Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Revival of the Hebrew Language

Hello everyone, and welcome to the new episode of the podcast "Yalla: Learning Hebrew with Steph." I'm Steph, and today we're going to talk about something really special that connects to everyone listening to this podcast. We're going to talk about the Hebrew language itself: where it came from, and how it almost disappeared from the world. Every time I record an episode for this podcast, I'm speaking in a language that, 140 years ago, almost no one spoke. People read Hebrew, prayed in Hebrew and wrote in Hebrew. But no one spoke Hebrew with their family, on the street, at home or at work. For almost 2,000 years, Hebrew wasn't a language people used in daily life. And then, in a pretty short amount of time, everything changed. Today, more than 9 million people speak Hebrew every day. When you think about it, that's incredible. There's no other language in history that went from being spoken by no one to being spoken by nine million people so quickly. So today I'm going to tell you the story of how that happened, and about the man who started it all: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Just before we start, I'll remind you that you can find all the episodes and transcripts, in both Hebrew and English, on my website, hebrew-with-steph.com. Okay, let's get started! Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born in 1858 in a small town that was part of the Russian Empire. His family name wasn't Ben-Yehuda. He was born with the name Eliezer Perlman, and later on he changed his name to Ben-Yehuda. From the time Eliezer was young, he had a dream that seemed impossible at the time: that Jews would live in a land of their own and speak a language that was their own. Not just to pray and read, but to actually speak it and live in it. In 1881, Eliezer moved to Jerusalem to try to make his dream a reality. And he decided to start this process in his own home. Ben-Yehuda decided that his house would be the first place where people spoke only Hebrew. That wasn't an easy decision. Think about it: at the time there weren't enough words in Hebrew to talk about everything in modern life, and almost no one around him spoke Hebrew. When his son was born, a son who was named Ben-Zion, whose name was later changed to Itamar Ben-Avi, Eliezer wanted him to be the first child in 2,000 years to speak Hebrew as a native language. There's a famous story that Eliezer made sure his son didn't speak any other language at all, to the point that he got angry at his wife when she sang to their son in Russian. It's hard to imagine growing up like that as a child. For a long time, Itamar didn't have anyone to talk to. Ben-Yehuda worked constantly. He worked as the editor of the newspaper "HaTzvi," which brought the Hebrew language to a lot of people. He also spent many years writing a huge dictionary of the Hebrew language, 17 volumes long, so big that it was only finished after his death, in 1922. At that time, a lot of people didn't agree with Ben-Yehuda. They felt that Hebrew was a holy language, a language just for the Bible and for prayer, and that it was wrong to use it for ordinary things like "ice cream" or "bicycle." But Ben-Yehuda believed the opposite: he believed a language isn't truly alive if you can't use it for everything. Okay, now I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. When people tell this story, they usually say that Ben-Yehuda revived the Hebrew language on his own. That sounds like a very nice story, but the truth is a bit different, and I actually think the truth is more interesting. First of all, Hebrew was never completely dead. Throughout all those centuries, Jews around the world read Hebrew, prayed in Hebrew and wrote in Hebrew. Because Jews came from so many different countries and spoke Yiddish, Arabic and other languages, they sometimes used Hebrew between themselves to understand each other. So Hebrew wasn't completely dead, it just wasn't being used very much. Besides that, one person can't revive an entire language alone. Eliezer was the first person to raise the idea loudly, and he added a lot of new words. But what really brought the Hebrew language back to life was something bigger: schools. In the eighteenth century, new schools opened that taught children every subject, math, history, science, all of it, in Hebrew. New immigrants arrived from all over the world and chose to speak Hebrew instead of their previous languages. So it was the children, the teachers and the families who turned Hebrew from an idea into a living language. Ben-Yehuda planted the seed, but the whole community grew the tree. Because no one was using Hebrew in daily life, it was missing a lot of modern words. Because of that, people had to invent them, usually starting from an existing root and building a new word from it. Something wonderful to think about is that a lot of the words we use today come from Ben-Yehuda himself. For example: milón (מילון): a dictionary itón (עיתון): a newspaper glída (גלידה): ice cream ofanáyim (אופניים): a bicycle bubá (בובה): a doll magévet (מגבת): a towel ribá (ריבה): jam Take a second to think about that. When you order ice cream on a hot day in Tel Aviv, you're using a word that was invented only about 100 years ago. So why is this story meaningful to me? When I'm learning Hebrew, sometimes I feel like it's hard and slow, and I ask myself, why am I doing this? But then I remember this story, and it gives me a lot of motivation. Everyone who speaks Hebrew as their mother tongue today speaks Hebrew thanks to someone before them who learned Hebrew from scratch, just like me today. And maybe, many years ago, that same thought gave those people motivation to keep going too. Hebrew wasn't always someone's native language. People built it, one speaker at a time. So when the words feel hard, or when I make mistakes, I try to remember that. If so many people could learn this language from scratch as their second language, then I can learn it too! And there's one more thing I love: when you're learning Hebrew, you're a small part of keeping the language alive. You're part of the story of the revival of the Hebrew language. That's it for today's episode. It was a bit different from the other episodes, so I really hope you enjoyed it and that the topic interests you as much as it interests me. If you already knew this story, or even if you just want to share your favorite Hebrew word, I'd love to hear from you. You can post a message on my website or comment on the podcast. As always, you can find the words from the podcast, with examples, and both the English and Hebrew transcripts, on my website. I'll put a link to my website in the podcast description. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the podcast "Yalla: Learning Hebrew with Steph," and until next time, take care and keep learning.