions of the same thing? Not exactly. For at least some of Haaretz’s Hebrew readers, its headline of Pollard tsafuy l’hager l’yisra’el, “Pollard Expected to Immigrate to Israel,” would have had a jarring effect not present in the English.

This would have been caused by the verb l’hager, to immigrate or emigrate. It’s a perfectly good Hebrew word, though not a terribly old one. In the second volume of his monumental sixteen-volume dictionary, the great Hebrew lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, while spelling the verb l’hagor, writes that it is “commonly used in Palestinian Hebrew speech and in many newspapers,” and dates its first appearance in print to an 1896 issue of the Jerusalem weekly Ha-Hashkafah, which he himself edited. For its etymology, Ben-Yehuda gave the Arabic verb hajara, to leave or forsake, and its accompanying noun hijra. The latter is familiar to us from our English “hejira”—which, when capitalized, refers to Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, the Year Zero of the Muslim calendar. Ben-Yehuda also linked hajara to the biblical character of Hagar, who is forced by Abraham and Sarah to leave their home—a linguistic connection that is indeed likely.

So what’s so jarring? Only this: in Hebrew, which before the 19th century did not have a specific word for “immigrate” or “emigrate” (in English, too, these are 17th- and 18th-century neologisms), there has always been one exception—namely, the verb la’alot, literally, “to ascend,” which refers specifically to traveling to, or settling in, the Land of Israel. It is already used this way in the Bible, as in a verse in the book of Ezra telling us that the latter alah mi-bavel, “ascended [to the Land of Israel] from Babylonia.”