 Thanks Neil. Good thing I wore heels, but let me just stand here for a second so you can see that there is actually someone behind this thing, not just eyes peeking. So do you know these people that when they watch, go watch a movie, they don't want to read the reviews before, they want to be surprised. They don't even want to know what the movie is or watch the trailer. So they're really into this surprise kind of thing. My father is not like that. He's the opposite. So when my father picks up a book, the first thing he does is open it on the last page. He reads, remember Hebrew is written from right to left, so this is actually the last page of the book. So he reads the last page just to find out if everyone's okay, if they stay together, if they're still alive, what was the main concept of the book. And then after he's done, he knows that he can start reading the book. So in the case that there are people here like my father who are really curious and they don't want any surprises, let me start by showing you this new Hebrew system that I wrote, that I'm going to be speaking about. This is Hebrew, Hebrew script. This is Latin, surprise, surprise. And this is the new Hebrew typography, a new Hebrew script or writing system that I'll be talking about. It's by Hugh Schoenfields from 1932. So as you can see, it's not really Latin, it's not really Hebrew, some weird mix. And when I first saw this writing system, I was horrified. But in a way, you know, when you're horrified by something but you cannot stop looking at it, you're like hypnotized by this thing. And I was looking at it over and over. And I was thinking to myself, what was the guy thinking? Did he do this for real? People really reacted to this. And then I thought, okay, let's not judge him too dramatically and remember the time that this was set in. So I want you all to remember during this presentation, the time and the period. So this is a talk by Henry, sorry, a quote by Henry Friedlander. When the reader will see the pressure bursting open doors, may he remember that in those days, all the doors were yet to be opened. And now we can after this short intro, we can really start at the beginning of the book. So the paleo Hebrew was used for Hebrew writing until the 5th century BCE. And at the time, Hebrew was beginning to be influenced by many of the languages around it, around the surrounding in the land of Israel. And the vocabulary was starting to change and grammar was starting to change as well. And to stop that and to prevent Hebrew from becoming something else, Ezra, the scribe, the Jewish leader came and he changed the paleo Hebrew for the Hebrew script to the Armaic script. And this Aramaic script is very similar to the square Hebrew that we use today. So actually the square Hebrew is derived from this Aramaic script. So things were written in the square script, but for a long time, Lord's name was still written in this paleo Hebrew. This item, in fact, is one of the items of the Dead Sea Scrolls, if you're familiar with. It was a massive collection of scrolls that were found in the Judea Desert and Comoran. And they date back to the 3rd century BCE until the 1st century BCE. Just showing some Hebrew that we can really still read today. So Hebrew as a script is not based on stone cutting or the slow calculated stroke. You can see some very amateurish stone cutting that we do have in Hebrew on the left image. And even in Mosaic inscriptions from the 6th century, you can see that they're trying to imitate a written form, a scribe form. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Hebrew took a split, if I can say. On one hand, there was this formal Hebrew, which was considered sacred, and it was only written by a certain qualified people to do it. It was very inflexible. It didn't change for a long time. And on the other hand, there was this daily Hebrew, the cursive one. And this script was really inspired by the place and the location and the tools that the people lived in. So the styles are varying. The formal Hebrew did change a bit according to the places in the world that it was used and by the tools that were used. So there are two major hands, calligraphy hands. The first one is the Spharadic style. This was written with a ridge pen. In Spain, Portugal, North Africa, Middle East, you can see the same tool for Arabic calligraphy and its low contrast. On the other hand, there is the Ashkenazic hand. And this was written with a quill in Northern Europe, sorry, Germany, Northern France. And this took its inspiration from Latin writing. Jumping on a few centuries later, two good Hebrew printing types were designed and produced. The Lebes Hebrew in the 16th century and the Van Dijk Hebrew, which is called Amsterdam letters in the 17th century. After these typefaces, there was a very, very steady decline of the Hebrew printing types. I'm sure you can all see that this has very heavy contrast. This Hebrew, Margalit and Merubin, and it was inspired by the Diedon style, the modern styles. And because Hebrew has a reverse stress, so the horizontals are the heavier. Do you hear me? Okay, by the way. Okay. The horizontals are the heavier. The letters are really falling. They don't have a steady base to stand on. This steady decline was stopped by a Frank Rule typeface. And this was designed in Germany and it's actually the typeface that we still use in Israel for most