Modern Zionism is a Jewish ideology born at the end of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the national movements that were then shaking Europe. The aim of this national movement was to give the Jewish people a political and cultural framework that would allow it to direct its own affairs. In Y. Leibowitz’s phrase, it was born of the Jews being fed up with being governed by non-Jews. Modern Zionism replaced the traditional Zionism, religious and messianic in essence, with which it chose to break.
The creation of this ideology is generally attributed to an Austrian journalist, Theodor Herzl, who, during a stay in Paris — supposedly the city of the rights of man — was shaken by the antisemitic demonstrations that accompanied the Dreyfus affair. Under the force of this emotion, he wrote a manifesto-book, L’État des Juifs (The Jewish State), before devoting all his energy to mobilizing the Jewish people around this idea (Basel Congress, 1897), and also to soliciting the support of the great powers for the implementation of this solution to the “Jewish problem”.
In truth, modern Zionism was not born with Herzl. Twenty years before he launched his project, a militant movement for the return of the Jews to Palestine had appeared, in the aftermath of the pogroms in Eastern Europe and in Romania. This movement had taken the name of the Lovers of Zion (Hovevei Tsion). Settlement centers, the first not far from Jaffa (Rishon-le-Tsion), were created as early as 1881. They would later receive the assistance of Baron James de Rothschild.
But only a few months before the Lovers of Zion founded that first village, a solitary young man, consumed by tuberculosis, and belonging to no institution, had accomplished the first Zionist act of modern times — perhaps the most important — by settling in Jerusalem for national and in no way religious reasons: Eliezer Ben Yehuda. He had but one project: the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.
In the nineteenth century the European Jewish world underwent a veritable cultural revolution, in the wake of the Haskalah movement launched by Moses Mendelssohn, who called on Jews to open themselves to the new ideas then dominating Europe.
Going beyond Mendelssohn’s original intention — an Orthodox Jew who nonetheless wished to recover the Maimonidean inspiration of an openness to the world — most of the adherents of this movement would break with rabbinical authority and the observance of the precepts. They were the “breakers of the yoke” of the Torah.
The evolution of some would lead them into the various Marxist revolutionary movements then on the rise; others attempted a sort of secular renewal of Jewish culture, in particular that of the written Hebrew language. A new profane literature then appeared, in Yiddish as well as in Hebrew (Mapu, Mendele Moicher Sforim, Peretz). But it had not yet occurred to anyone to make Hebrew a living language.
Ben Yehuda (1858–1922), whose original name was Perelman, was born in Lithuania. Orphaned of his father very early, he was destined to be a rabbi and undertook a solid Hebrew education before losing his faith and going through a grave moral crisis. He severed all ties with the Jewish world, religious as well as secular, to commit himself to the Russian revolutionary movement. The Bulgarian people had then risen up against Ottoman domination, and Ben Yehuda had made the rebels’ cause his own. It was then that a strange phenomenon occurred which would upend his life, and beyond him the whole of the Jewish people.
One night when he was drafting a pamphlet in favor of the Bulgarians, an inner, imperious voice uttered this simple sentence: “Revival of the Hebrew language on the land of the Ancestors”. It was not, for all that, a “vision” or a “hallucination” in the strict sense.
His first reaction was to reject this absurd idea. What had he to do with this little Jewish people, he who had devoted his life to the great Slavic people? Twice — in his autobiography and in the preface to his Great Dictionary — he recounts the tale of that mysterious “night of destiny,” in which he struggled with all his strength to reject this intrusion into his thought, before, at first light, admitting himself defeated and accepting the idea to which he would henceforth devote an incredible energy. He would undertake the most astonishing linguistic operation ever attempted: to remake a dead language, religious, literary and on occasion poetic, into a living language. Let us imagine that, in order to give the European whole a genuine cohesion, it were decided to make Latin a living language. Eliezer is barely seventeen.
But what is the criterion of a living language? Let us propose this one: it is the language in which the infans, the baby, pronounces its first words. It is to this criterion that Ben Yehuda means to answer.
