Education: Lightning Before My Eyes

How one obsessed visionary brought a dead language to life

Like some of the wilder prophets of the Old Testament—like Hosea or Micah or perhaps Jeremiah—Eliezer Perelman was a visionary possessed by one irresistible idea. He even spoke once of the transcendent moment in which it came to him: “Suddenly, like lightning before my eyes, my thoughts flew across the Balkans . . . to Palestine, and I heard a . . voice calling to me: The revival of Israel and its language in the land of its forefathers!”

Who was Eliezer Perelman to hear such a voice and think such thoughts? A nobody, a young scholar in Vilna, on the Baltic coast of what was then the Russian empire, the land of the pogrom. Perelman knew Russian, French and German, but what bewitched him was Hebrew, the scriptural language that he had first learned from a tutor at the age of three. Ever since the Jews were driven from Roman Palestine in A.D. 135, Hebrew had survived only as a literary language, primarily of prayer; nobody had actually spoken it in everyday affairs for centuries. It did not even have words for such mundane things as pencils or forks.

He, Eliezer Perelman, would change all that. He started by changing his name to Ben-Yehuda, meaning Son of Judea, and at 23 he sailed with his new wife Dvorah to the Ottoman Empire’s province of Palestine. Hebrew today is the mother tongue of 3 million Israelis, but when Ben-Yehuda landed, there were fewer than 25,000 Jews in Palestine, and most of them spoke Arabic, Yiddish or the Spanish-Jewish dialect known as Ladino. Exactly 100 years ago, in August, Dvorah gave birth to a son in Jerusalem. Ben-Yehuda named him Ben-Zion and vowed that he would become the first baby since Roman times to learn Hebrew as his mother tongue.

It is not easy to address an infant solely in the language of the Old Testament. Ben-Yehuda had to keep inventing words: buba (doll), glida (ice cream), mimkhata (handkerchief). When more children appeared (eleven in all), they too had to speak entirely in the dead language that Ben-Yehuda was almost single handedly bringing back to life. Recalls his daughter Dola Ben-Yehuda Wittman, now 75: “Sometimes the other children would mock us because they didn’t understand the Hebrew words we were using.”

Mockery was only the Orthodox rabbis denounced da’s peculiar obsession as a defilement of the language of Scripture. Some fanatics who heard young Ben-Zion talking to his dog in Hebrew seized the dog and killed it. There were other kinds of opposition as well. Immigrants who had been nurtured in Yiddish clung emotionally to the language of the Diaspora. Even Zionist Leader Theodor Herzl rejected Ben-Yehuda’s campaign as impractical.

Prophets transcend practicality, and Ben-Yehuda labored on. He started Jerusalem’s first Hebrew newspaper in 1883; he founded in 1889 what is now the authoritative Hebrew Language Academy; he published in 1909 what would eventually become (in 1959) the 16-volume standard dictionary of Hebrew. Among his first and most important disciples were schoolteachers, who found in Hebrew a way to instill in each wave of newcomers a sense of themselves and of their once and future nation. Shortly before Ben-Yehuda’s death in 1922, the newly established British authorities decreed Hebrew, Arabic and English to be the official languages of Palestine. When Israel was reborn in 1948, so was Hebrew.

Like any living language, Hebrew needs to be re-created daily.* Of the 100,000 Hebrew words now in use, only about 12,000 date back to the Old Testament. Ben-Yehuda alone contributed thousands of new words, and his heirs follow his basic principles, starting with a search for biblical precedents. Thus it is that the Hebrew word for electricity derives from the light that Isaac saw in the sky, garage from a part of Solomon’s palace, and terrorist from the little foxes in the vineyard of the Song of Songs. The 45 sages of the Hebrew Language Academy have subdivided into committees on fields as diverse as sports, sewing and computer technology. Their recommendations are then submitted to as many as 200 experts in the field and finally referred to the full academy. “The process can take years,” sighs one member. Even then, the academy’s verdicts can be overruled by popular usage.

Ben-Yehuda named the telephone a sakrahok, meaning long-distance conversation, but everybody calls it a telefon. Hebrew sport terminology has largely caught on well: soccer is kaddor regel (ball foot), boxing is igruf, but tennis remains tenis. Lehiz-dangef, meaning to hang around, indisputably comes from a Tel Aviv square named Dizengoff, where what people do is hang around, but if they want to order a sandwich, should they ask for a karikh or a sendvich! If they need to get some money, should they cash a hamkha ha or simply a chek? The jury of public opinion is still out.

Since that jury includes a large share of the world’s 15 million Jews, the arguments will not end soon. Israel’s President, Yitzhak Navon, leading the celebration of the Ben-Yehuda centennial, used the occasion to warn that the language must be defended against “non-Hebraic influences.” By contrast, Novelist Amos Oz becomes rhapsodic over the constant shifting of “a language being born.” Says he: “Modern Hebrew is my torture, my love affair and my musical instrument.” As for Ben-Yehuda, who watched his first-born son grow into a well-known journalist, he now lives on in a Ben-Yehuda Street here, a Ben-Yehuda school there, a Ben-Yehuda taxi company or hotel, names woven into the everyday language that was once just the dream of a young student in Vilna. —By Otto Friedrich. Reported by David Aikman/Jerusalem

* Hebrew is the most successful example of revitalization, but not the only one. The Irish government has encouraged the teaching of Gaelic in schools. Nationalists in Wales are promoting the use of Welsh, while in Spain separatists advocate Basque and Catalan.