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Most Jewish Religious Literature is written in Hebrew, such as codifications, commentaries, and prayers with the exeption of the oldest prayers which are written in Aramaic. A notable exception is the Gemara portion of the Talmud , written in Aramaic . Some important works of medieval philosophy, such as the Guide To The Perplexed , were originally written in Arabic . During the Golden Age Of Jewish Culture In Spain , some Jews moved to Moorish Spain due to increasing religious repression elsewhere in the Muslim world. Rabbis translated many works of Jewish , Muslim , Greek , and Roman Philosophy and science into Hebrew from Arabic, which was inaccessible to European Jews outside of Spain. The influx of subject matter forced an expansion of Hebrew vocabulary. In the eighteenth century, the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) movement worked to achieve equality and freedom for European Jews by promoting Jewish Culture as equal. Moses Mendelssohn 's translation of the Hebrew Bible into German inspired a quarterly review written in Hebrew. Other periodicals followed. In the late nineteenth century, some writers such as Sholom Aleichem started out by composing in Hebrew but switched to Yiddish to gain a wider audience. The rise of the Zionist settlement in Palestine encouraged the use of Hebrew as a shared language among the various Jewish immigrant communities. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda determined to enable the use of Hebrew for all modern purposes by adapting and adopting words from all periods of the Hebrew language, as well as from other languages that had previously loaned words to Hebrew. In 1922, Hebrew became an official language of the British Mandate Of Palestine . In 1966 Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel Prize For Literature for writings in Hebrew. Today thousands of new books are published in Hebrew each year, primarily works of Israeli Literature . |
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