A Dream Come True 9780813316406, 0813316405

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A Dream Come True Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

TRANSLATED BY T. Muraoka

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EDITED BY George Mandel

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Modern Hebrew Classics

Published with the assistance ofthe Committee on Research and Graduate Studies, The University ofMelbourne All rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the pub­ lisher. Copyright © 1993 by Westview Press, Inc. Published in 1993 in the United States ofAmerica by Westview Press, Inc., 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United氐ngdom by Westview Press, 36 Lonsdale Road, Summertown, Oxford OX2 7EW Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, 1858-1922. [ Ha-halom ve-shivro. English] A dream come true/ Eliezer Ben-Yehuda ; [translated by] T. Muraoka; edited by George Mandel. p. cm.一（Modern Hebrew classics) ISBN 0-8133-1672-3. 1. Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer, 1858-1922. 2. Hebraists—Biography. 3.Jews—Russia— Biography. 4.Jews—:Jerusalem-Biography. 5. Hebrew language-Revival. 6.Jewish nationalism. I. Mandel, George, 1937. II. Title. III. Series. PJ4534.B4A3 1993 492.4'092—dc20 [B]

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Printed and bound in the United States ofAmerica oo

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Preface

his firstEnglish translation ofEliezerBen-Yehuda's account T of his life from the time "the fire of love for the Hebrew language" (in his words) was kindled in him when he was a ye­ shiva student in Russia in the 1870s, to the birth, in Jerusalem in the summer of 1882, of his son, the first child in modern times to grow up speaking Hebrew, started as a language exercise for my third-year Hebrew students at The University of Melbourne in 1982. The work was originally published with the title Ha­ Halom ve-Shivro as a series of articles in Ha- Toren, a Hebrew magazine, from December 1917 to December 1918. The most recent Hebrew edition, edited and annotated by R. Sivan, was published in 1978 Qerusalem: The珈lik Institute). W hen the entire text had been translated into English, I thought that this important work should be available to the wider reading public, a view shared by the late Ben-Zion Patkin of Melbourne, presi­ dent of the Austral芷New Zealand branch of Brit lvrit Olamit (the World Association for Hebrew Language and Culture). He was also kind enough to persuade a local firm of electrical engi­ neers and contra�tors, Dodd & McKinnon Pty. Ltd., to see the value of such a publicatiqn and donate a generous sum toward the preparation of an English version of the autobiography, and here I record my appreciation of their donation. The Faculty of Arts of The University of Melbourne also defrayed part of the cost of typing the original version. The publications sub­ committee of the Research and Graduate Studies Committee of ．． Vll

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Preface

the university also provided a generous subsidy toward the cost of printing the volume. The original translation produced by my students has since undergone a few stages of metamorphosis. Following my ed正 ing, the entire translation was read carefully by J. A. Thompson, sometime reader in the Department ofMid曲Eastern Studies at The University ofMelbourne. Above all, however, I am consid­ erably indebted to George Mandel, fellow ofthe Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. He read the manuscript with utmost care and attention with respect to both English style and matters ofsubstance. It was his suggestion to have a general in­ troduction added to the translation. I am also grateful to David Patterson, president of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, for his encouragement, and to the Centre itself, under whose auspices this translation is being published. T. Muraoka Leiden University

Introduction

The author of this autobiography, Ehezer Ben-Yehuda (1858—1922), was born in Luzhky, in Lithuania, at that time part ofthe Czarist empire. Lithuania contained some ofthe major centers ofEast European Jewry. At the close of the nine­ teenth century, when the first reliable census was taken, about 1,500,000 Jews lived in Lithuania—more than one-eighth ofthe total population一and there were over three hundred communi­ ties with more than 1,000 Jews in them. In some of the smaller towns and villages, Jews were a majority of the population. (It should be noted, though, that in the 1860s and 1870s, when Ben-Yehuda was growing up, the population must have been somewhat smaller than at the time ofthe census of 1897; a con­ siderable population explosion took place during the nineteenth century, and it was even greater among the Jews than among the rest ofthe inhabitants.) The outlook and way oflife ofLithuanian Jews were based on the Written Law (the Pentateuch) and the Oral Law (the Mishnah, Talmud, and Codes). Education, which was largely confined to the study ofJewish religious and legal texts, was held in high esteem, and nearly a叮ewish boys received an elementary education in the heder. More advanced pupils would then pro­ ceed to the yeshiva. Education of girls was more restricted but most women were literate, at least in Yiddish, which was the

