Eliezer Ben Yehuda

Eliezer Ben Yehuda became renown throughout the world as the founder of the modern Hebrew language. Born into a religious family, he grew up in a traditional Jewish shtetl in Lithuania and learned both Yiddish and Hebrew as a child. Under the influence of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala), he broke with his past. He began to speak Russian in everyday life and read world literature. Ben Yehuda first studied German and French, followed by English, Latin and Arabic.

On the issue of the “Jewish Question,” he was an advocate of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination and became one of the founding fathers of Zionism. He aimed to create a Jewish national identity within a secular community with modernized Hebrew as a unifying new language. In 1881, at the age of 23, Ben Yehuda immigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem.

From then on he dedicated his life to the re-establishment of the Hebrew language – which for many centuries had been considered almost exclusively a Jewish prayer language – and to its becoming a contemporary and secular language for daily use.

Ben Yehuda’s “Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew,” published by Langenscheidt in eighteen volumes between 1910 and 1959, was his academic life’s work. His work was a great success. By the year 1918, Hebrew had been established – along with English and Arabic – as one of the official languages in Palestine. Eliezer Ben Yehuda passed away in 1922. After the State of Israel was founded, modern Hebrew (Ivrit) became a central pillar of national identity.