Eliezer Ben-Yehudah (1858-1923)

Ben-Yehuda has a lot of streets named after him all over Israel :).

According to the same book by Arthur Hertzberg, he was born in Lithuania in 1879 as Elizer Perlman, but he 'Hebraized' his name. When he was fifteen he left Yeshiva to go to a scientific high school and he was a proponent of Jews founding a new modern, secular nation for themselves. He went to Paris to study medicine, but when that didn't work out he did a stint in Algiers and then made it to Jerusalem in 1881.

He's best known for founding the modern Hebrew language. He and his wife's was the first household to speak only modern Hebrew. He was cofounder and initial president of the Academy for the Hebrew language.  He really hated Yiddish and opposed any language other than Hebrew being the language of the Jews.

In his letter to Smolenskin's journal, Hashahar, he wrote:

"Today we may be moribund, but tomorrow we will surely awaken to life; today we may be in a strange land, but tomorrow we will dwell in the land of our fathers; today we may be speaking alien tongues, but tomorrow we shall speak Hebrew." (161)

"True, the Jewish nation and its language died together. But it was not a death by natural causes, not a death of exhaustion, like the death of the Roman nation, which therefore died forever! The Jewish nation was murdered twice, both times when it was in full bloom and youthful vigor. Just as it revived after the first exile from its land, after the death of the nation that had murdered it, and rose to even higher spiritual and material estate, so now, too, after the death of the Roman nation which murdered it, it will rise even beyond what it had become before the second exile! The Hebrew language, too, did not die of exhaustion; it died together with the nation, and when the nation is revived, it will live again! But, sir, we cannot revive it with translations; we must make it the tongue of our children, on the soil on which it once blossomed and bore ripe fruit!" (164).

He was so right!

It's always really amazing to read Zionist writing and see how brave they were, how impossible it seemed for a new Jewish nation to be founded... and then to think about how their wildest dreams came true.

Ben-Yehuda, maybe especially, had a crazy dream of reviving a dead language and seeing it spoken in an as yet non-existent nation, and he was never discouraged from that dream and he made it happen! It really reminds you to dream big and then chase down your aspirations unflinchingly.