1

Explanatory notes to the text will be found at the end of the book.

normal spoken language of practically all the Jews in the empire. Of far higher prestige was Hebrew, the "holy tongue," which educated male Jews were expected to be able to read and which many of them could also write. Ben-Yehuda, by the time he reached the age of thirteen, could read Hebrew fluently and must have known Aramaic—the language of most of the Talmud—almost as well. The language of everyday conversation with his family and friends was Yiddish, and it is unlikely that ei­ ther he or his classmates knew more than a few words of Russian or Lithuanian. The Jews of the multinational Russian Empire were both a religious and a national minority, divided from their neighbors by language as well as creed. During the nineteenth century a number of new cultural and political tendencies were making themselves felt in Lithuanian Jewry, as among the other Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The first to be mentioned here is the movement for "enlighten­ ment" (in Hebrew, haskalah), which was started by Moses Mendelssohn(1729-1786) and his circle in Berlin. The move­ ment soon made inroads into Lithuania, which bordered on Prussia. It aimed at the cultural and intellectual emancipation of Jews from the medieval ghetto life-style and mentality to which the majority of them had been confined for centuries. In order to achieve this objective, the adherents of the move­ ment, the maskilim(sing.: maskil) advocated reforms in educa­ tion. They wanted Jewish children—girls as well as boys—to re­ ceive a wider education that included the study of European languages, science, and vocational subjects. In Eastern Europe, the Haskalah movement also led to a revival of Hebrew litera­ ture. The maskilim saw Hebrew as the bearer of whatever was most admirable in Jewish culture and looked down on Yiddish, often preferring to speak Russian. They extolled the Hebrew Bible and favored its study at the expense of the traditional Jewish learning, with its emphasis on the post-biblical rabbinic literature. This tendency gave birth to the Hebrew novel and the Hebrew newspaper in the very decade of Ben-Yehuda's birth. The first Hebrew novel, Ahavat Tziyyon(The Love of Zion), by

Introduction

3

2

A Dream Come True

Abraham Mapu—as it happens, a Lithuanian Jew—was pub­ lished in 1853(Ben-Yehuda refers to the novel or to its main characters more than once in his autobiography). The weekly newspaper Ha-Maggid(The declarer) made its first appearance in 1856 and was also known to Ben-Yehuda, as the autobiography makes clear. This Hebrew revival was purely a literary one. No one made a serious attempt to bring about a revival of spoken Hebrew before Ben-Yehuda started doing so at the beginning of

the 1880s. The initiators of the Haskalah movement wanted to make it possible for Jews to live as Jews within modern society. In Germany, however, where the movement started, constant ex­ posure to German culture, as well as various demands that German society made on the Jews, led many of the latter to lose much or all of their Jewish identity. In Lithuania and other parts of Eastern Europe, where Jews lived in much greater numbers and where their relationship to the society around them differed from that of the German Jews, this rarely happened. Instead, the movement created a considerable interest in the Hebrew lan­ guage and its literature. Lithuania boasted a number of Hebrew printing houses; its capital, Vilna(Vilnius), became one of the world's leading centers of Hebrew printing in the nineteenth

century. The Haskalah movement was opposed, often bitterly, by the religious conservatives, who believed that all the time available for study should be devoted to the traditional type of Jewish learning and feared that secular studies would lead Jewish youth away from observance of the precepts of Jewish law. That the Haskalah was regarded as heretical is reflected in Chapter 1 of the autobiography, where we see that reading the new kind of Hebrew literature and even studying Hebrew grammar— another hallmark of the Haskalah-were activities that had to be hidden from general view. Another important movement was Hasidism, a great revivalist-type religious movement with a strong emphasis on fervent prayer and emotion as against the traditional concentra-

