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Tongue of the Prophets
by Robert St. John
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Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the Jewish scholar who almost unaided revived the Hebrew language and helped to lay the cornerstone for the new state of Israel, was born in a small town in Lithuania, educated in Russia and France. It was in Paris that he conceived the idea to which he was to devote his life, for even as a young man he realized that Jews could never have any country of their own, or any national entity, unless they had a common language. He determined to revive ancient Hebrew and make it the common language of a new Jewish state.
In 1881, with practically no money and in the worst possible health – the doctors him he had only a few months to live – he set out for Palestine. Shortly after his arrival he sent for Deborah, the daughter of one of his benefactors, but before he married her he made her promise to speak nothing but Hebrew to or to any children they might have. Thus, with the birth of their first child, Deborah Ben Yehuda became "the first Hebrew mother in nearly two thousand years."
In Jerusalem, Ben Yehuda taught school, published a newspaper, the Deer, which became a fighting spokesman for Jewish independence and a testing ground for the words which he was constantly adding to the Hebrew language. At the same time he began work on his great Hebrew dictionary.
Deborah died, but the crusade went on. The Deer became the center of controversy both inside and outside Palestine, and the Turks finally banned it for almost two years. Ben Yehuda married his wife's sister, who in 1909 found a German publisher for the first volumes of the dictionary.
Eliezer Ben Yehuda died in 1922, his great work still incomplete, but most of the material for eleven posthumous volumes of his dictionary had been collected, Hebrew was spoken freely in Palestine, and Zionism had become firmly established in the political thinking of the world. While he was still alive, he had been attacked on all sides, but in death he was mourned by all factions as a truly great man.
This biography of Ben Yehuda is the touching and inspiring story of a frail scholar burning with an inner fire, whose fanatical devotion to a single idea triumphed against overwhelming odds.
Tongue of the Prophets
400 pages, photographs....$15.00 |
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