The Hebrew revival movement in Palestine (Eliezer Ben Yehouda)

Eliezer Ben Yehouda (1858-1922), born Eliezer Perelman in Lithuania, was the principal architect of the resurrection of Hebrew as a spoken everyday language, an undertaking without precedent in the History of languages. Convinced that a Jewish national renewal required a living common language, he settled in Jerusalem in 1881 and made the radical wager of raising his children exclusively in Hebrew, making his son Itamar the first native speaker of modern Hebrew since Antiquity. He coined thousands of neologisms to equip the language with a vocabulary suited to contemporary life, edited newspapers in Hebrew, campaigned for its teaching in the schools of the Yishouv, and undertook the compilation of a vast historical dictionary of the Hebrew language. He was also the driving force behind the Hebrew language committee, the forerunner of the present-day Academy of the Hebrew Language. This linguistic revival, which made Hebrew the official language of a modern state, remains one of the most spectacular achievements of the Zionist movement.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan
• Jewish Virtual Library ↗