A Bit More Detail

Oakland Ross' article in yesterday's Sunday Star, "How Hebrew rose from the dead", is an interesting overview of the history behind Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's kickstarting the late 19th century revival of the Hebrew language as an everyday vernacular after nearly two thousand years.

Little more than 100 years have passed since Hebrew first began to rediscover its tongue. Last spoken in Old Testament times, it now is firmly established as the primary language of about 5 million Jewish Israelis, not to mention some 2 million additional Hebrew speakers scattered through the world.

The once-dead language possesses a rich, modern vocabulary, extensive enough to support a 16-volume dictionary, with an even more comprehensive work on the way.

Its speakers can swear, sing, argue, mate, conduct wars, negotiate peace treaties, publish newspapers and carry out any of the countless other human activities that profit from the use of words.

Hebrew also boasts a thriving literature, including a Nobel laureate--Shmuel Agnon in 1966--plus a host of prominent contemporary writers, led by Amos Oz.

This, in any language, would constitute a mouthful. In the case of Hebrew, however, the transformation is extraordinary.

A parlance last used in oral form by biblical prophets has accommodated itself in only a few decades to a world of six-lane highways, reality TV and the Internet.

Born in 1858, Ben Yehuda arrived in the Holy Land in the early 1880s as a pilgrim from czarist Russia.

At the time, not a solitary person on Earth used Hebrew as a means of communication for daily affairs. In fact, barely a soul had done so for more than 2,000 years.

True, the language survived in written form for liturgical purposes, but nobody spoke it at the dinner table, during sporting contests or while preparing for bed.

Depending on where they lived, Jews in modern times spoke a variety of languages, ranging from Yiddish, Ladino and Arabic to an array of European tongues.

Inspired by the early stirrings of Zionism, Ben Yehuda decided that what Jews really needed in order to become a nation--apart from a land of their own--was a common means of communication.

Quixotically perhaps, he settled on Hebrew, which had ceased to be the spoken language of the Jews several centuries before the birth of Christ, according to Frieden.

By the time of the Romans' destruction of the second temple in 70 AD--the event that sparked the flight of the Jews into the Diaspora--those fleeing souls mostly spoke Aramaic.

Nonetheless, on his arrival in Jerusalem in the years of Ottoman rule, Ben Yehuda somehow convinced his wife that they should converse exclusively in Hebrew, both between themselves and with their children. Their first son, Yitzhak, is credited with the first child whose first language was Hebrew in two millennia.

"This is what they did," says Birnbaum. "This was the start of the whole thing."

Other Jews were moving to the Holy Land, many of them inspired by the Zionist dream, and Ben Yehuda managed to persuade neighbouring families to take part in what quickly became his life's central project.

Although not a linguist, Ben Yehuda set about coining thousands of words to describe daily phenomena--articles and activities missing from Hebrew's ancient vocabulary.

"There wasn't a vernacular in Hebrew," notes Frieden. "How do you speak a language that only exists as a religious language?"

Against great odds, Hebrew began to catch on among Jews as a means of conversing about their day-to-day affairs.

In 1914, eight years before Ben Yehuda's death, an association of Jewish teachers in the Holy Land decided to make Hebrew the official medium of instruction in their schools, a critical milestone in the language's journey back from the dead. By the time Israel was established as a state in 1948, it was home to 600,000 Hebrew speakers.