The Man Who Revived The Hebrew Language

By Yoav Greenburg

Today we think of Hebrew as the language of Israel, but it was originally spoken by the children of Abraham, who went down to Egypt, were enslaved there, and who were led forth by Moses. The language was active as the language of a nation for over 1700 years. The Jewish Bible, called the Torah (or the five books of Moses) was written in Hebrew.

When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70 C.E., Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language. It did, however, survive, through he ongoing study of the Torah and use in prayers by religious Jews.

At first, some thought Eliezer ben Yehudah (1858-1922), was idle dreamer, but today he is known as the restorer of Hebrew as a modern language. When he moved to Jerusalem, Ben-Yehuda became a teacher at the Alliance School, and with his efforts, became the first school where some courses were taught in Hebrew.

By the age of twelve he had been studying in Hebrew for nine years and had read large portions of the Torah, Mishna, and Talmud. His parents hoped he would become a rabbi, and sent him to a yeshiva. Upon graduation he went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne University. Among the subjects he studied there were history and politics of the Middle East, but the one that had the most lasting effect was Hebrew – specifically, his advanced Hebrew classes taught in Hebrew.

Ben-Yehuda created a three-part action plan: “Hebrew in the Home,” “Hebrew in the School,” and “Words, Words, Words.” Before he moved to Israel, he had successfully tried several lengthy conversations in Hebrew. He made the decision to speak only Hebrew with every Jew he met. Although he was able to speak Hebrew with little problem, he constantly had to come up with new words to describe everyday human activities.

In 1882, he son Itamar Ben-Avi was born. He got his wife Deborah to agree to raise Itamar as the first all-Hebrew speaking child in modern History. Ben-Yehudah had to invent words for household objects that did not exist in Biblical or prayer-book Hebrew, such as: ice-cream, omelet, towel, and bicycle.

The resurrection of an ancient language to a modern society would only succeed if the younger generation would learn to speak Hebrew fluently. Upon moving to Israel, he started teaching at the Alliance Isralite Universelle School, where the children were from a variety of Jewish communities around the Europe and the mid-East, and thus Hebrew was their only common language. Ben-Yehudah began to use the “direct system” of learning Hebrew (this means teaching the HEbrew language without translations from other languages). After a short time, the students were able to chat with each other about daily topics.

Ben-Yehudah constantly wrote articles in other papers, but eventually began to publish his own newspaper Hatzvi. It’s purpose was to teach adults, both via its content and its language. It was alos used to introduce new words which were desperately needed, such as: editor, telegram, soldier, among others.

As a revived language, Hebrew needed an academy and a dictionary in order to standardize the new words. Ben-Yehuda founded “Va’ad HaLashon”, the predecessor of the Hebrew Language Academy, and worked laboriously on his “Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.” He published the six volumes in 1910, but after his death, his second wife and son brought the work to an entire 17 volumes.

In 1922, the British mandate authorities recognized Hebrew as the official language of the Jews in Palestine. This culminated in his life-long dream being fulfilled, but one month later, he died from tuberculosis which had plagued him numerous years. Cecil Roth’s penned the famous quote: “Before Ben-Yehuda… Jews could speak Hebrew; after him they did.

See our Free Videos and Hebrew samples at Hebrew Language website.

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