Eliezer Ben-Yehuda אליעזר בן־יהודה

Born in 1858 at Luzhki in the Vilna Governorate, under the name Perlman. In 1881 he came to Jerusalem—in the years of the First Aliyah—and took to teaching at the Alliance school.

His design was single and stubborn: Hebrew must become a spoken language again. He began at home: with his wife and children, Hebrew only, and his son Ben-Zion, later Itamar Ben-Avi, he raised so that the boy heard no other language in childhood. That made Itamar the first man in eighteen centuries whose native tongue was Hebrew.

Then the work of a lifetime: the newspaper HaZvi, the Vaad ha-Lashon (the Language Committee, out of which grew the Academy of the Hebrew Language), and the dictionary he compiled until his death and which was finished after him. Words were lacking, and he made them—from roots, by the rules the Spanish grammarians had described.

The Old Yishuv of Jerusalem met this with hostility, and their argument should be named, not mocked: this is the holy tongue, in it men pray and study Torah, and to bring it down to the market and the newspaper is a profanation. His paper was shut for a year; a herem was declared as well.

He died at Jerusalem in 1922; thirty thousand came to the funeral. By then Hebrew was already one of the official languages of Mandatory Palestine.

One thing more should be said that seldom is: what he revived was not the language but the speech. Hebrew had not ceased to be written for a single year—for all eighteen centuries men wrote and corresponded in it. The task was another and therefore possible: to bring back into the house what was living in the book.