Twenty years later, when Herzl wrote his État des Juifs, he would not pose the linguistic question for a single instant. For him, in this new State, everyone would speak their language of origin, with a preference for German. Herzl’s Jewish State would have resembled the Tower of Babel. On this point, and on many others to which we shall return, Ben Yehuda showed a lucidity that far exceeded that of all the other Zionist leaders who would come after him. Would the State of Israel be conceivable today without this revival of Hebrew?
This mysterious inner voice, which enjoined upon him, with no possibility of evasion, the resurrection of the Hebrew language on the land of the ancestors, seems also to have indicated to him the course to follow in order to attain this objective.
He would become a doctor to earn his living, he would start a family and would go settle in Jerusalem, where he would have children who would be the incarnation of the revival of Hebrew. As for the forming of a couple, Eliezer already knew who his partner would be.
After abandoning his rabbinical studies, rejected by the uncle who was financing his education, he had been taken in by a strange man, Jonas, himself in rupture with Jewish orthodoxy, a self-taught writer who earned his living as a brewer. He had advised Eliezer to learn Russian in order to study in the schools of the Empire, and it would be his daughter Deborah who would initiate him into this profane language. Very quickly, the two young people fell in love with each other. Deborah would wait until Eliezer had finished his studies. In the end, he left for Paris to undertake his medical studies.
Two important events would upend his initial program.
The first was a happy encounter. In the Latin Quarter, at the café de la Source on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, he met a Russian journalist who took a liking to him, initiated him into journalism, and opened the doors of the principal Parisian salons. Informed of the young man’s projects, he urged him to set them out in an article that would be published in the monthly of the Haskalah, Ha Shahar (The Dawn).
The second event was illness. A grave tuberculosis, contracted during the years of destitution, declared itself. Eliezer spent months hospitalized, then left to convalesce in Algeria. This illness would accompany him all his life; his wife Deborah and some of his children would be infected by it and would die of it.
The path of medicine was now barred. He then sought to provide for his needs by way of journalism.
Despite the illness, Deborah refused to leave her fiancé, and in the end the two of them embarked for the Palestine of that time. On the boat, two events would once again leave their mark on Ben Yehuda’s projects. He decided with his wife to speak only Hebrew from then on. They would henceforth refuse to answer anyone who addressed them in another tongue, including Yiddish, dubbed “jargon”.
The second event occurred during the stopovers preceding the arrival at Jaffa. Arabs in ever-greater numbers came aboard. An immense anguish then took hold of him and never let go. He was discovering that the country was inhabited: “They were the citizens of the country, those who dwelt in it.” And what if his dream, the Zionist dream, were “devoid of place in reality…”? Contrary to the Zionism of Herzl and his friend Nordau, which sees in Palestine a land empty of inhabitants — a notion that would later be repeated ad nauseam — Ben Yehuda discovered the Palestinians, and all his life he would strive to maintain good relations with them. Throughout his life, Ben Yehuda would seek friendship and coexistence with his Arab neighbors. Later, he would imagine that the future political entity that would succeed Ottoman domination ought to take the form of a confederation of cantons on the Swiss model. Who knows whether, one day, this formula may not finally impose itself as the only viable one?
Arriving in Jerusalem, he found a poorly paid post at the city’s only Hebrew newspaper, Havatselet (The Lily).
During the long, eventful journey that took him from Paris to Jerusalem, Ben Yehuda had forged the concepts that would guide his action: — To speak only Hebrew and to teach it only through Hebrew, in a sort of total immersion. — To desacralize the language so that it might serve the most trivial uses. — To enrich it with neologisms that would have to be ratified by a collective body which would later become the Academy of the Hebrew Language. — To forge a simple, direct language, breaking with the emphatic style that dominated the literature of the Haskalah. — To have children who would embody this renewal of the language.
These principles would earn him the hostility — violent to the point of persecution — of Ashkenazi Orthodox circles. The Sephardic community, for its part, would prove far more welcoming, probably the reason for Ben Yehuda’s adoption of the Sephardic pronunciation.
