ABSTRACT
Modern or Israeli Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic phylum. The rebirth of Hebrew, as a spoken language, from the literary Hebrew which was used in the Mediterranean area for a thousand years, began in Eastern and Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, as the hopes nourished by the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, of assimilation on the basis of shared German–Hebrew/Russian–Hebrew Bildung faded. The leading figure in this revival of Hebrew as a living spoken everyday language was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), a journalist and lexicographer who devoted much of his life to the project. The decline of Haskalah coincides with the renewed persecution of the Jews in Russia in the 1880s, and with the emergence of Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934), the national Hebrew poet, whose career covers the intermediary period between the end of Haskalah and the onset of the Palestinian period (1924–1947). The Palestinian period saw a vigorous campaign for the renewal of Hebrew as the spoken and written language of a new Jewish society centred on Palestine. Notable writers include Abraham Shlonsky and Uri Zvi Greenberg. With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, this ideal was realized, as Hebrew became once again a national language, spoken and written within its own national frontiers. Today it is spoken as a native language by over 4 million people – a spectacular testimony to the single-minded efforts of Ben-Yehuda a century ago, and an inspiration to advocates and planners for declining and endangered languages around the world today.
