[Avodah] History of Havarah

[Minden]

R Michael Kopinsky wrote:
> Another issue is when a community decides, for reasons legitimate or not, to change their havarah.  The South African community changed their havara to sefaradit (ie Israeli) I believe in the 1950s

I think one shouldn't equate "sefaradit" with Israeli even for shortness' sake. It's an insult to the sefardi traditions of Hebrew (and a double insult if one subsumes the other non-Ashkenazi communities, of course), and it's not for nothing that Sefaradim refer to the Israeli pronunciation as Ashkenazit. The Israeli pronunciation is basically the tradition of German Protestant Christian scholars who heard it through their ears from Italian Jews (or one Italian Jew), whereafter it developped in church and academia for four or five centuries without any conctact to Jews. This is the basis, and the concrete performance of this basis is Ukrainer Yiddish. In fact, all that is interesting if not fascinating, and it works finely in the Israeli main vernacular, but it's really not Sefardic.

ELPhM
http://lipmans.blogspot.com