tion on Talmudic scholarship. This movement, which origi­ nated in the rural southern corners of Poland in the late eigh­ teenth century, soon spread throughout the Ashkenazi Jewish world. In Lithuania it met with particularly fierce opposition from the established Jewish leaders. In the end, there emerged a form of Hasidism known as Habad, which may be said to repre­ sent a compromise between mainstream Hasidism and the intel­ lectualism and emphasis on study that were characteristic of tra­ ditional Judaism. Ben-Yehuda's father-in-law was at one time a member of this group. Socialism, too, which had reached Lithuania from the East, was finding Jewish adherents during Ben-Yehuda's youth. Ben­ Yehuda relates in his autobiography how he nearly lost his Jewish identity during his school days through the influence of nihilism, identifying completely with the struggle for the liberation of the Russian people from tyranny. (Lithuania was also of major im­ portance in the growth of a specifically Jewish socialist move­ ment, although it seems that Ben-Yehuda did not have any con­ nections with this.) Lithuanian Jewry also produced some of the most important figures in the early development of Jewish na­ tionalism. Among those who hailed from this part of Eastern Europe were David Gordon, who edited Ha-Maggid in a nation­ alist spirit from the 1860s on; Peretz Smolenskin, who argued throughout the 1870s in his prestigious review Ha-Shahar that the Jews were a nation and not merely a religious group; and Yehiel Michael Pines, who expressed a religious-nationalist viewpoint in his writings of the late 1860s. Ben-Yehuda tells us in his autobiography that while he was at school he was a devotee of Smolenskin's writings, but it was not these, or any other Jewish-nationalist opinions, that directly brought about his own conversion to Jewish nationalism; indeed, both before and after that conversion he rejected Smolenskin's program, which was based on the latter's view of the Jews as a "people of the spirit. " Ben-Yehuda's nationalism was from the start explicitly territorial and political.

Introduction

5

4

A Dream Come True

What triggered Ben-Yehuda's conversion, as he relates in this book, was the war of 1877-1878 between Russia and Turkey, in which one of Russia's aims was the liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish rule. The example ofBulgarian nationalism produced in his mind the notion that the Jews, too, might one day be an in­ dependent nation again. Shortly afterwards he read a Russian translation of George Eliot's "Zionist " novel, Daniel Deronda, 咖ch strengthened him in his newly acquired opinions.

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Ben-Yehuda's father died when Eliezer was five years old, and the boy was brought up by his mother. When he was about thir­ teen he was sent to a yeshiva in Polotsk headed by Rabbi Yossi Bloicker. His experiences there, described in Chapter 1, are the starting point, chronologically, of this autobiography. It ends soon after the birth of his first child in Jerusalem in 1882, about a year after his arrival there. Since Ben-Yehuda lived and worked for forty more years, it may be worth saying something about his activities during the later period and some other topics that are dealt with only sketchily, or not at all, in the autobiography. Palestine in October 1881, when Ben-Yehuda arrived there with his bride, Deborah, was part of the rapidly declining Ottoman Empire and, in social and cultural terms, was an unin­ viting backwater. The Jews constituted a small minority of the population: The yishuv (settlement), as the Jewish community of Palestine was known, numbered about 24,000 out of a total of perhaps half or three-quarters of a million. (The figure of30,000 Jews given by Ben-Yehuda in Chapter 8 is almost certainly too high.) The Jews were concentrated mainly in the four "holy cit­ ies," Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. More than half of the Jews lived in Jerusalem, where Ben-Yehuda settled, and where, as he states, they probably constituted a majority of the population. The Jews of Palestine at this time were of the traditional-minded pious type who had been settling in the country for generations and who were attracted to it chiefly for

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religious reasons. In later years this commu ty known as the “ Old Yishuv'， m came to be t� �istinguish it from the "Ne� Yishuv"-:few sfrom Russ ia and Romania who st a rted a r rnv in the early 1880s and wh ri mg o, like Ben-Yehuda, we re prompted by motives of nationa1ism rather than religion. Ma ny of the members of the New Yishuv settled outside the fou r holy cities, either founding agricultu ral villages or set tling in other cities, chiefly Jaffa and Haifa. It was this ew Yishuv th at began th� � sett lement process that led eventually to the fo unding of the St ate ofIsrael. The Old Yishuv was ver y :ra ented socially. Ab � out half its mem�ers wereAshkena zim: Jews from Europe . (ch iefl y Eastern and Central Europ e) who spoke vario ri us dial ects of Yiddish. Other groups were the ephardim., d descendants of theJews wh had been expelled firam o Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, and who spoke their own 1�nguage,L adino (aHispanic language usually writt en in the Hebrew alpha bet a�d co nt a ining some words derivedfromHebrew in its voca bular y)， and the Oriental Jews, those who had liv ed for centuries in theAr a bic-speaking Moslem world, and wh o spoke va varnious for ms ofAra bic. There were a1so sma11er groups , such as the Geo n,-i eor g1 a ns and the Bukharans. The Ashkenazi group was subdivided into many kolelim (communities), each co nsisting ofJews from a partic ular countr y or region in Europe.A large proportion of th —espe eJe ws theAshken cially ena::i7i z1m—-lived off halukkah 'money colle cted over seas for the upkeep ofJews m theHolyLand. The Hebrew 1anguage, whi ch Ben-Yehuda set out to revive, had ceased to be an eve ry d ay spoken 1angu age some 1,600 _ years earlier. It had, h nowever, survived, not only as a language of prayer and script scri ural stud but also y, in active use. Jew s regu wrote private let ters, larly communal minut es and reg ul a tio ns, and ork � s of philosophY, poetry, and natural sri scie nce in Heb rew. la nguage was al;o spo The ken on occasion:, for inst ance, bet ween Jews from different coun tries who had no othe r 1anguage m common. Until fairl rec ent times most educate d Jewish �ales,

