Eliezer Ben-Jude

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Ben-Jude at work on his dictionary

Eliezer Ben-Jehuda [ ɛli'ʕɛzeʁ bɛn jɛhu'da ] ( Hebrew אֱלִיעֶזֶר בֶּן־יְהוּדָה, born Eliezer Jitzchak Perlman ; * January 7, 1858 in Luschki, Russian Empire ; † December 16, 1922 in Jerusalem ) was a journalist and author of the first modern Hebrew dictionary. He is considered to be the most important force in completing and spreading modern Ivrit , especially as a spoken language. He has thus revived Hebrew as the mother tongue , which had been used almost exclusively as a sacred language in Torah studies since around 200 AD .

Life

Growing up in Europe

Childhood in Russia

He was born as Eliezer Jitzchak Perlman in Luschki (in today's Belarus ), a small town in the Vilnius Governorate (then the Russian Empire ), into a poor, Jewish-Orthodox family. His father Yehuda Leib died when Eliezer was five years old. His mother Feige Perlman remarried, the marriage divorced a few years later and Eliezer was given to his maternal uncle, David Wolfson, for economic reasons. After his bar mitzvah at the age of 13 years, his uncle sent him to a yeshiva of Rabbi Joseph Blücker in Polotsk , where he Talmud lessons received, in the hope that he would make a career as a rabbi to take. A rabbi, from whom Eliezer received lessons, initiated him into the Jewish enlightenment, the Haskala , which impressed him very much and gave his life a different direction. He turned into a free thinker and shaved his sidelocks , devoted himself to cultural life and began to read secular literature .

After such books were found on him, he had to leave the yeshiva. This annoyed his uncle, who from now on no longer supported him and asked him to leave the house. Fourteen-year-old Eliezer was taken in after a short period of wandering by a Jewish family in Glubokoye near Vitebsk who shared his secular views. Schlomo Jonas, father of the family and wealthy entrepreneur, was impressed by Eliezer and encouraged him in his development. Debora, the eldest daughter of the family, whom he later married, gave him language lessons in French, German and Russian for the next two years, which paved the way for him to the grammar school in Daugavpils (dt. Dünaburg ). In the same year in which he graduated from high school, the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78 began , in which he raised a lot of enthusiasm for the Balkan peoples , whose independence was to be fought for.

Paris and turning to Zionism

He began to extend the idea of ​​national liberation to the Jewish people; its own country, its own language. The following quote is an example of this:

“It was as if the heavens had suddenly opened, a bright, incandescent light blazed before my eyes and a powerful inner voice boomed in my ears: the rebirth of Israel on the soil of its ancestors… The more the national concept grew in me the more I became aware of what a common language means for a nation "

- Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

In this way he became a staunch Zionist . In 1878 he first went to Paris to study medicine at the Sorbonne .

The Sorbonne

In the intellectual environment there and in many conversations, the idea arose to no longer limit Hebrew to discussing religious topics, but to transform it into an everyday language and mother tongue. For the first time under the pseudonym Eliezer Ben-Jehuda he published an essay on his political ideas in the Hebrew magazine Haschachar (German: The Dawn ) , which was edited by Peretz Smolenskin and was very important for the Haskala . Mainly he called for immigration to Palestine . He also worked to build a national and spiritual center for the Jews there. He also declared Hebrew as a common language to be a basic requirement for a national unity of Judaism. In Paris he met a Jewish journalist, among others, who told him that he had spoken Hebrew with the Jews there on his travels through Africa and Asia, so that the language was by no means a dead language , which motivated Ben-Yehuda in his efforts .

In the winter of 1878, Ben-Jehuda fell ill with tuberculosis and had to break off his studies. In search of the warmer climate, he traveled to Algiers . During a stay in a sanatorium, he met the Jerusalem scholar Abraham Moses Luncz , who spoke Sephardic Hebrew with him . From him, Ben-Yehuda learned that the members of the various Jewish communities in Jerusalem could only communicate with each other in Hebrew with their different mother tongues, which further strengthened his plan.

Back in Paris he continued to write political articles and attended a seminar of the Alliance Israélite Universelle , where he was trained as an instructor for an agricultural school. There he also met the lecturer Joseph Halévy , an early proponent of coining new Hebrew words for terms that do not appear in religious scriptures.

He became a strong advocate for the construction and settlement of Palestine and chose to live there. He informed his former host father Schlomo Jonas of his plan, who then offered him to marry his daughter Debora. Ben-Yehuda agreed on the condition that their future children would only be raised in Hebrew. They then met in Vienna on the way to Palestine and married before landing in Jaffa by ship in 1881 .

Jerusalem - Palestine

Jerusalem, Jaffa Gate around 1900

When they arrived in Jerusalem , they adopted the dress style and customs of the local religious Jews in the hope of increasing their influence on the local population and reviving Hebrew. From then on, Ben-Yehuda went to the synagogue , and Deborah covered her hair. Even though most of Jerusalem's Jewish population could speak Hebrew, communication mostly took place in the respective mother tongue. Only in the Sephardic communities was there a tradition of speaking Hebrew, albeit with a very limited vocabulary.

