David Yellin

David Yellin was an educator, Hebrew-language activist, and writer born in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Nahalat Shiva, which was established by his father. At age fourteen, Yellin, who had a traditional education, began editing Har tsiyon, a Hebrew newspaper that he published twice a month. In 1881, while studying in a yeshiva in London, Yellin met Nissim Behar, a Jerusalemite Sephardic Hebrew educator who inspired him to return to Jerusalem to begin what would become a lifelong career of teaching Hebrew. With Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, in 1890 Yellin established the Hebrew Language Committee, the forerunner to the Hebrew Language Academy; in 1903 he cofounded with Menachem Ussishkin the Hebrew Teachers Union; in 1913 he founded the Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary. Active in B’nai B’rith and Jerusalem politics, Yellin served on the city’s municipal council (1905–1920) and as deputy mayor. He composed more than one hundred texts, including myriad translations, several plays for youth, Hebrew grammars, and countless articles in Hebrew journals. Yellin was a founding faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is recognized as central to the formal revival and development of the modern Hebrew language, particularly its neologisms.