s

Introduction

7

A Dream Come True

in most countries, knew Hebrew just as educat ed Christians in medieval Europe knewLatin. What Ben-Yehuda wanted was for Hebrew to become the normal langua ge used within the family, learned by children from their parents as their first language, and used in theJewish society in Palestine for all purposes of life, for everyday conversation as well as for literary and intellectual mat­ ters. Ben-Yehuda faced many obst acles in his t ask. One was the op­ position of most of the Old Yishuv, led by its rabbis, to the na­ tionalist ideas of the newcomers and to the secular views and way of life of some of them. Another obst acle was the fact that a variety of ways of pronouncing Hebrew had grown up over the centuries, so it was necessary for the supporters of the plan to re­ vive Hebrew to a gree on one of them to the exclusion of the others. Yet another difficulty lay in the lack of modern vocabu­ lary in the language. Although the Haskalah movement of the preceding hundred or so years had contributed considerably to the expansion of the language, Ben-Yehuda was fully aware at the out set of his career that Hebrew was far from being a viable me­ dium of communication in modern society. The researches of Ben-Yehuda and others in libraries around the world led to the discovery of a surprisingly large number of words and expres­ sions "buried" in long-neglected writings; these words could be put to modern use as they were or with some adjustment of meaning. However, it also proved necessary to create many new words in a short period of time; in Chapter 4 of this work Ben­ Yehuda records his first venture into this field. In spite of these difficulties Ben-Yehuda persisted in his ef­ forts. For him, theHebrew language was an essential component of the national revival; the Jewish nation that was to be reest ab­ lished as an independent political entity on the soil of its fore£企 thers had to use its ancest ral language as its normal means of daily communication. Jews who wished to remain part of the Jewish nation had to uproot themselves from their Diaspora existence a nd abandon their Diaspor a languages—especially Yiddish which divided the nation. They had to acquire, or reacquire, the

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A Dream Come True

Introduction

ancient tongue, which put them in touch with the rich heritage of their past. In this insistence that the revival of Hebrew as a ver­ nacular -was an essential part of the national movement, Ben­ Yehuda d啦red significantly from some other prominent Zionist leaders. Theodor Herzl, for instance, wrote in TheJewish State, "We cannot converse with one another in Hebrew. W ho amongst us has sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask �or a railway ticket in that language?" He added that, of the many lan­_ guage� theJews would bring with them to the propo�edJewis� ;tat;, one �ould eventually emerge as the most useful for general intercourse and would be adopted "without compulsion" as the national tongue.

spelling. The council was the forerunner of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which was set up in 1953 and is still in exis­ tence. One of the enterprises for which Ben-Yehuda is best remem­ bered is the production of a massive dictionary of the Hebrew language. The modest beginning of this work一a list of everyday words for Ben-Yehuda's own use-is described in Chapter 4. Later it developed into a full-fledged scholarly work of refer­ ence. Ben-Yehuda did not realize at first what he was taking on; he wrote later that had he known how much work was involved, he would never have begun. He had no training in lexicography or philology and labored under immensely difficult financial conditions. Nevertheless, the work was done, and the end result, A Complete Dictionary ofAncient and Modern Hebrew, contains six­ teen quarto volumes with a total of 7,944 double-columned pa�es, and an additional 304-page volume of prolegomena. Its publication, completed a hundred years after the author's birth, took place volume by volume over a fifty-year period; the many posthumous volumes were edited first by M. H. Segal and later by N. H. Tur-Sinai. Ben-Yehuda also published two pocket dictionaries, one a Russian-Hebrew dictionary (1899), the other a Hebrew­ Russian-Yiddish dictionary (1902). It has been argued that these contributed much more to the revival than the multivolume dictionary, not only because they were much more accessible to the layman and much easier to use, but also because the large dictionary came too late and was not available during the most critical years of the revival. The single most effective measure advocated by Ben-Yehuda was almost certainly the use of Hebrew as the language of in­ struction in the schools. In Chapter 9 Ben-Yehuda relates how he was asked to teach Hebrew in a school in Jerusalem and agreed only on condition that no other language would be spo­ ken in class. Ben-Yehuda's period of employment as a teacher was brief, but the idea of teaching all subjects (not just Hebrew itself) in Hebrew, which he had advocated in an article written