Six months after his arrival in Jerusalem, Ben Yehuda received the visit of the first two emissaries of the Lovers of Zion, come to buy land in Palestine to create Jewish villages where those fleeing the pogroms might live.
For Ben Yehuda the matter was certain: this land could only lie in the vicinity of Jerusalem, “mother-city of the Jewish people,” as he put it. But the two delegates had other plans: to make Jaffa the center of the new settlement. These words “had on me the effect of a scorpion’s sting,” writes Ben Yehuda.
He tried to change this disastrous plan. Jaffa was an Arab city. The influx of Jews might in the long run awaken their hostility. Jerusalem, by contrast, was at the time a small town of 16,000 inhabitants with a Jewish majority, and considered as such by the Arabs. Why provoke them?
Nothing came of it. There was no question of being near the fanatics… the Jewish fanatics of Jerusalem. Strangely, it is the hatred of the traditional Jew that would orient all of modern Zionism.
“The Lovers of Zion, the ‘Zionists’,” writes Ben Yehuda with a pained humor, “utterly neglected Zion… Some of them dared to say explicitly that we had no need of Jerusalem, that we should lack for nothing if it became forever foreign to us. Jaffa remains a kind of misfortune for Jerusalem…”
These lines were written in 1918, well before the creation of Tel Aviv, well before the outbreak of the Arab revolt that, in 1930, marked the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian hostilities which have not ceased since.
From now on Ben Yehuda would devote himself to the revival of Hebrew, for which he would wage so many painful battles, curiously always against Jews.
His weapons in this battle were first his journalistic activity, then his teaching of Hebrew despite the hostility of the Alliance Israélite at the time, and finally and above all the begetting of a child who would pronounce his first words in Hebrew. This wondrous child would be the incarnation of the language’s revival.
And very soon, this child announced himself. He would bear the name Ben Zion (which he would later replace with Itamar). From his birth, Ben Yehuda decreed this iron rule: one could cross the threshold of his house only if one spoke Hebrew, for the child must hear only the sound of this language. No other language was to pollute his virgin ear.
One can imagine the care with which little Ben Zion was raised. From morning to night, his father surrounded him, spoke to him in Hebrew, read him biblical passages. But the child remained mute despite the months and years that passed. They feared he might be stupid, autistic.
Ben Yehuda’s friends urgently begged him to cease this mad experiment, to speak to the boy in living languages, to let his mother sing him beautiful Russian songs. Ben Zion appeared as a new Isaac whom no angel, this time, would come to save.
It was then that Ben Yehuda uttered this terrible sentence: “In that case, I shall repeat the experiment with my second son, my third, my fourth, until I succeed.”
This extremism led Ben Yehuda to be called mad. But for him the revival of Hebrew had meaning only if children pronounced their first words and sentences in this language which, otherwise, would have remained a cultic language, at best a scholarly one.
And then one night, Eliezer Ben Yehuda caught his wife singing to their child a song in Russian. This set off a violent quarrel between the spouses in front of the child. Whereupon the child uttered a cry, a first word, a first sentence: “Father, do not touch Mother!” — as if in echo of the Angel’s sentence addressed to Abraham: “Do not touch the child!” Ben Zion had thus begun to speak, and in Hebrew. The experiment had succeeded. And in the days that followed, the Hebrew language would gush impetuously from the child’s mouth in all its richness.
The affair made a great stir in Jerusalem. It led many families to rally to Ben Yehuda’s positions, to speak only Hebrew in their homes, despite the hostility of the Ashkenazi Orthodox circles for whom the daily use of the “holy tongue” was blasphemous. These latter would wage a rearguard battle, at times violent, going so far as to lay siege to the home of the first “Hebrew family”.
