When asked to discuss the process by which their language was “revived,” most knowledgeable speakers of Modern Hebrew, native or otherwise, will first mention the name of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.[1] Despite his status as a linguistic hero (Harshav 88), Ben-Yehuda’s role in the effort to revitalize Hebrew was not as influential as either laymen or scholars have tended to believe. Many of his efforts ended in comparative failure, and even his successes did not always bring about the results he intended.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, originally Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman, was born on January 7, 1858, in the village of Luzhky, located in what is now Lithuania (Fellman 19). Sent as a young teenager to a yeshiva in the nearby city of Plotzk, he there had an experience that determined the course of much of his life: One of his instructors introduced him to the Hebrew writings of the Enlightenment. This literature “opened Ben-Yehuda’s eyes to the broad vistas of modern thought” (Fellman 20) and, more importantly, brought him to the realization that Hebrew could successfully be used for secular as well as religious purposes. Such an outlook, however, rendered Ben-Yehuda unacceptable to the more conservative members of the community. In order to avoid their displeasure, he left Plotzk, joining the “enlightened” household of his future father-in-law and later moving on to study at the gymnasium of the Russian city of Dünaburg.

By that time, Ben-Yehuda was becoming an ardent Slavophile. As he wrote forty years afterward, “Nothing Jewish captured my interest, and I felt myself—or at least I imagined to have felt myself—a complete Russian” (Myhill 82-83). Yet, on a certain night, possibly in 1878, while reading newspaper accounts of the Russo-Turkish War, he had what might be termed an epiphany. He described the event in this way: “After several hours of . . . pondering the issue of the Bulgarians and their future liberation [from the Turks], . . . my thoughts flew from . . . the Balkans to . . . the Land of Israel, and I heard a strange internal voice calling unto me: The revival of Israel and its tongue in the land of our forefathers!” (Myhill 83). From that point on, Ben-Yehuda was convinced that the establishment of a new state and the concomitant revival of Hebrew were the only methods by which the distinctiveness of the Jewish people could be preserved. In the hope of winning others over to his views, he began to write articles for Hebrew-language newspapers (including his best-known work, She’ela nikhbada, “A Serious Question”). He was also intent on practicing what he preached and, in the summer of 1881, set out for Eretz Yisrael, accompanied by his young wife Dvora (Fellman 25).

Ben-Yehuda settled in Jerusalem and soon commenced his language-revival work, which, on analysis, consisted of a number of different steps.[2] The first was the establishment of a household in which Hebrew was the sole language spoken. Despite his determination, Ben-Yehuda found communicating with Dvora, whose practical knowledge of Hebrew was even smaller than his own, difficult. Unable to so much as ask her for a cup of coffee, he was reduced to the use of gestures and circumlocutions such as the following: “Take that and do that and bring me that and I’ll drink” (Harshav 107). The couple’s son Itamar, born in 1882, did not speak at all until he was four years old—likely due to this lack of meaningful conversation. When the boy finally pronounced his first sentences, the Jewish population of Jerusalem was greatly interested (Fellman 39); however, Ben-Yehuda’s attempt to persuade others to adopt a monolingual “Hebrew-only” policy was largely unsuccessful. Itamar’s achievement brought four families, two of which were those of David Yudelevitz and Yehuda Grazovski-Gur, both enthusiastic teachers of Hebrew who had married their former students. By 1902, twenty years later, just six more households had been added to this group.

