Eliezer Ben-Yehuda — linguist (hebrew) with roots in the Russian Empire
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman on 7 January 1858 in Luzhki, in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Vitebsk Oblast in Belarus. His parents, Yehuda Leib and Tzipora Perlman, were Chabad Hasidim; his father died when Eliezer was five. He was sent to yeshiva, but turned to secular studies, learning French, German and Russian, and was sent to Dünaburg (now Daugavpils) to study at the Russian gymnasium, from which he graduated in 1877.
In the preface to his dictionary he later described how the idea of a national rebirth of the Jewish people on its ancestral soil came to him as a sudden revelation. In 1878 he went to Paris to study medicine, intending to support himself as a doctor in the Land of Israel, and while there attended courses at the Sorbonne. In 1879 he published an article in the Hebrew journal Ha-Shahar setting out the idea of a national centre in the Land of Israel. In Paris he contracted tuberculosis and met Jews from the East who still used Hebrew as a common language.
In 1881 he married Devora Jonas and settled in Jerusalem, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He resolved to speak only Hebrew at home, and his son Ben-Zion, later known as Itamar Ben-Avi, became the first child in modern times to grow up with Hebrew as his native language. He taught, and edited newspapers in Hebrew, among them HaZvi, founded in 1884, Hashkafa and HaOr, coining words for everyday modern things for which the ancient language had none. Devora died in 1891, and he later married her sister Hemda.
He was a leading figure in founding the Hebrew Language Committee, Va'ad HaLashon, in 1890 according to most accounts, which coined words and settled questions of grammar and pronunciation and later became the Academy of the Hebrew Language. His life's work was the Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew; the first volume appeared in 1908 or 1910, and six had been published by the time of his death.
He died in Jerusalem on 16 December 1922, aged sixty-four. His widow Hemda and his son Ehud continued the work, and the seventeenth and final volume of the dictionary was completed in 1959.
"Left the Russian Empire in 1878 to study medicine in Paris; settled in Jerusalem, then in the Ottoman Empire, in 1881."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Luzhki, Vilna Governorate (now Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus)
Born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman in Luzhki, in the Vilna Governorate, in 1858 to a Chabad Hasidic family, he studied in a yeshiva and then at the Russian gymnasium in Dünaburg before leaving for Paris in 1878.
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Luzhki, Vilna Governorate (now Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"If Hebrew is not enough for our children, then we have no future in this land."