newspapers, books, etc. So why didn't Hebrew develop like Latin? Well, the Hebrew, as I said, was considered a sacred writing used mainly for this religious use. And it was just, it had these really important rules. It had to stay the same. So one of these rules, for instance, was that each letter had to be written separately. So this actually prevented many different styles to develop, such as the cursive styles. This is from the Cairo Gnisza collection. It's in Cambridge University at the moment and you can see this piece of ephemera which was kept in a time when these sort of things weren't kept. So this is really showing the fact that Hebrew was considered a sacred thing not to be thrown. This is a Stam scribe, Sofer Stam, a person who is qualified to write Hebrew. He says a prayer before and after. He finishes to write and it has to be, it has to be examined and qualified to be sold or brought. So we don't have cursive in Hebrew. This didn't integrate into the square script. The only one that did somehow manage to is the Rashi type Rabbinic style. It was used for biblical commentaries and since the 14th century in Italy. I don't know how to read it. My mother was taught in school. Some of the letters are a bit different than the ones we use. At the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, there was a revival of the Hebrew language as a spoken language. So until then, Hebrew was only used for biblical matters, sacred matters. And this revival is the only case in the history of the world that a language became from a dead language to a spoken language in daily life. And this revival took place in two areas in parallel at around the same time. This is what is now Israel and this revival was the revival of the spoken Hebrew. And it was driven by the ideas of Eliezer Ben Yudah, that guy, that he was the driving spirit of this. At the same time, in Europe, the Haskala movement, the Enlightenment movement, they revived the Hebrew writing as secular for secular matters and books. So you'll see this slide later on, but the Hebrew was revived, the Hebrew was a language, and there was a need for a new modern typeface or script. And as you can see on the on the top image, these are a, it's a, can you say, another word, when you draw something really extreme? Yes, we say caricatura, I'm sure you can, you can understand. So actually things weren't gradually developing, they were just being changed completely, creating a very, very weird shapes, distorted shapes, and one of them is the one we will talk about now. This is the guy, is you, Sean Field. He's a British biblical scholar, and he was a very controversial figure, sorry. He wrote, for instance, the book that's called The Passover Plot in 65. It was a story telling actually the real story that Jesus planned his crucifixion to show everyone that he's the real Messiah. And as we all know, this plan went unexpectedly wrong. So this, this person published in 1932, the book which is called The New Hebrew Typography, a take obviously on the German new typography. It was published in the Danish archer press in the UK. And in this book, he's explaining the problem, let's go back to this. He was discussing the current situation of Hebrew and expressing his dissatisfaction with it, and he was offering a new solution to the existing Hebrew. He begins the book with this, with this thing, it's called No Fetou Fim. It's from 1475, and to the left you can see the manuscript, and to the right it's in, or incunable, can you say that? The first printing books, and they're trying to imitate the scribe's work in that printed type. He begins in this, he's forward by saying that this urgent of finding a new Hebrew, this need is really urgent, and he's doing this for the Jewish people. I forgot to mention he was a Hebrew Christian, so he was a Jewish, a Jew person that converted to Christianity. He's saying how bad the situation is, and how important it is for him to change this. And he's talking about the fact that Hebrew didn't really stay the way it was, and everything we talked about, and how urgent it is to find a good reason for a good solution for the daily used Hebrew. He's also saying that right now in Hebrew there is no reason for in the metal type, there is no reason for it not to be to develop also hot metal, and that Hebrew has very old forms really unnecessary for the time. So he's talking about the Hebrew and what's wrong with it, so we can go over this quite quickly, and some things I agree with him. So he says that many letters seem very similar. You can see the pairs, I highlighted them, and too similar. He says that because of the stress there is no flow in the Hebrew, the Hebrew is really stuck. His idea was, and we'll get to that later, to accommodate Hebrew to the best Western's exemplars. So he's saying the Hebrew is stuck, not flowing, and it lacks emotions. So when a printer needs to find a certain type for a certain cause, he doesn't have a big variety. The only variety he has is the rabbinic style which we talked about. And in this book he becomes very emotional with few quotes that I wanted to share with you, how a book loving people like the Jews could so long endure to have the treasures of their national literature reproduced in such unlovely forms. It is difficult to imagine. Will not the eyes of a freeborn children of Eret Israel become deemed with pouring over illegible pages as any