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.