Background
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman in the small town of Lushki in the province of Vilna, Lithuania.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman in the small town of Lushki in the province of Vilna, Lithuania.
He received a traditional Jewish education. At an early age he moved from town to town in search of good religious and secular schooling. He completed his secondary education in Dvinsk. Realizing that he would not be accepted in a Russian university because of discriminatory laws against Jews, Ben Yehuda went to the University of Paris, where he studied medicine in 1879.
The struggle for independence in the Balkan countries made Ben Yehuda aware of the homelessness of the Jews and of the need to restore the ancient, wandering people to its homeland-Palestine. In 1879 Ben Yehuda published his first Hebrew article in Hashahar (The Dawn), the foremost Hebrew monthly of the time. He presented the then novel idea of the return to Zion and revival of the ancient Hebrew tongue as the spoken language of a resurrected people. During his stay in Paris, Ben Yehuda succumbed to tuberculosis and had to postpone his plan to settle in Palestine. He went first to Algiers, where he continued to publish articles in the Hebrew press, including the weekly Havazelet, printed in Jerusalem. In 1881 he was invited to Jerusalem as assistant editor of that weekly. His health having improved, he accepted the post. On his way he married Dvora Jonas, who shared his ideals. Upon his arrival in Jerusalem he organized a group which dedicated itself to the task of using Hebrew as a daily language. It took Ben Yehuda many years of persistent work to convince the skeptics that Hebrew could be made to live again. He was also bitterly attacked by religious factions in Jerusalem, who opposed the secular use of the holy tongue. In his own newspapers, which he had begun to publish, he coined new Hebrew terms and words for daily use. His children were the first in modern times to speak Hebrew as their mother tongue. To make available the riches of ancient as well as modern Hebrew, Ben Yehuda concentrated his efforts on his monumental lifework, The Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, Old and New. He worked daily on the dictionary and continued the task during the years of World War I, which he spent in New York. At his death five volumes of the dictionary had been published. Ben Yehuda left enough material to complete the work. In all, 16 volumes were published, the last one appearing in 1959. Ben Yehuda also wrote textbooks in history and literature and translated literary works into Hebrew. Ben Yehuda suffered from poor health; at times he endured hunger and persecution; yet at the end he witnessed the triumph of his ideal. The Hebrew language, which has become the national tongue of Israel, today serves as the mortar that cements the multilingual Jews who have come from the far corners of the world into one nation.
Quotations: "The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and. .. become a living language. "
Ben‑Yehuda raised his son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda (the first name meaning "son of Zion"), entirely through Hebrew. He refused to let his son be exposed to other languages during childhood. He even once yelled at his wife, after he caught her singing a Russian lullaby to the child. His son Ben-Zion was the first native speaker of modern Hebrew as mother tongue.
Ben Yehuda was married twice, to two sisters. His first wife, Devora (née Jonas), died in 1891 of tuberculosis, leaving him with five small children. Her final wish was that Eliezer marry her younger sister, Paula Beila. Soon after his wife Devora's death, three of his children died of diphtheria within a period of 10 days. Six months later, he married Paula, who took the Hebrew name "Hemda. "
