The return of speech: Hebrew becomes spoken again

In forty years Hebrew became again the language of the home, the street and the newspaper.

One must begin with precision, because it is usually not kept here. Hebrew was not a dead language. It ceased to be spoken after Bar Kokhba; written it never ceased to be—in it are the Mishnah, the piyyutim, the commentaries, the codes, and in it corresponded communities that had no other language in common. What had to be revived was speech, not the language—and that is why it proved possible.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda came to Jerusalem in 1881. He began where alone one can begin: at home. In the family, Hebrew only; his son he raised so that the boy heard no other language in childhood. So Itamar Ben-Avi appeared, the first man in eighteen centuries whose native tongue was Hebrew.

Then came the rest: the newspaper HaZvi, the Vaad ha-Lashon—the committee that made the missing words—and the dictionary he compiled until his death. The words were made from roots, by the very rules that Hayyuj and Ibn Janah had described in Spain nine hundred years before.

Alone he could not have done it. What made Hebrew spoken was the Second Aliyah: schools that taught in Hebrew, settlements where it was spoken to children, and a whole generation for whom it was the first.

Who was against it, and why. The Old Yishuv of Jerusalem met it with hostility, and their argument deserves to be given whole: lashon ha-kodesh is the holy tongue; in it men pray and study Torah; to bring it down to the market, to abuse, to newspaper quarrels is a profanation. Ben-Yehuda's paper was shut, and a herem was declared against him. This dispute is part of the same division as the argument over Zionism, and it was not resolved—it was overtaken by what happened of itself.

What happened was this: by Ben-Yehuda's death in 1922 Hebrew was already one of the official languages of Mandatory Palestine. Today it is the mother tongue of millions—and the only case in history of a language that ceased to be spoken and became so again.

There was a price, and not only in the quarrel with the Yishuv. Yiddish and Ladino, spoken by those who came, were pushed aside in the new country—and soon Yiddish had no speakers left to push: of the six million who perished in the Shoah about eighty-five per cent spoke it.