* * *

To achieve his goal, in an undertaking that had no precedent in human history, Ben-Yehuda adopted a number of measures. One was to make Hebrew the language of his own household and to bring his children up to speak Hebrew as their mother tongue. His first son, Ithamar Ben-Avi, whose early upbringing in Hebrew is described in the last chapter of the book, became a prominent Hebrew journalist. Ben-Yehuda also founded and edited a Hebrew newspaper, Ha-Tzvi (to evade censorship regulations it also appeared under other names), in whose pages he campaigned for his beliefs and gradually forged a viable modern and secular style of He�rew '. ;nd whi�h se;ved as a launching pad for new Hebrew words and expressions that he wanted to put into circulation. Toget�er �ith lik�-minded people, he founded two organizations, both of them short-li;ed, one of which was intended to promote the na­ tional revival as a whole, while the other had as its aim specifi­ cally to encourage people to speak Hebrew. Similarly, he a�d oth�rs set up a Language Council whose main jobs were to make available words to fill gaps in the language (either by searching for them in the corpus of Hebrew literature or by creating them); to establish a uniform pronunciation; and to give ruling� wher� there were uncertainties, e.g., in matters of grammar and

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A Dream Come True

Introduction

11

German and supporters of Hebrew in the Hilfsverein schools, and matters came to a head in 1913 when the Hilfsverein, which was in the process of establishing a higher technical institute in Haifa, decided that instruction there would be in German, since Hebrew was not sufficiently developed for the needs of the exact sciences. This led to an outcry, and teachers and pupils in Hilfs­ verein schools all over the country walked out. During this "lan­ guage war" Ben-Yehuda criticized the Hilfsverein openly in spite of the fact that the organization was one of the main finan­ cial sponsors of his dictionary. The opening of the institute was delayed, and World War I broke out before the issue was settled. After the war and the Balfour Declaration, the question of any language other than Hebrew being used in the Technion (as the institute came to be called) had disappeared.

in 1879 while he was still living in Paris, was accepted and put into practice by the settlers in the new agricultural colonies and in the urban settlements. The school in Rishon le-Tziyyon, after a period during which first one, then another, subject was taught entirely in Hebrew, became an all-Hebrew school in 1888. The method then spread throughout the agricultural settlements. In the 1890s the first all-Hebrew kindergarten was opened, and within a few years there were also high schools that conducted their lessons entirely in Hebrew. It should be remembered that the first instructors were, for the most part, not trained teachers, had no Hebrew textbooks, and had to teach in a language that they themselves knew only imperfectly, and that still lacked many words. Gradually these difficulties were overcome and a generation of children grew up for whom it was natural to speak in Hebrew, and when they themselves entered into matrimony, many of them established Hebrew-speaking households. The订 children, born in the decade or so before World War I, were the first generation of native Hebrew-speakers for more than 1, 600 years. In addition to the difficulties that have just been mentioned, the campaign to make Hebrew the sole language of instruction faced resistance from advocates of other languages, including European languages—chiefly French and German. The influ­ ence of French declined as that of Hebrew increased, but in the early years of the new century the influence of German began to be felt in a network of schools that was set up in Palestine by the Berlin-based Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Relief Organ­ ization of German Jews). In all these schools the role of Hebrew was important, and in some of them it was the dominant lan­ guage, but emphasis on German increased as German imperial interest in the Ottoman Empire grew. This coincided with ris­ ing nationalism in the yishuv, brought about by the arrival of a new wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe—the "second ali­ yah," 1904-1914-whose ideas were much more radical than those of their predecessors in the first aliyah (1880s and 1890s). There were many instances of friction between supporters of

