Eliezer Ben-Yehuda Raised His Son to Be the First Native Speaker of Modern Hebrew

Hebrew was, in 1881, no one's first language. It had been a liturgical and scholarly tongue continuously for nearly two thousand years — used in prayer, in rabbinic argument, and in correspondence between communities — but no Jewish child had grown up speaking it as a mother tongue since around 200 CE. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman in 1858 in what is now Belarus, decided to change that. He had studied at the Sorbonne and absorbed European nationalist ideas about the connection between language and nation. He wrote that a Jewish state, if there were ever to be one, would need a Jewish language; the only candidate was Hebrew.

In 1881 he moved with his wife to Jerusalem, then under Ottoman rule, and announced that the household would speak only Hebrew. The first practical problem was domestic. Hebrew of 1881 had no word for doll, ice cream, bicycle, jelly, or hundreds of other ordinary things. Ben-Yehuda invented some, drew some from biblical roots, and lifted some from cognate Arabic. His son Itamar Ben-Avi, born in 1882, grew up forbidden to hear or speak any other language; until he started school he was, more or less, the only native speaker of modern Hebrew alive. The Orthodox communities of Jerusalem despised the project, which they considered a profanation. Ben-Yehuda was excommunicated, briefly imprisoned in 1893 by Ottoman authorities on charges of sedition, and continued working.

He died in 1922 of tuberculosis; an estimated 30,000 mourners attended his funeral in Jerusalem. The seventeen-volume Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew he had been compiling was finished by his successors in 1959. Today's Hebrew has roughly 9 million speakers, almost all of them native.