Letter to Ha-Shaḥar on Reviving the Hebrew Language

Eliezer Yitsḥak Perlman was a pioneering champion and the living symbol of the idea that the Hebrew language, properly modernized, had to be the living language of a revived Jewish nation in the Land of Israel/Palestine. Born in Luzhki, in the Russian Empire (today Belarus), Perlman was educated both in traditional and in Haskalah texts. Influenced, he later suggested, by the nationalist currents in the Balkans, he first articulated a call for Hebrew language revival twinned with the creation of some sort of Jewish national center in Palestine in 1879; he discussed this in an article in Peretz Smolenskin’s Ha-Shaḥar under the pen name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Son of Judah). Immigrating with his wife and children to Palestine in 1881, he embarked on what would be decades of linguistic work to render Hebrew adequate to all the needs of modern life and daily discourse while famously insisting that his family speak only Hebrew at home. His vision, which he expressed as a writer and editor in many different venues, coupled with his non-Orthodox sensibility, provoked opposition from Palestine’s ultra-Orthodox community but won growing support in the Zionist movement and in Palestine’s growing Zionist subculture, in which his son, Itamar Ben-Avi (the Hebrew Initials of his father’s name AB"Y read also read “Son of My Father”), and his second wife, Ḥemda Ben-Yehuda, played a significant role as well. His magnum opus, Milon ha-lashon ha-‘ivrit ha-yeshanah ve-ha-ḥadashah (A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew, 17 vols., 1908–1959), was finished posthumously by Ḥemda, herself also an important Hebrew writer and translator.