The Zionists who revived Hebrew were not native speakers; most were native speakers of Yiddish, Russian, or other diaspora languages. This raises the question of whether adopting a Semitic language makes one a Semite in the same way as someone with a continuous heritage.

Hebrew, while preserved in religious contexts, was not a mother tongue for any community by the 19th century, making it "almost as dead" as Akkadian and Aramaic in terms of everyday use.