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Anyone who attempts to assess Ben-Yehuda's achievements is compelled to recognize as a fact of history that his twofold dream has now been realized. The Jewish political existence in that cor­ ner of the Middle East is a tangible reality, although it has never been free from forces threatening its continuation. As for the re­ vival of the spoken Hebrew language, the term miracle is often used to describe this unprecedented phenomenon. As early as 1916-1918, i.e., during Ben-Yehuda's lifetime and less than four decades after his arrival in Palestine, a local census indicated that about a quarter of all Palestinian Jewish adults and over half of their children registered themselves as Hebrew-speakers. No­ body would deny that Hebrew is today a viable, fully functional, normal language, with the whole spectrum of human activities being conducted in it. Those who do not use Hebrew as their sole or main language, or are not capable of doing so, represent a minority among the Jewish population oflsrael. How much of this achievement is to be credited to Ben­ Yehuda is admittedly a moot question. Recent years have witnessed a tendency to minimize the significance of his per­ sonal role in the enterprise and to "demythologize" his figure

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12

A Dream Come True

and life. Yet the existence of a legend, and the interaction be­ tween the factual and the legendary, may themselves constitute facts of history. It would be historically wrong to deny the im­ portant part played by the romantic or romanticized figure of Ben-Yehuda in the subsequent history of the Hebrew revival. Ben-Yehuda was the moving spirit of this daring venture, a pioneer who toiled and made personal sacrifices for the cause he served. T his incomplete autobiography, which was penned in 1917-1918 in the United States, where the author had sought refuge during World War I from the hostile and suspicious Turkish authorities back home, provides us with a moving ac­ count of the early part of the pioneer's life and struggle. Recommended Works in English on Ben-Yehuda

J. Fellman,

The Revival of a Classical Tongue. Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague and Paris, 1973). G. Mandel, "Why Did Ben-Yehuda Suggest the Revival of Spoken Hebrew?" in L. Glinert, ed., Hebrew in Ashkenaz (New York, 1993). E. Silberschlag (ed.), Eliezer Ben-Yehuda: A Symposium in Oxford (Ox­ ford, 1981).

First Period

1

I

dreamt a dream. About forty-three years have passed since that wonderful mo­ ment in my life when the vision was suddenly revealed to me for the first time, one night in the darkness of the Diaspora; only forty-three years or so, not even a completejubilee, yet already I am seeing it come true. This realization, which I am privileged now to witness with my own eyes-this realization of my dream is so wonderful, so radiant with splendor and beauty, that there are moments when a dreadful thought comes into my mind: Perhaps it isn't happen­ ing, perhaps what seems to me the realization of the dream is it­ self nothing but another dream ... But a feeling of the actuality of it quickly intensifies and dis­ pels all doubts. Unless everything is a dream-unless all the frightful events of the last four years, which we have witnessed with our own eyes, are a dream as well-the realization of the dream that I dreamt almost a jubilee of years ago, which we are all witnessing now, is no dream, either, but a reality. The words that Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild in the name of the British government were indeed written. No! This is no dream, but the coming-true of my dream. As this feeling of the reality of the event intensifies and impresses itself upon me, so my thoughts wander back and I re­ flect on the forty years that have passed between the dream and its realization. Many memories rise from the depths of my mind, among which not a few seem worthy of being put before the 15

16

A Dream Come True

* * *

All my life I have been inconsolably grieved about two things. I was ·not born in Jerusalem, not even in the Land oflsrael. And my speech, from the moment I was able to utter words, was not in Hebrew. From the moment my feet trod on the land of my fathers, I tried with all my might to become a native part of it. I embraced its dust with affection, breathed in its air thirstily, and gazed in delight at its mountains and valleys, at the glorious changes i� the �olors of its skies, at the rising and setting of its sun. I listened with a feeling of sanctity to the murmurs of its rivers and streams, and I can say that I feel myself to belong altogether to this land, to be a Jerusalemite. I have severed every link between myself and other countries, and I feel love for one land only, the Land oflsrael. I love not only the country itself but also its very

hardships, its ailments, and its fevers. Eve� so, I must admit that there are moments when child­ hood memories grow strong, when longings for my birthplace awaken secretly, and then suddenly before my eyes there appears a vision of places not in the Land oflsrael; and these places speak to me in a language of hidden love. Then I realize that I was n_ot born in the L;nd oflsrael and that I shall never be able to feel for the land of our forefathers that deep affection which a man feels for his birthplace and his childhood. As with the land, so too with the language. I believe that all my friends who hail from the Diaspora and have settled in the Land of Israel during the past forty years would admit that I lead a more deeply Hebrew life than they do. Not, Heaven forbid, that I exceed them in the love or knowl-

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public now, at this great moment when the dream is beginning to come true. But by way of introduction, I must describe in a few lines how the events of my childhood led me to the dream that I dreamt.