ghetto-born? Unsavory mess of ugly letters. Only people trained in suffering could allow itself the edition newspaper to be so imposed on. So I think this is actually quite lovely, but he didn't agree with me obviously. He's talking about these new ideas which we'll discuss later about writing Hebrew in Latin characters, and he's saying this is not a good idea because this is ruining all the history of the Hebrew script which is so important. See very soon what he did. So he said that the Hebrew has only one case and that's very problematic. Hebrew needs to have italic and the lower case. And I was just looking at these two examples and thinking to myself what is worse, writing Hebrew in Latin characters or creating something that doesn't look like Hebrew. I cannot read it and doesn't look like Latin either. This weird hybrid, so you can be the judge of this. So he felt that the time is right for something concrete to be attempted. What did he do in this oddly looking script? He changed the stress to begin with to the Latin stress. He decided to take the existing letters with only minor changes. Agree with me or not? I think they are not minor at all. To use these for the caps, the upper case, and he added serifs. I don't know the reason. He eliminated the final forms. We have five final letters in Hebrew, so they don't need to be used anymore. And he created a new set of lower case. Oh, and he added the centers and dissenters to make the type more harmonious. Surprisingly, when he was designing the italics, so he was designing but not drawing them. When he designed the italics, I was really surprised to see that they're leaning to the reading direction. But he says that whenever there would be a need to switch the Hebrew to be written from left to right, no problem, it can just be slanted to the other direction. And very awkwardly, we use in Hebrew the regular, the Latin punctuation, so he advised to just reverse it. And then he talks about how important it really is to change the script. He says that people would need to learn something new, but that's definitely worth it. Definitely worth the challenge, because the benefits would be so much better. So then he adapted it to several typefaces, Latin typefaces, which you can see right now. So we've got the Castland Old Face. I heard that. I don't know how to pronounce this. Kochen, or you know, and italics for that. These are the final pages of his book. Also sans serif in this new typography. So his main goal was to give the printer these rich options of styles, italic as well. And this is my favorite, the Ultra Budoni. I cannot read that at all. And he mentions that he, sorry, I'll keep this for one more second, he mentions that he was not inventing anything. He relied on historical sources, historic sources, and I know that at that time he didn't have the resources that I have. So I was doing some research, trying to find exactly where he took his inspirations from. So he's saying things very general, like rabbinic, eastern rabbinic first century. So I was doing him the courtesy and really trying to find the similar, the most similar forms. This is what I came up with. So he used the rabbinic, I grouped them up. So the rabbinic style, there is the kaf, chet, bet, and aleph. And then there is the Samech, which is a, it's this P that you see on top, and the white one is the Hebrew Samech, the square script. So I was looking at some that looked similar to what he mentioned. He took his inspiration from first century inscriptions. So there is the Vav and the Hey. I didn't see this swirl anywhere. And the Chet and the Mem also from first century inscriptions. And this is my favorite, the Reish, which is an R actually, if you can see. Do you think it's similar to the, yes, no? Do you agree with this guy? Think about it, we'll talk about it over coffee. And some of them he took from the Caps, from the uppercase. And some of them, according to him, is from the usual form. So I don't know, you can, you decide. Some of them he took from Maccabean coins, which I did not find any proof for this. And some from Old Yemenite, which again I don't think is very similar. Eastern manuscript cursives, final forms of the Hebrew he eliminated. And from pre-exiled seals and inscriptions. I still don't quite get why he used the Q for the Kuf. So he's not mentioning anywhere that he took his inspiration from Latin. This just happened to be this way. Although I found some things that look very similar. So actually this is a cut and paste of Latin. So what do I think of this as a native Hebrew speaker and reader? I think he went too far. I agree with some of his problems, with some of the problems that he mentions. But I don't think it's worth throwing a whole script away and designing a new one. And I think that this fact that he's basing his theory on these historical findings is not, it just sounds like an excuse. I think he tried to do, to come up with some Latin version, which would be easier according to him. And I think that learning this new style would be so difficult for people. Someone that thought different than me was Stanley Morrison, who heard about this idea and he thought it's an excellent idea. So he wrote the introduction for this book. And once again he writes that this is an urgent matter. This is a practical step. This is not some kind of weird experiment. He writes that these days he's really