Ben-Yehuda accepted an apprenticeship in the Alliance Israélite Universelle , the first school to teach some subjects in Hebrew at Ben-Yehuda's insistence. He also began to write for the weekly, Hebrew literary magazine Ḥabatseleth (Eng. The Lily ) as an editorial assistant. In the second edition of 1882 he complained that the Alliance Israélite Universelle was encouraging and helping Russian-Jewish emigrants to emigrate to the United States of America , which he called the "final burial place of Judaism".

The first son of Deborah and Ben-Jehudas, Ben-Zion (later he changed his name to Itamar Ben-Avi ), was born in 1882 and was probably the first child in a very long time whose only mother tongue was Hebrew.

Edition of the HaZewi newspaper from December 18, 1899

Ben-Jehuda began his research on the Hebrew language and the creation of new words to enable everyday communication. From 1884 he published the Hebrew newspaper HaTzewi ( Eng . Der Hirsch ), which 30 years later, at the beginning of the First World War , was to be banned by the Ottoman Empire due to the open demand for a Jewish state . In his newspaper he used the words he had newly introduced, which found their way into other publications through adoption and thus into the developing linguistic usage. Many European Zionist immigrants who settled mostly outside Jerusalem were inspired to speak Hebrew by Yehuda.

A break with the Orthodox inhabitants of Jerusalem occurred with the approaching sabbath year , in which according to biblical custom it is forbidden to work the fields or to buy anything from Jews who do not comply with this commandment. In view of the difficulties that agriculture was already facing, Yehuda was very stubborn in his rejection of the rabbis and thus gambled away his reputation in the Jerusalem public. He and his newspaper were ostracized by the religious community. As a result, the Ben-Jehuda family no longer felt it was their duty to adhere to the religious dress code, and all previous religious friends were broken.

In 1890, as its chairman, Ben-Jehuda founded the forerunner of the Academy for the Hebrew Language , the " Wa'ad HaLaschon ", which still exists today . He worked there up to 18 hours a day in his later years to complete his " Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew ".

Ben-Jehuda with his second wife Hemda in 1912

In 1891 Eliezer's first wife, Debora, died of tuberculosis. She left him seven children. Six months later Paula, 14 years his junior, the sister of the late Deborah, visited him. The two married, whereupon Paula changed her non-Hebrew name to Hemda. The marriage intensified the antipathies between Ben-Yehuda and the Jerusalem community. They aroused in him a strong dislike of the religious leaders, whom he later accused of embezzling donations for their personal use.

Three years later, in 1894, Ben-Yehuda published an article by his father-in-law in which the phrase "let us join forces and move forward" was to be found. The Ottoman Empire, which was averse to Zionism, saw a call to rebellion due to a misinterpretation in this sentence and had Ben-Yehuda imprisoned. He was only released through bribery and international intervention, with the condition that he would not publish any more newspapers for a year. He began working on a modern Hebrew dictionary with great intensity.

Theodor Herzl , who as president of the Zionist World Congress in Basel in 1903 campaigned for the British Uganda program , found a supporter of this idea in Ben-Yehuda, which caused Ben-Yehuda and his newspaper much disapproval from Jewish immigrants in Palestine. After Herzl died in 1904, Congress finally decided in 1905 to reject the British offer. Ben-Jehuda turned back to his dictionary, with the great help of his wife.

For his research he worked in national libraries and museums in various European capitals. From 1910 the first six volumes of the dictionary finally appeared in the " Langenscheidtschen Verlagsbuchhandlung " in Berlin. During the First World War Ben-Jehuda spent with his family in the United States (1915-1919). There, too, he worked on his dictionary. After returning to Jerusalem on November 29, 1922, he succeeded in convincing Herbert Samuel , the High Commissioner of the British Mandate for Palestine , to make Hebrew the official language alongside Arabic and English.

Eliezer Ben-Jehuda died the following month, December 16, 1922 in Jerusalem and was buried on the Mount of Olives .

After his death, his widow and son Ehud continued to publish the manuscript. The complete publication of all 17 volumes was completed in 1959. Today streets in numerous places in Israel bear his name.

Ben Yehuda House in Jerusalem

The house that Ben Yehuda had built in the southern suburb of Talpiot and in which his widow lived is now used by the Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste as a country headquarters and as an international meeting place ( Beit Ben Yehuda ). The place has become a meeting place between Germans and Israelis, as the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace has opened a youth hostel there and offers Hebrew language courses.

literature

Web links

Commons : Eliezer Ben-Jehuda  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ either still in Paris or already in Algiers (the information in the literature is not clear on this)
  2. ↑ Momentous Century; Part 8: Ittamar Ben Avi, the “Guinea Pig Infant” of Modern Spoken Hebrew, Tells How He Uttered His First Word in Hebrew (1885) p. 51; ISBN 0-8453-4748-9
  3. ↑ http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/newspapers/hazevi/html/hazevi-18991218.htm ( Memento from July 6, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ There is no agreement in the literature on the actual reason for the arrest. Some believe it was due to members of the ultra-Orthodox community who deliberately mistranslated the Ottoman authorities: "Let's gather an army and march eastward".
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 20, 2008 .
personal data
SURNAME Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jitzchak Perlman, Eliezer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish journalist and author, innovator of the Hebrew language
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH Luzhki, Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 1922
Place of death Jerusalem