Believing that Arabic and Aramaic have preserved the ancient character of proto-Semitic language, Ben-Yehuda favoured a strong reliance upon Arabic and Aramaic in the creation of modern Hebrew in Palestine, although in reality modern Hebrew became a new Semito-European hybrid language borrowing many words from Yiddish, Arabic, Aramaic, Ladino, Latin, Greek, Polish, Russian, English and other European languages. However, the patterns pursued by Ben-Yehuda, of borrowing from and modelling on Arabic, built upon previous extensive Hebrew borrowings and morphological modelling on Arabic that took place during the golden age of Arab Islamic civilisation. Although the influence of Arabic on modern Hebrew cannot be attributed entirely to Ben-Yehuda or his Hebrew Language Committee,22 many of the new words coined by Ben-Yehuda under the influence of Arabic became part of the standard Hebrew language of today.23 Examples of the Hebrew words coined by Ben- Yehuda on the basis of Arabic words included qattar (‘locomotive’), which he borrowed from the Arabic qitar; taarikh (‘date’), from the Arabic taarikh (‘history’, ‘dating’); and adiv (‘polite’), which comes from the Arabic adib (‘cultured’).24 Morphological patterns modelled on Arabic are found in the modern Hebrew greeting boqer tov (‘good morning’) and its refrain boqer or (‘morning of light’), modelled after the Arabic sabah al-khair (‘good morning’) and sabaḥ an-nur (‘morning of light’) (Shehadeh 1998: 60).

It should be borne in mind that the reference here is not only to patterns of direct borrowings from Arabic, but also to loan translation:

words modelled closely after Arabic, consisting of the speech material of Arabic. As we will see below, this modelling on and loan translation from Arabic would subsequently have a major impact on the transformation of Palestinian Arab toponyms into Israeli Hebrew toponyms by the Israeli Names Committee.

Ben-Yehuda was born Lazar Perelman, in the Lithuanian village of Luzhky, and attended a Talmudic school in Belarus in the Russian Empire.

A linguistic utopian and a secular linguistic Zionist, the most influential lexicographer of the Zionist vernacular also borrowed many words from literary and colloquial Arabic, Greek, Aramaic and other languages. A newspaper editor, Ben-Yehuda immigrated to Palestine in 1881 and became the driving spirit behind this Zionist vernacular revolution (Stavans 2008; Rabkin, 2006: 54–57; 2010: 132). At that time the Jews in Jerusalem spoke Arabic, Yiddish and French. Ben-Yehuda set out to resurrect and develop a new language that could replace Yiddish, in particular, and other languages spoken by the European Zionist colonists in Palestine. He had studied history and politics of the Middle East at the Sorbonne University in Paris and learned Palestinian colloquial Arabic. In the four years he spent at the Sorbonne he took Hebrew classes. It was this experience in Paris, and his exposure to the rise of French linguistic nationalism at the end of the 19th century, that inspired Ben-Yehuda (Perelman) to attempt the ‘resurrection’ of Hebrew as a practical and Zionist nationalist cultural project.

After arriving in Palestine in 1881, Lazar Perelman changed his name to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (‘Son of Judah’) and became the first to use ‘modern Hebrew’ as a vernacular and transform it from a biblical language and a language of liturgy (lashon hakodesh) into a ‘secular-nationalist’ modern language. Ben-Yehuda’s second wife Paula Beila took the Hebrew name Hemda, and he raised his son, Ben-Tzion (‘son of Zion’), speaking only modern Hebrew by totally isolating him and refusing to let him be exposed to other languages during childhood.

Ben-Yehuda served as editor of a number of Hebrew-language newspapers, including Ha-Tzvi (the Deer). The latter was closed down for a year by the Ottoman authorities following fierce opposition from the Orthodox Jewish community of Jerusalem, which viewed his work as sacrilegious.

Jerusalem was a predominantly Arabic-speaking city, whose Jewish residents spoke both Arabic and Yiddish and objected to the use of the ‘holy tongue’ (lashon hakodesh), Hebrew, for everyday conversation. Other local Jews ridiculed the new Hebrew as a ‘fabricated’, hybrid language.

In Jerusalem Ben-Yehuda became a central figure in the establishment of the Hebrew Language Committee (Va’ad Ha-lashon ha-ʿIvrit). It was initially set up in 1890, operated for one year, disbanded and then revived in 1904; Ben-Yehuda was its first president. Ben-Yeduda’s linguistic efforts were crowned with success when the British colonial authorities in Palestine decided in 1922, under a Zionist Jewish High Commissioner, Herbert Samuels, to recognise modern Hebrew as one of the three official languages of British Mandatory Palestine, alongside Arabic and English.

Ben-Yehuda’s committee was replaced by the Israeli Academy of the Hebrew Language, which was established following an Act of the Israeli Knesset, passed on 27 August 1953, as ‘The Supreme Institute of the Hebrew Language’ and located in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As modern Hebrew became more widely spoken among East European Zionist settlers in Palestine, the Hebrew Language Committee began to publish bulletins and dictionaries and coined thousands of words that are in everyday use today in Israel. The Committee’s President, Ben-Yehuda, also compiled the first modern Hebrew dictionary. Ben-Yehuda argued that Arabic, a living fellow Semitic language, rather than European languages, should fill modern Hebrew lacunae, seeing Arabic as a major source for missing roots and new words in Hebrew (Shehadeh 1998: 61‒62). Ben-Yehuda’s claims, made in a 1914 article entitled ‘Sources to Fill the Lacunae in our Language’, echoed similar claims put forward by Western biblical archaeologists and scriptural geographers in the 19th century such as Edward Robinson and Victor Guérin. He wrote: ‘the majority of the roots found in the Arabic vocabulary were once part of the Hebrew lexicon, and all of these roots are not foreign, nor are Arabic, but are ours, which we lost and have now found again’ (Ben-Yehuda 1914: 9; see also Blau 1981: 32).

Ben-Yehuda, then head of the Jerusalem-based Committee of the Hebrew Language, insisted on the relevance of Arabic for reviving the dead language of Hebrew and reinventing modern (Ashkenazi) Hebrew.

Joshua Blau, Professor Emeritus of Arabic Languages and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and President of the Israeli Academy of the Hebrew Language (1981‒1993), writes that Ben-Yehuda insisted on the usefulness of living Arabic: ‘In order to supplement the deficiencies of the Hebrew language, the Committee coins words according to the rules of grammar and linguistic analogy from Semitic roots: Aramaic and especially from Arabic roots’ (Blau 1981: 33).