155th anniversary of Eliezer Ben Yehuda (07-01-2013)

Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda ( 7 January 1858 – 16 December 1922) was a Jewish Litvak lexicographer of Hebrew and newspaper editor. He was the driving spirit behind the revival of the Hebrew language in the modern era. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman, in Luzhki (Belarusian Лужкі (Lužki), Polish Łużki), Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus). He attended cheder where he studied Hebrew and the Bible from the age of three, as was customary among the Jews of Eastern Europe. By the age of twelve, he had read large portions of the Torah, Mishna, and Talmud. His mother and uncle hoped he would become a rabbi, and sent him to a yeshiva. There he was exposed to the Hebrew of the enlightenment which included some secular writings. Later, he learned French, German, and Russian, and was sent to Dünaburg for further education. Reading the Hebrew language newspaper HaShahar, he became acquainted with the early movement of Zionism and concluded that the revival of the Hebrew language in the Land of Israel could unite all Jews worldwide. 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. While he was in Paris he met a Jew from Jerusalem, who spoke Hebrew with him. It was this use of Hebrew in a spoken form that convinced him that the revival of Hebrew as the language of a nation was feasible. Ben-Yehuda spent four years in Paris. In 1881 Ben-Yehuda immigrated to Palestine, then ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and settled in Jerusalem. He found a job teaching at the Alliance Israelite Universelle school. Motivated by the surrounding ideals of renovation and rejection of the diaspora lifestyle, Ben‑Yehuda set out to develop a new language that could replace Yiddish and other regional dialects as a means of everyday communication between Jews who made aliyah from various regions of the world. Ben-Yehuda regarded Hebrew and Zionism as symbiotic: "The Hebrew language can live only if we revive the nation and return it to the fatherland," he wrote. To accomplish the task, Ben-Yehuda insisted with the Committee of the Hebrew Language that, to quote the Committee records, "In order to supplement the deficiencies of the Hebrew language, the Committee coins words according to the rules of grammar and linguistic analogy from Semitic roots: Aramaic and especially from Arabic roots" (Joshua Blau, page 33). Ben Yehuda was married twice, to two sisters. His first wife, Devora (née Jonas), died in 1891 of tuberculosis, leaving him with five small children. Her final wish was that Eliezer marry her younger sister, Paula Beila. Soon after his wife Devora's death, three of his children died of diphtheria within a period of 10 days. Six months later, he married Paula, who took the Hebrew name "Hemda." Hemda Ben-Yehuda became an accomplished journalist and author in her own right, ensuring the completion of the Hebrew dictionary in the decades after Eliezer's death, as well as mobilising fundraising and coordinating committees of scholars in both Palestine and abroad. Ben‑Yehuda raised his son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda (the first name meaning "son of Zion"), entirely through Hebrew. He refused to let his son be exposed to other languages during childhood. He even once yelled at his wife, after he caught her singing a Russian lullaby to the child. His son Ben-Zion was the first native speaker of modern Hebrew as mother tongue.