Story of Modern Hebrew

It all started with a man who took the Hebrew name Eliezer Ben Yehuda. He was born in 1858 in the small town of Lushki in the province of Vilna, Lithuania. From the age of three, he had a traditional Jewish training in Hebrew. Knowing that due to Russian discrimination against Jews he would not be admitted into university in Russia, he attended the University of Paris where he studied medicine in 1879.

There existed at the time a Hebrew monthly periodical in Europe titled Hashahar (The Dawn). Ben Yehuda was aware of the homelessness of the Jews and quickly became a follower of the developing movement which soon became known as the Zionist movement. He presented the then novel idea that not only did the Jews need to be re-settled in their ancient homeland but that Hebrew should be revived as the spoken language of the new state!

Due to ill health, Ben Yehuda was not able to go directly to Palestine, but he continued to publish articles in the Hebrew weekly Havazelet which was published in Jerusalem. In 1881 he was invited to become the paper’s assistant editor, a post he happily accepted. He married Dvora Jonas who shared his enthusiasm for the language and on their arrival in Jerusalem organized a group dedicated to speaking Hebrew as their exclusive language. He and Dvora’s children were among the first to speak Hebrew as their mother tongue.
    
It was not without trials for Ben Yehuda’s work. It took years of persistent labor to convince skeptics that Hebrew should be the national language of the developing Jewish entity in the Middle East. He was attacked by religious factions in Jerusalem who opposed the secular use of the “sacred language.” He was even jailed on occasion for his work. In spite of the persecution from both religious and Ottoman overlords, Ben Yehuda worked tirelessly adding new words to what ultimately became a multi-volume dictionary of Modern Hebrew. While it has been added to as new words in technology came into play, the Ben Yehuda Dictionary is still the standard in use today.

Ben Yehuda lived to see the acceptance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 naming Palestine as a national homeland for the Jews. Always in poor health, he died in 1922. But his prophetic work lived on and became the official national language of the new State of Israel.
    
You can read the details of Ben Yehuda’s life in the biography by Robert St. John, titled Tongue of the Prophets: The Life Story of Eliezer Ben Yehuda.

At the same time, while Palestine was under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I, Ben Yehuda’s idea of making Hebrew a national language for the Jews who were immigrating into the land was seen as subversive and even treasonous – the beginning of a “state within the state” and the formation of a unity that could bring trouble to the reigning Turkish government. 

Several times during this era Ben Yehuda was jailed for his efforts to create what became Modern Hebrew. He suffered for his efforts on both fronts. His efforts yielded the fruit that we see today in a Hebrew-speaking Israel. A debt of gratitude must go to his memory.