The paradigm of the Sacrifice of Isaac would have been, in this affair, the dominant one. A few years later, Ben Zion, wearied by the confinement to which his father continued to subject him, revolted. It was then that his mother, who had in the meantime contracted her husband’s tuberculosis — an illness that would soon carry her off — spoke these words to her son: “I ask you not to revolt against your father. You are the new Isaac whose ‘sacrifice’ made the revival of Hebrew possible.”1
Let us note that the difficulty Ben Zion experienced in coming to Hebrew was never repeated with his brothers and sisters, nor with all the little Hebrews who would soon be born in Palestine. What Ben Zion lacked was having no fellow, no child of his own age. This has led me to the following hypothesis: the so-called mother tongue is acquired only through the relay of a fellow. It is perhaps first of all the fraternal tongue.
This radical experiment that Ben Yehuda conducted unfolded under particularly tragic and difficult conditions. This first family lived in destitution, faced the violent hostility of the Orthodox and that of the Alliance Israélite. Tuberculosis had struck Ben Yehuda from the outset, then his first wife Deborah, who died of it, and several of the couple’s children. Miraculously unharmed, Ben Zion nonetheless contracted a croup that nearly carried him off. He owed his recovery to the first anti-diphtheria serum to reach Jerusalem at that end of the nineteenth century.
When one evokes the primordial role played by Eliezer Ben Yehuda in the revival of Hebrew, two things are generally stressed: — his writing of the first dictionary of Hebrew; — his invention of neologisms to adapt Hebrew to the modern world. He took care to have these neologisms accepted (or refused) by a Committee of the Hebrew Language that he had organized, the embryo of the future Academy of the Hebrew Language.
In truth, these two factors are secondary in Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s work.
As for the elaboration of his monumental dictionary — which was, moreover, very quickly outdated — he devoted himself to it only as a necessary element, a cornerstone of the operation of reviving the language. But he declared that this was not his vocation, which was, according to his son, “to do journalism and to sow the good word.” To “sow the good word” consisted in being a living example. It was also to wage the battle to impose Hebrew… on the other Zionists.
For some, his principal role was to enrich the old Hebrew language with neologisms. This aspect, too, must be considered secondary. Ben Yehuda did feel a particular pride when, in a sort of epiphany, the first neologism emerged in his mind, the word designating the dictionary, milon, derived from mila (word).
But others than he, in particular his son Ben Zion, as well as the members of the Commission of the Hebrew Language, which transformed into the Academy of the Hebrew Language, forged as many of these neologisms — necessary for the adaptation of ancient Hebrew to the modern world — as he did, if not more. Far more important in his action was the orientation he wished to give to this language he loved above all else.
First, to desacralize Hebrew, this Grundsprache supposedly the language of God and of the angels. What better realization of this objective than to make it the language of… coachmen! So true was this that he accepted as the finest tribute being elected honorary coachman by the coachmen of Jerusalem. To desacralize Hebrew also meant ridding the literature in this language of the emphasis that characterized it, restoring to it the clarity and simplicity of the biblical text, terribly weighed down in the rabbinical texts and in the nineteenth-century novels written in the wake of the Haskalah. In this respect, Ben Yehuda was a sort of Boileau of the new literature that would soon take a rich flight.
In the meantime, the wish of Herzl — who died in 1906 — to make his mother tongue, German, the language of the country he dreamed of creating, was to find an attempt at realization. In the 1910s, German Zionists had decided to create in Haifa a first Institution of Higher Education (which would become the prestigious Technion). German was to be its language. It was then that Ben Yehuda, whose illness was worsening, threw all his last strength against this aspect of the project. He devoted many articles to it, prompted large and violent street demonstrations. He finally prevailed: Hebrew would be the language of the Technion.
From that moment on, the victory of Hebrew could be considered definitive. Ben Yehuda could die with the feeling, so rare, of having reached his goal.
In conclusion, Ben Yehuda was the author of the most extraordinary linguistic revolution in history, a revolution whose measure has surely not been taken. The revival of Hebrew is, in any case, the most incontestable achievement of Zionism — an achievement that did harm to no one, and that gave birth to a new culture and to works of great richness.
Notes
Itamar Ben Avi, Mémoires du premier enfant hébreu (Memoirs of the First Hebrew Child), published in La Renaissance de l’hébreu, éditions DDB, Paris 1988, p. 256.↩︎