Sabbath, Shibboleth, Synagogue: some words associated with Jewish heritage

It has a Greek origin in ‘synagein’, meaning “to bring together”. It also refers to a place or building where people assemble and study their religion. Its traditional functions are reflected in three Hebrew synonyms which when translated into English read ‘house of prayer’, ‘house of assembly’ and ‘house of study’. The Yiddish word ‘shul’, which in turn comes from German ‘schule’, meaning a “school”, is also used to refer to a synagogue.

Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic are the three major languages associated with Jewish history. Originally, a dialect of Middle High German, Yiddish uses the Hebrew letters and has 15 per cent Hebrew words and smaller percentages of words from other languages. In an earlier write-up, I had mentioned chutzpah, a Yiddish word. There are many crisp and elegant words from Yiddish like, bagel, nosh, kosher, schmaltz and kibitz, all of which have added a punch to the English language. We will find an opportunity to deal with these some other time.

For now, let’s look into the meaning and origin of another word in the above-mentioned news story. Sabbath (often with a capital ‘S’ and article ‘the’) is the seventh day of the week observed by Jews from sunset on Friday till Saturday evening as one of rest from work, social gathering and prayers. The same for Christians is Sunday. Its origin is Greek ‘sabbaton’ which itself is traced to Hebrew ‘shabbat’, meaning “rest”.

Sabbatical, a word often used in academic circles, shares the same origin. Used as a noun, it means a period of time when a teacher at a university or a college is allowed to stop her normal work so that she may study, write or travel while being paid. For example: The professor has taken a year’s sabbatical to work on her debut novel. A professional may go on sabbatical midcareer to get rid of burnout.

Here’s another word with an interesting story behind it and its present-day usage. Shibboleth in Hebrew means ‘ear of grain’ (the part of a cereal plant which contains its flowers or seeds). In ancient Israel, its two main tribes, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, went to a war in which the former were victorious. Some of the Ephraimite refugees tried to escape by crossing the Jordan River but were captured. Those who denied their nationality were put to a linguistic test by the captors. The test was to pronounce the word shibboleth. Anyone who pronounced it sibboleth (without the sh sound) was put to death.

Ages later, the trick was used by American soldiers during World War II, when the Japanese were infiltrating their lines in the Philippines. Realising that the Japanese found it almost impossible to pronounce the letter ‘l’, Allied forces used ‘lallapaloosa’ as the password and sentries were told to fire at anyone who could not pronounce it. The closest the Japanese could come up with was ‘rarraparoosa’, leading to their swift elimination.

From this ruthless exploitation of speech variety, the word shibboleth is used to mean any speech sound or linguistic signature by which a person’s social background or native region can easily be recognized. It may also mean a repeated saying, a cliché, a slogan or a catchphrase by followers of a party or a sect. For example: What the country needs today are not the shibboleths of welfare but its dynamic processes to ensure growth with equity.