surprised that the Hebrew state for so many centuries is the same. It's very conservative and he was, he thought about this as a triumph for the conservative spirits of the people, like the Jews who are world people. And he was surprised that the certain Jewish movements of this revival of the Hebrew language didn't affect the script. He thinks that this solution is not the best one yet, but it's the least offensive one. Morrison thinks that Hebrew should be engraved, should not look like a written form. And he thinks that in the machine age, back then it was, it's really useless for the machines to follow written forms and it doesn't accommodate itself well in type. And this is an interesting correspondence I found from 31 on of Stanley Morrison with Henry Friedlander, the German Jewish type designer. So Friedlander sends Morrison his drawings for Hebrew and he didn't find anyone else who can really comment on these. And Morrison says his thoughts about Hebrew and how it should look like. And he also attaches these nice drawings of Serif Hebrew, Latin Serif Hebrew element. He thinks that Hebrew should look like type and not like a script. He thinks that it should look like it was cut by an engraver. He doesn't think it should be a German toys sans serif. And he thinks that until we make up our mind, this is a quote, until we make up our minds regarding this issue, it's better if we just use Latin letters for Hebrew. And he thinks that it's really bad that Hebrew has only one case, it should definitely have the lower case and italics with it. So Friedlander sends him his work and the first thing Morrison says is Ed Serifs. Ed Serifs similar to the Castelons Serifs in the I and the J. And this is the first thing you need to do. The second thing you need to do is find a nice cursive in Hebrew and adapt it to your typeface as the lower case. So just to end this story, this is not related to the talk but just, you know, end this nicely, they continue their correspondence while Friedlander was in the Netherlands during the war. And in 63 after Hadassah typeface, which Friedlander designed, after it was published, Friedlander sends Morrison a copy of the specimen and suddenly Morrison is much more merciful. He says that he was actually right and Hebrew should not be romanized. He still thinks there are some problems but that Friedlander did quite a good job. This time I agree with Morrison. Some of the other reactions to the new Hebrew typography book, Friedlander himself said that the conclusions were foolish, although he does understand the need for a whole big family that includes lower script, let's say, and italics. And Tobi, which did these drawings, he wrote that something like, so this person seriously suggested to do something like this, this distorted forms of Hebrew. And Schoenfeld's thing is here to the right. Some other reviews, the Sentinel from Chicago, a Jewish weekly, they wrote that they agree with all the problems about Hebrew but they think the solution is way too radical. And they thought it had some nice interesting anecdotes in it but then they found out that Schoenfeld is a Hebrew Christian so they really thought that he has no right to comment on that. Schoenfeld replied to them that it has nothing to do with this and he put his soul into the issue. On the other hand, the Palestine Post, a local newspaper from mandatory Palestine, wrote excellent reviews about this new system. They thought that the Hebrew is archaic and the letters are clumsy and this is the first practical step in the development of the new Jewish culture. They thought that the lower case is excellent. So they were really raving for a few pages about this. We're good with time so I can show you some other cases of trying to change the Hebrew script. Just a few facts. In Hebrew we have some letters that have the same sound so this is causing some challenges. So we have Bu and Vu and Ch and Tu and Ku and Si, never mind. And there are also many letters that look very much alike so it's the type designer's job to really differentiate them well. And also we don't have vowels in Hebrew so we read by understanding the context but in the 9th century there were these vowel marks added for certain purposes and they are called nikud. So if I read this I could read that in many, many, many ways. It could be sefer, separ, sofir and the meanings of these would be one of these, the meaning of these three letters. And another problem with these vowel marks, the nikud, is that it actually costs double because you need to cast a line of letters and then the line of the vowel, the vowel marks. So Hebrew is actually a language which you have to know the vocabulary in order to read without the vowel marks but how would you know the vocabulary without reading it first? So it's a challenging language to learn. So people came starting from 1898 with new reforms to fix these problems. So Josef Kaplan from Switzerland designed this script in 1914 and he did two main innovations. The first one was to add third row from the bottom to the left. These are the vowel marks. So instead of putting them below the letter he suggested to just put them right after each letter and also he did a monoliniar script. So according to him it would be more legible. He also narrowed the letters by two thirds or actually by one third to make it more economic in space and he looked at all these similar letters