Summary: He followed a three-pronged approach— (1) Hebrew in the Home, (2) Hebrew in the School, and (3) Words, Words, Words—along with the establishment of a council, newspaper publishing, and the creation of a dictionary. Details are provided in the appendix below.
In the context of Samskrit we can draw some parallels to the revival of Hebrew, with the additional advantage of being able to leverage the huge advantage of digital media and the internet. In some of these areas Universities can play a crucial role. A few thoughts are indicated below, submitted as topics for discussion and debate.
a. Samskrit in School — A more coordinated and well-funded programme to ensure that adequately trained teachers are more actively engaged in a vibrant school outreach programme where Samskrit is taught in Samskrit (like French in French, German in German, and English in English). The Universities can play a key role in ensuring a coordinated approach in schools in each of their catchment areas.
b. Samskrit in the Home.
c. A Newspaper — In today's context we should be able to do this on the internet, e.g. creating and keeping continuously refreshed a Google News page in Samskrit. Universities can help create a translators' pool that works in a coordinated manner round the clock across the world's different time zones.
d. Establishment of a Language Council, like the Hebrew Language Council—the forerunner of today's Hebrew Language Academy, the supreme arbiter and authority on all matters pertaining to the Hebrew language. This needs to be debated in the context of Samskrit. The rules of Samskrit Grammar, combined with the rich treasure house of root words, may need to be codified rather than created, as may have happened in the case of Hebrew.
e. Script — If we need to use the power of the internet and the ubiquitous English-language QWERTY keyboard, then the ability to create and use a phonetic version of the Greco-Roman script may have to be developed for Samskrit.
f. Dictionary — Compilation of a comprehensive dictionary, print and online. This already exists and may only need to be popularised.
g. International Support — National recognition was given to Hebrew as Israel's national language by the UK. While Samskrit was declining as a mainstream option in India, it was kept alive by the Germans. It is important to recapture support from the international network to ensure the research and literature that keeps the language current is being constantly done all over the world, not just in India. Each Samskrit University should affiliate itself with one or more Universities in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and Germany, and work with corporate houses to get endowments for Samskrit research in each of these places—e.g. the University of British Columbia at Vancouver (Canada) has a "School of Asian Studies," initially established by a donation from a Japanese businessman. We must have a well-thought-out strategy and plan for international affiliations, easily funded by Indian houses and high-net-worth individuals. International support and spread will give the language a resilience and branding that will ensure its survival and growth.
h. Digital Strategy — Programmes with international software companies like Google and Microsoft are crucial to content creation and information dissemination. The next generation is far more likely to look for its information from the worldwide web rather than from print media, and a large part of the branding and communication spend of any organization will move towards internet-based digital media.
i. Mobile and Internet Telephony — The technology advances and adoption of devices in these two areas must be rapidly exploited for the increased usage and spread of Samskrit. More research is required in this area, and the Samskrit Universities can play a crucial role.
j. Strategy for Broadcast Media — A content-creation programme for broadcast media like television, with the end goal of having a combination of dedicated Samskrit channels and other-language channels interspersed with Samskrit programmes with local-language subtitles, must be initiated. The initial incubation ground for this will have to come from the Arts and Theater departments of Universities working closely with Samskrit Universities and activist organizations.
k. Content Creation Talent Pool — The Samskrit book fair is a very good initiative, and the momentum must be maintained by having more such fairs across the world with much greater frequency. Here again there is room for Universities to create a funded pool of talent that can create digital editions of these books, as is being done by the Gutenberg Foundation.
l. Job Council and Portal — To consolidate information on employment opportunities for graduating students to continue research and teaching in Samskrit in India and abroad.
However, for all this to happen, there is one pre-requisite which seems to exist for the revival of Samskrit—a dedicated and passionate individual or group of individuals.
Ben-Yehuda, then, was the prophet and propagandist, the theoretician and tactician, the sign and symbol of the revival. He wrote in his newspaper Hatzvi in 1908 that real progress needs just one determined, resourceful person willing to commit fully to it, and that such a pioneer must lead the way without turning back, however small each step forward may be.
