2019 signals the 130th anniversary of the creation of the Hebrew Language Committee (Vaʻad ha lashon ha-ʻIvrit), an institution later replaced by the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is often featured with reference to this date, in various manners: Resuscitator of Hebrew, innovator of the language, father of the sacred language, among other laurels upon his memory. Clearly, something is being left aside, as Hebrew cannot have been reborn by a single man, nor was this a language completely extinct or dead so that it was necessary that it should be brought back to life; either in its spoken for, much less so in writing. This so-called “rebirth of Hebrew” was the result of the work done by a group of scholars and intellectuals. In being so, then, what is real and what mere myth about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda? What of all this is history and what legend?
Dzienciarsky, D. A. (2020). The revival of the Hebrew language: The true contribution of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Cuadernos Judaicos, (37), 235–247. https://doi.org/10.5354/0718-8749.2020.60588
