Background
Ben-Yehuda was born in Lithuania on January 7, 1858.
lexicographer and newspaper editor
Ben-Yehuda was born in Lithuania on January 7, 1858.
Eliezer Perlman was sent to a yeshiva (Talmudic academy), but soon left to study privately with a rabbi. This rabbi introduced the boy to a Hebrew translation of "Robinson Crusoe" and from that moment Ben-Yehuda became fanatical in his belief that the Hebrew tongue should be not only a language of prayer but also a secular language.
When his family heard of the boy’s new interests, they brought him home; when he was caught reading secular books, he was turned out. He was taken in by an “enlightened” Jewish family called Yones, whose eldest daughter, Deborah, taught Perlman French, German, and Russian. He left them to study at a high school and then went to Paris to study medicine because he hoped that this would bring him into contact with people who could help him fulfill his dream: to live in a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel where Hebrew would be the spoken vernacular.
In his first published article, in a Viennese Hebrew journal, Ben-Yehuda (who had now Hebraized his name) appealed for settlement in the Land of Israel. Health problems sent him for a time to Algiers, where the climate helped his condition, but he was to suffer from tuberculosis for the rest of his life. On his return to Paris, he found that his appeal in the Viennese journal had been widely reprinted and had evoked considerable reaction - most of it negative.
He then started sending articles to the Jerusalem Hebrew journal Ilavatzelet, expressing his ideas, that Hebrew had to be modernized to be used as a language that unified the Jews. Realizing that he might be regarded as a hypocrite for remaining in Paris while advocating Jewish resettlement in Eretz Israel, he decided to move there. En route he reencountcrcd and married Deborah Yones, and the couple arrived in Jaffa in 1881. They settled in Jerusalem, where Ben-Yehuda worked as associate editor of Havatzelet.
Ben-Yehuda started to teach Hebrew at a new school under French Jewish auspices, but he lost his job on the journal because his views were too radical for its editor. He then founded his own weekly, Ha-Tzevi, the first modern, European-style journal in the country.
In 1891, his wife died, leaving him with five children, three of whom died within the following three months. Subsequently, Eliezer married his wife’s sister, Hemda, who was to help him actively in his work and publications.
On one occasion, the Ottoman authorities objected to an article in Ben-Yehuda’s journal (which, in fact, had been written by his father-in-law) and imprisoned him for a time, took away his newspaper license for a year, and forbade him to leave the country (as a result he missed the first Zionist Congress). By 1897, the use of Hebrew had begun to spread throughout the country, partly thanks to the support of the new settlers who had arrived from Eastern Europe. Books and plays began to appear, and Ben-Yehuda started to devote himself to what was to become his greatest monument, his "Hebrew dictionary". He maintained that as the Jews had produced a vast literature down the centuries, old words could usually be used to express everyday language. He set out to trace lost Hebrew words and, when these were not forthcoming for what he wanted to express, he coined new words, sometimes borrowing from cognate Semitic languages. He introduced his new words through his newspaper and encouraged his family to use them wherever possi¬ble so as to encourage their dissemination. Most of his suggestions passed into common parlance.
Ben-Yehuda put the old and the new words into a dictionary that included translations into French, German, and English for purposes of definition, with references to many Hebrew sources and to a multitude of other languages. It was also a thesau¬rus with a list of connected words appearing after each entry. And also showed the changes undergone by each word throughout its history.
By 1914 he had completed half of his dictionary, but when Turkey entered World War I, he had to leave the country and moved to the United States. On his return after the war, he was greeted by the British governor of Jerusalem with the Hebrew words “Shalom aleikhem.” Ben-Yehuda said he had never dreamed that he would be greeted in Hebrew by a British governor. Under British rule, Hebrew became one of the country’s three official languages and Hebrew teachers in the Diaspora found themselves in great demand. Ben-Yehuda lived to see the results of a census, in which a majority of the country’s Jews gave Hebrew as their mother-tongue.
He left his dictionary unfinished at his death. His widow and son looked after its completion, and the last of the seventeen volumes appeared in 1959.
Ben-Yehuda’s insistence on speaking Hebrew brought him many enemies, especially among the Orthodox, who regarded Hebrew as a holy tongue not to be desecrated by everyday use. Sometimes he was attacked w'ith stones as he traveled around Jerusalem, but his home was a Hebrew-speaking home, with Ben-Yehuda insisting on a Sephardic pronunciation, which he felt was the closest to the Hebrew of the Bible. His children were brought up speaking Hebrew, which made it very difficult for them as they had no playmates with whom they could talk.