Israel marks Hebrew Language Day every year on the birthday of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of modern spoken Hebrew. This year, the Hebrew date falls on January 19.
The revival of the Hebrew language is an extraordinary story, unparalleled in history. A language with roots dating back more than 3,000 years, it was brought back to life after centuries during which it effectively lay dormant, and it’s now flourishing in the 21st century.
A hundred and fifty years ago, Hebrew was not a spoken language. It was literally nobody's mother tongue. Today, more than 9 million people speak Hebrew and, for the majority of them, it’s their native tongue.
Throughout the millennia of the Jewish dispersion following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Hebrew remained alive in liturgy and religious ceremonies and as a sort of lingua franca across the Diaspora. Written Hebrew continued to evolve; it was the language of poetry and correspondence between scholars, who wrote books on law and philosophy in Hebrew. Each generation was encouraged to be literate in Hebrew so as to be familiar with Judaism’s foundational texts and life-cycle traditions and rituals. But, during these years, the language ceased to be a living, breathing part of ordinary, secular personal or national life.
Man of vision: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda
Eliezer Ben Yehuda was the driving force behind the revival of the ancient language and its transformation into its modern form. This visionary linguist, who was born in Lithuania in 1858, came to Israel in 1881 with a dream to transform Hebrew into a modern language and to make it the language spoken in every home in Israel. He settled in Jerusalem and dedicated his life to the realization of his dream.
Ben Yehuda campaigned to make Hebrew the language of instruction in Israeli schools, worked on expanding the Hebrew vocabulary so it could meet the demands of modern Israeli society, created the first modern Hebrew dictionary and edited the first Hebrew-language daily newspapers. His son, Itamar Ben-Avi, was the first child in modern times to grow up with Hebrew as his mother tongue.
Ben-Yehuda fashioned out of the ancient Hebrew structures over 300 new Hebrew words. Since then, more than 15,000 new words have been added, and we’re still counting.
Layers of Hebrew: Historical review of the Hebrew language
The Hebrew language and its distinctive history is an indispensable key to understanding Israel's historical and cultural heritage. Just like the Jewish people, the Hebrew language experienced many vicissitudes from the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans through to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
This vibrant history can be divided into five main periods:
1. Biblical Hebrew – Over 3,000 years ago, when the people of Israel first arrived in the Holy Land, Hebrew was established as the national language. Hebrew remained in common usage, even during the Babylonian exile (686-534 BCE), for over 1,500 years, till around 400 CE when, under the weight of the dispersion of the Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple, it fell out of common usage. Biblical Hebrew survived through this time (and indeed through to today) through its role as the language of liturgy and of religious texts.
2. Mishnaic Hebrew – The Mishnah, the corpus of Jewish law that was written in Hebrew, was edited during the 2nd century CE. Here we find new words and idioms that were added to the language.
3. Medieval Hebrew - At the turn of the first millennium, there was a revival of Hebrew in Jewish communities across the globe, with grammar study that was accompanied by the appearance of the first Hebrew dictionary. During the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain, Hebrew poetry written by gifted Jewish poets enriched the Hebrew language even further. It was at this time that Hebrew began again to spread outside the traditional fields of liturgy and religious learning.
4. Renaissance Hebrew – In the 15th and 16th centuries, the technological development of printing made its contribution to Hebrew; the first Hebrew printing press in the Holy Land established in Safed in 1577.
During this period and later, many European scholars tried to establish Hebrew as "the mother of all languages." They believed that Hebrew was the original source from which all other languages developed.
5. Modern Hebrew – In the 19th century, Hebrew underwent an unprecedented revival. This is the time of Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s efforts and accomplishments. Many authors and poets joined his campaign and their efforts helped unleash an era of immense linguistic vitality and creativity. Hebrew became an official language of the State of Israel in 1948.
Since then, as Israel absorbed millions of immigrants and grappled with the myriad challenges of building a modern state, and more recently, with the impact of globalization and immense technological changes, modern Hebrew has grown into a dynamic language with a lexicon of more than 75,000 words. These include over 2,400 deliberately designed Hebrew alternatives for foreign words and recent terms which the ancient language never contained.
Ancient language, new era
The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language is part of the creative energy which has always characterized the story of modern Israel. The Hebrew language is a rich, compelling expression of Israeli vitality and, at the same time, of the profound link between the Bible and the latter-day rejuvenation of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. This is a story of national and cultural revival unparalleled anywhere else. And the realization of a vision that only a few generations ago would have seemed like a wild and impossible dream.