Another step was Ben-Yehuda’s production of a newspaper, Ha-Tzvi. Initially, he had acted as an assistant to Israel Dov Frumkin, editor of Ha-Havatzelet; yet, deciding that Frumkin was not a strong enough nationalist, in 1884 Ben-Yehuda made up his mind to work on his own. One of his motivations was a desire to provide both general world news for local readers and news of Palestine for readers in the Diaspora. A stronger motivation, however, was his wish to create a style of Hebrew that could easily be used to describe present-day events and ideas. To this end, Ben-Yehuda sought to rid his writing of the “over-ornateness . . . and the over-abstract character” (Fellman 58) of the classical language. When he lacked some word that he needed, he avoided the excessive use of foreignisms, instead turning to post-biblical writings. When those sources proved insufficient, he invented a word himself, devising terms for a broad variety of concepts, from diphtheria, blouse, and apricot to cactus, nitrogen, and telegram (Fellman 67-68). As Ha-Tzvi was widely read, Ben-Yehuda’s neologisms were widely disseminated, and perhaps seventy-five percent of them were accepted into the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew (Fellman 69-70). But, after 1895, the circulation, quality, and size of Ha-Tzvi all began quickly to decline. The younger emigrants of the Second Aliyah (1903-1905) disdained the “maudlin, melodramatic, baroque and old-fashioned newspapers of Ben-Yehuda” (Fellman 125), considering his “new” style to be both too biblical and too idiosyncratic. Thus, despite his relative success in the formation of words, Ben-Yehuda’s attempt to establish a new mode of writing failed.

Undoubtedly, the best-remembered of the steps is Ben-Yehuda’s work on his Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, Ancient and Modern, which began as a personal list of “the new Hebrew words most necessary in conversation” (Fellman 70) and grew into a lifelong endeavor. With the purpose of helping beginning Hebrew speakers to find the words they needed for everyday life, Ben-Yehuda decided to organize the Dictionary as if it were a thesaurus; for example, all names of trees were listed under the entry for the word tree. He was, as he admitted (Fellman 73), unprepared for the sheer magnitude of the project he had set for himself, yet his assiduity has become legendary. Having no assistants other than his second wife Hemda and, after 1902, two yeshiva students, he sometimes worked “in eighteen-hour marathons” (Stavans 105). He explored approximately 40,000 works (Fellman 79) from all periods of Hebrew literature, searching for words, and traveled to cities as far apart as Philadelphia, Moscow, and Rome to use the resources available in their libraries. In the end, Ben-Yehuda was able to catalog some 20,000 words and to produce five of the seventeen volumes he had planned. As in the case of Ha-Tzvi, however, he was unable to achieve his primary goal. The Dictionary appeared too late to have any real influence on the language revival (Myhill 85), except perhaps to prove that Modern Hebrew, possessing an official lexicon, was indeed a “real language” (Fellman 134). While some continue to value the Dictionary for its own sake, considering it to be “alive with absorbing material and citations” (Fellman 80), others dismiss it as being “stuffed with obsolete words” (Stavans 111) and irrelevant for today’s Hebrew speakers.

Two other steps, the foundation of a Language Council and of societies to promote spoken Hebrew, had little or no recognizable effect at the time. The most effective step, the teaching of “Hebrew through Hebrew” to schoolchildren, was one in which Ben-Yehuda was involved for only about three months. Yet his role in the revival was characterized by Anglo-Jewish scholar Cecil Roth in this way: “Before Ben-Yehuda . . . Jews could speak Hebrew; after him they did” (Fellman 139 [emphasis original]). His greatest achievements lay in demonstrating that Hebrew could naturally be used just as could any other modern, popular language, and in combining geographical Zionism with linguistic Zionism, elevating Modern Hebrew as the unifying language of Eretz Yisrael. Although the image of Ben-Yehuda as a single-handed champion may be a myth, his linguistic contributions remain in evidence today.

[1]  As some variations in the spelling/transliteration of this and other names exist in the sources given in the bibliography, a standardized spelling will be used throughout this paper and in quotations.

[2] This method of textual organization is closely derived from Fellman 36ff.

Fellman, Jack. The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language. The Hague: Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, 1973.

Harshav, Benjamin. Language in Time of Revolution. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Myhill, John. Language in Jewish Society: Towards a New Understanding. Clevedon (United Kingdom): Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2004.

Saulson, Scott B. Institutionalized Language Planning: Documents and Analysis of the Revival of Hebrew. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979.

Stavans, Ilan. Resurrecting Hebrew. New York: Schocken Books, 2008.