Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman (1858-1922) was born in Lithuania to an Orthodox family. His father died when he was five, and his mother sent him to live with an uncle. After his bar mitzvah, his uncle sent him to a yeshivah in a nearby town. There, he met a rabbi who introduced him to the ideas of the Enlightenment. He soon began reading the classics of world literature, but it was discovered by the yeshivah authorities and expelled.

Eliezer wandered helplessly until he was «adopted» by the family of Shlomo Yonas, an enlightened Jew. Amazed by the abilities of a 14-year-old boy, Yonas asked his daughter Deborah to teach him French, German, and Russian. In 1878, he went to Paris to study medicine. It was there that it occurred to him that Hebrew should be transformed from a language used only by rabbis and scholars to a language used by people in the marketplace. He began writing his ideas about a Jewish homeland with Hebrew as the common language, under the pseudonym Eliezer Ben Yehuda.

It was in Algeria that I first heard the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew. He has adopted it as his way of speaking Hebrew. I have returned to France and decided to live in the Land of Israel. He proposed marriage to Deborah, but on the condition that only Hebrew would be spoken in his home.

When the couple arrived in Jerusalem, they adopted the dress and customs of religious Jews. They wanted to influence them to revive the Hebrew language. They only used Hebrew for prayer and study. He began publishing a newspaper, «Zvi,» in which he used new words he had devised. Pioneers coming from Europe began using Hebrew as their journaling language.

When the Sabbatical year arrived, the rabbis decreed that farming the land had to be stopped. Eliezer found this absurd and wrote about it in his newspaper. In response, the rabbis contacted Eliezer and his newspaper. Eliezer and his wife stopped pretending to be religious Jews. In 1891, Deborah died, leaving him with several young children. His sister-in-law Hemda, 14 years his junior, came to visit them, and they eventually married. This was frowned upon by the religious community in Jerusalem. In 1895, he began working on a dictionary of modern Hebrew.

Together with Herzl, Ben Yehuda supported the Uganda proposal to establish a Jewish homeland. Because of this, the pioneers who had arrived in the Land of Israel became hostile to him and considered him a traitor. Upon Herzl’s death, Ben Yehuda abandoned the Uganda idea and concentrated on his dictionary. With Hemda’s help, he managed to publish 17 volumes.

Eliezer Ben Yehuda had an enormous impact on modern Jewish life, although he failed to convince ultra-Orthodox groups to speak Hebrew. He died in 1922, the year British authorities declared Hebrew, English, and Arabic the three official languages ​​of the Land of Israel. His son Ben Zion spoke only Hebrew from birth, and people spoke Hebrew in the marketplace.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Articles by Libby Kantorwitz, Jack Fellman, David Saiger, and Ami Isserof.