and changed the curve direction which you can see here. He also added this serif looking and in the left bottom example he changed the shape so the sounds of b and v could be different and people would know how to read them. Another thing he did is because the Hebrew was receiving a new word every day taken from Latin from any Latin language or others. There were many Hebrew signs, Hebrew letters that didn't have any representation. So he designed these ligatures of ch for instance and he did some other nice ligatures for mister and for number. So this was his suggestion and then he revised it and did the second draft in 32 but actually nothing really happened with this. After he did took all the trouble and did many styles with it so this one didn't work. Another idea which was very popular in the 1930s was to write Hebrew in Latin letters similar to Turkey and their main idea was that because the Hebrew derived from the Paleo-Hebrew and the Paleo-Hebrew is very similar to the Phoenician which is where the Greek derived from and which is where the Latin derived from so actually the Latin is more true Hebrew than the one we use today. Agree? So there were two very enthusiastic supporters of this suggestion, Itamar Ben-Avi and his father was the driving spirit behind the revival of the Hebrew language and Zev Jabotinsky. So they were starting to work on this together then they had some miscommunications and Itamar Ben-Avi published this newspaper. It lasted for only one year but it was written with Latin characters in Hebrew. In 1959 Dr. Michael Avino came up with this new system of using Latin letters with the addition of a few other characters that that are either vowels in Hebrew or sounds that we don't have in the regular letters and his idea was not to have the Hebrew be an easier tool for people to learn not for that purpose not for the teaching purposes but to pass on as much information as possible. So these are a few examples of his suggestion and this is a chemistry text written in his sort of Hebrew so you can see some weird character looking parts. So he approached monotype when I was doing research in Salfords I found this folder and I saw that he requested the monotype to design these few extra characters for him and he wanted them to be used with the Times New Roman series 3 to 7 if I'm not wrong and there was this back and forth discussion between them he gave them comments they gave him comments and another interesting discussion within monotype whether this thing would actually become a reality. So John Dryfus for instance thought that it would never happen other thought that maybe they should really take this suggestion seriously and produce these trials because it might really happen it didn't. At some point it was just stopped they asked Avino to give some feedback from Israeli readers and he never supplied that so it just ended. Going back a few years Gil Hebrew he was designed by Eric Gil he was in Israel in 1934 he was doing some reliefs and some stone cutting for signage in the Rockefeller Museum and he designed this this Hebrew that you can see here and after designing it he came up with a new Hebrew typeface Gil Hebrew which had a Latin serifs which probably he looked at the Hebrew entry strokes and thought of them as serifs so it was a very inscriptional typeface and the monotype did few trials for this in 1937 but it was never published with them. Few years later this is the folder of the original drawings in the archives. Few years later it was published finished and published by the Jerusalem type foundry this is this was the first and maybe only the only type foundry in Israel. It was founded by Dr. Moshe Spitzer and he thought that this Gil Hebrew is excellent it's an innovation it's young it's energetic it received mixed reviews but this is an example of a book from the 60s that was designed by Ellie Gross. She refined the lettering a bit and used that. Some of the reactions to this typeface so we said that Moshe Spitzer was in favor of it but people like Friedlander which we talked about thought that these serifs are actually preventing the flow of the reading of the Hebrew whereas in Latin they're helping read over letters. So I had to finish with some examples from our days my city Haifa and even in my neighborhood of a let's say Latinized Hebrew so this is supposed to be Aleph but it's it's an X. This is fairly new book with the Latin serifs. I love this one this is from a tiny neighborhood they had this center and it spells Deniz and they took the branding process really seriously so they designed this for any application of the name this as well. This is a typeface called English a free typeface free font and this is the image I wanted to finish with just of the reversed case of a ethnica restaurant not a very good one that took the Hebrew vowel mark for the English so you know you would know how to read the beginning of the word. So I think although this you know I don't think anyone would really do this such a thing today people are much more aware of the need for research and while doing it on latin's but it does stand out we say in Hebrew Samania Manikitsoni which means the right extreme mark to show what can be done and have people be careful not to get to this situation including myself for other scripts and that's it I'll be happy to talk over coffee if you have any questions later thank you very much