The man who resurrected the Hebrew language: Who is Eliezer Ben Yehuda?

Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who was born in 1858 in today's Belarus, started learning Hebrew when he was three years old, like every Jewish child in Eastern Europe in those years. By the age of 12, he was able to read the Torah and Talmud to a large extent.

He was determined to turn Hebrew, which he learned as a religious language in his childhood, into a current language. Ben Yehuda, who started speaking French, German, and Russian before the age of 16, had only one goal in life:

To resurrect Hebrew and take it out of synagogues and dusty book pages.

Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda (7 January 1858 – 16 December 1922) was a Russian-Jewish linguist, lexicographer, and journalist. He is renowned as the lexicographer of the first Hebrew dictionary and also as the editor of Jerusalem-based HaZvi, one of the first Hebrew newspapers published in the Land of Israel. Ben-Yehuda was the primary driving force behind the revival of the Hebrew language.

He went to Sorbonne University in Paris to study "Middle East History and Diplomacy". Here, the Hebrew lesson, not the other lessons he took, influenced him the most. The fact that this lesson was taught only in Hebrew reinforced his idea that Hebrew could well be a street language spoken in daily life. The idea of removing Hebrew from synagogues developed further.

To do this, he started by speaking Hebrew to everyone he encountered in daily life. The words of Eliezer, who addressed a group of friends in Hebrew for the first time in Paris on October 13, 1881, were recorded as "the first daily conversation in Hebrew in the modern period." It was out of the question for young Eliezer, who did not care at all whether his interlocutors understood Hebrew, to make any concessions.

After a while, his inner circle had to learn Hebrew to communicate with him. Ben Yehuda had reaped the first fruits of his language resistance.

At the end of the same year, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who came to Palestine with his newly married wife Devora, set about carrying out the second and third stages of his plan to revive the Hebrew language. Ben Yehuda, who first required his family to speak Hebrew, began publishing a Hebrew newspaper and teaching the language to all Jews who immigrated to Palestine. At the same time, he started working as a teacher at Alliance Israelite Universelle School.

When he saw Jews coming here from different countries and speaking different dialects, he aimed to study Hebrew and bring everyone together in a single language.

It was not an easy thing to teach people a language that was not available in daily life. It was necessary to derive the equivalents of new words, write plays and tales, translate and adapt existing ones, open schools and courses, and most importantly, convince people that Hebrew should be spoken again. Eliezer Ben Yehuda achieved all this with patience and persistence. He organized campaigns to encourage Jewish families to speak “only Hebrew,” and his own family took the lead.

While doing all this, Ben Yehuda did not neglect to prepare a daily dictionary and a giant dictionary of Hebrew. The dictionary he worked on (and completed by his second wife, Hemda, after his death) remains Israel's primary language guide even today.

The small commission he established for language studies continues its activities today as the Hebrew Language Academy.

When Eliezer Ben Yehuda died of tuberculosis in Jerusalem in 1922, Israel was still 26 years away from being founded. But the language, cultural infrastructure, institutions, and texts of the new state were already ready. And all of this was made possible by the efforts of a man who worked alone like crazy throughout his life and those who were inspired by him.