In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 10 Modern Hebrew We will be able to create a new language which is completely old. — Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, 1886 The Fire of Love for Hebrew We now jump ahead in time to January 7, 1858, when a man was born in Lithuania in whom “the fire of love for the Hebrew language burned,” as he would later write. The man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, was born Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman in a Lithuanian village called Luzhky under circumstances not much different than most of his peers. Most Jewish boys in Luzhky started studying Hebrew and Torah at three years of age, Mishnah (also in Hebrew) a few years later, and by age nine or ten moved to the study of the Talmud (in Aramaic). Young Eliezer was seen as a gifted Hebrew scholar, and so, like other potential scholars, he was sent to a religious yeshiva after his bar mitzvah to continue his studies. Eliezer thus made his way to neighboring Polotzk. Though he had been sent to Polotzk to learn religious matters, BenYehuda was exposed there to two related aspects of modernity: the secular thinking of the Enlightenment and the notion that Hebrew could be used to express those secular thoughts. He learned that the Hebrew which he so loved could be used not only to study religious texts, but to express the modern secular thoughts of the 19th century that he was just learning to appreciate. Ben-Yehuda thus joined the ranks of those 19th-century Jews who struggled with the juxtaposition of antiquity and modernity, and who accepted 187 188 Modern Hebrew the latter into their lives. He was not alone in accepting modernity, but he turned out to be too modern for Polotzk. So he left, and made his way to a city called Glubokia. There, a woman named Devora Yonas (who turned out to be his future wife) helped Ben-Yehuda add French, German, and Russian to the Lithuanian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic that he had already studied. He would later learn Arabic, too, in Algiers. In addition to his linguistic interests, Ben-Yehuda was caught up in the nationalism that pervaded 19th-century Europe. The competing goals of nationless inclusion in an empire and national unity were played out most dramatically in Ben-Yehuda’s life at the age of twenty, in the form of the Russo-Turkish war, which let the Bulgarians leave the Ottoman empire. Ben-Yehuda saw in this the signs of the ultimate downfall of the Ottoman empire itself, an eventuality that only augmented the need for Jewish nationality. A year later, Ben-Yehuda published his first article, “A Weighty Question ” ( , also sometimes translated as “An Important Question ”), in the Hebrew periodical “The Dawn” (Ha-shaxar ). There he traced European nationalism, and arrived at his own definition of the term. He then asked his “weighty question”: What qualities must a nation-state have? His answer included a requirement for a common language. More particularly, his answer for the Jews was that they must not only have a land but a language. Palestine was to be that land and Hebrew was to be that language. The notion of a people retaking control of a land they had once owned took no one by surprise. After all, earlier in the century the Greeks and Italians had retaken control of their ancient lands. But the Greeks did not return to speaking ancient Greek1 and the Italians did not return to Latin. Ben-Yehuda’s first attempt at publishing the article, in “The Speaker” (Ha-Maggid ), had been unsuccessful, his ideas having been rejected as nothing more than “visions and exaggerations.” Even years later, BenYehuda would face similar criticism, for example, when the editor of a leading Palestinian newspaper called his ideas mere “pious dreams.” His ideas were indeed dreams and visions, representing what seemed to be a wholly unrealistic and unachievable goal. While Hebrew had never been fully abandoned as a spoken language, it is doubtful if anyone spoke 1. Modern Greek is so different than ancient Greek that high school students in 21st-century Greece spend four years studying ancient Greek, and yet can only read Aristotle with difficulty . Nonetheless, the great national importance the Greeks place on a “continuously spoken Greek language” prevents many inhabitants of the country today from recognizing the vast differences in the languages. Similarly, many Greeks of the time may have believed they were literally speaking the language of their ancestors. But if so, they...

Share