For the revival of the Hebrew language, that pioneer was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda himself.
Writing in 1966, the American linguist Einar Haugen observed that language revival movements can typically be traced to a single devoted person who focused the pent-up dissatisfactions of their people, and who was driven by more than intellectual motivation alone—their effort became bound up with the broader liberation of the group. For the Hebrew revival, this characterization applies squarely to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was born Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman in the Lithuanian village of Luzhky on January 7, 1858, and, like most Jewish children of the era, began learning Hebrew from a young age within a religious upbringing. He was sent to a yeshiva with the hope he would become a rabbi, but grew drawn to the secular world and completed his studies at a Russian gymnasium in 1877. That same year, Russia's war with the Ottoman Empire on behalf of the Bulgarians led Ben-Yehuda to reflect on national revival movements across 19th-century Europe—the Greeks, the Italians, and now the Bulgarians—and he concluded that the same logic of national restoration should apply to the Jewish people and to Hebrew, despite the language's near-total absence as a spoken tongue at the time.
He left Russia in 1878 to study medicine in Paris, intending to serve the Jewish community in Palestine, but ill health (tuberculosis) cut his studies short. Undeterred, he arrived in Palestine in 1881 with his revival plans intact, having already published several articles abroad linking the renewal of the Jewish people, their land, and their language—ideas now seen as forerunners of political Zionism. He settled in Jerusalem to spread his ideas throughout Palestine and the Diaspora.
Ben-Yehuda's plan of action had three main strands: "Hebrew in the Home," "Hebrew in the School," and "Words, Words, Words." On the first, he resolved even before arriving in Palestine to speak only Hebrew with every Jew he met, and continued this on disembarking in Jaffa. When his first son was born in 1882, he asked his wife to raise the boy as the first native Hebrew-speaking child in modern history—a symbolic step meant to prove that a full revival of the language among ordinary families was genuinely possible. Ben-Yehuda went to considerable, sometimes extreme, lengths to shield the boy from other languages, and new Hebrew words for everyday objects were coined as the child grew.
The most consequential strand was "Hebrew in the School." Drawing on how Russian had taken root among youth through school instruction, Ben-Yehuda argued Hebrew should become the language of instruction in Jewish schools in Palestine, for both religious and secular subjects, believing the revival depended above all on the younger generation speaking it freely. Teaching briefly at the Alliance Israelite Universelle School in Jerusalem in 1882 using a direct, translation-free method, he found children fluent in everyday Hebrew conversation within months. Despite severe shortages of trained teachers, textbooks, and terminology, this approach spread and, over time, produced a genuinely Hebrew-speaking younger generation.
Ben-Yehuda also worked to reach adults, founding the newspaper Hatzvi to model everyday Hebrew usage and introduce new vocabulary for modern life. To support learners, he began compiling what grew from a personal word list into his monumental 17-volume dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew, completed by his family after his death. In December 1890 he founded the Hebrew Language Council, forerunner of today's Hebrew Language Academy.
Ben-Yehuda did not achieve the revival alone: the great wave of young, educated, idealistic Jewish immigrants who arrived in Palestine from 1881 onward proved receptive to his ideas and carried Hebrew into their homes, kindergartens, and schools. Within roughly forty years, a generation of fluent Hebrew speakers had formed, and in November 1922 the British Mandate authorities recognized Hebrew as an official language of the Jews in Palestine. Ben-Yehuda died of tuberculosis only a month later, his lifelong goal fulfilled.
Scholars caution against the popular claim that Hebrew was simply "dead" before Ben-Yehuda and single-handedly revived by him—written and liturgical Hebrew were widely understood well before his time. The more accurate formulation, as one historian put it, is that before Ben-Yehuda Jews could speak Hebrew; after him, they did. He was, in his own words from 1908, the kind of single dedicated pioneer any such movement requires—one who leads the way without the possibility of turning back.
Jack Fellman was born in the United States in 1945 and studied linguistics, semantics, and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard, earning his doctorate in 1971. He came to Israel in 1968 and is a senior lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at Bar-Ilan University.
Source: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/biography/ben%20yehuda.html