Chapter 1

17

edge of the language, but merely in time and quantity. I started to speak Hebrew many years before them and I speak Hebrew every single day much more than they do. I speak Hebrew and only Hebrew, and not only with the members of my household, but also with every man and woman who to my knowledge un­ derstands Hebrew, more or less; and in this respect I pay no at­ tention to the rules of etiquette towards either men or women, so my bad manners have earned me a good deal of hatred in the Land of Israel. Hebrew has already become my language not only in speech but also in thought. I think in Hebrew by day and by night, awake and in dreams, in sickness and in health, and even when I am racked with pain. Even so, I must admit once again: At times my mind sinks into thoughts, especially of days that are past, days of my child­ hood and youth, and frees itself for a moment, without my sens­ ing it, from the Hebrew yoke that I have imposed on it firmly for so many years. Then suddenly I realize that for a moment I have not been thinking in Hebrew, that from beneath the thought in Hebrew a few alien words have floated to the surface, words of Yiddish, Russian, or French! Then I realize that even for me Hebrew is not the mother tongue, that my first utterances were not in Hebrew, that I did not suck the sounds of the language in with the milk from my mother's breasts, that my ears did not hear them when my mother put me to sleep in my cradle. I sense then that, with all my love for Hebrew, I have never known the taste of that endearment to the language that a person whose ears have heard it from the day of his birth, and who has spoken it from the moment of his first utterances, feels for it. Every time I ask myself to whom I am most indebted for the fact that I am nonetheless both a resident of the Land of Israel and a Hebrew-speaker; who brought me to leave my alien birth­ place and my alien language, and depart, as many as forty years ago, to settle in the land of my forefathers and begin to speak their language; every time I ask myself these questions I see be­ fore my eyes the face of one of the teachers of my youth, Rabbi

24

A Dream Come True

sometimes happened that after reading two or three sentences of one of these books I would immediately abandon it with a feel­ ing of anger. For the truth is that the Hebrew literature of the time excelled neither in content nor in form. The subjects that were dealt with by those "writers" in that "literature" were so trivial and insignificant, and the form was so far from being beautiful, that even now, when I am inclined to treat this litera­ ture more leniently and theRussian literature of that time some­ what more harshly, I cannot be enchanted with that Hebrew lit­ erature. I was even less likely to find anything in it in those days when the "greats" ofRussian literature like Pisarev and his circle had so much prejudiced my opinion, as they had prejudiced the opinion of all the Russian youth of that generation. Moreover, the style of most of the ''writers' ' of that time not only could not endear the Hebrew language to me, but had just the opposite ef­ fect, helping to extinguish the last remaining enthusiasm that still smoldered in my soul. This was the time of the general disillu­ sionment of the maskilim in Russia with the Hebrew language, the time when Moses Leib Lilienblum himself pronounced a death sentence on it, declaring in Rodkinson's journal Ha-Kol that the era of the Hebrew language had already passed, that it no longer had any role at all to play in the life of Jews, and that if he and his friends were still writing articles in Hebrew this was only because there were still some Jews who knew no Russian and could not achieve throughRussian the education that everybody required; therefore the Hebrew writers were not very accurate in their diction and did not strive to improve it. They used a mix­ ture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Russian because to them Hebrew was not an important language, seeing that eventually it was going to be abandoned. These were the words of the Hebrew writers themselves, and I, who had almost gone beyond the point of no return, what could I find to attract me in this literature and this language? Certainly in the end I would have forsaken the literature, and the language it was written in, had it not been for Peretz Smo-

Chapter 2

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lenskin's Ha-Shahar, in which my ears perceived more vitality and in which I found more problems that a person of our times should grapple with. Of course Smolenskin's stories were, in my view, no match for What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevski. Nevertheless I read them willingly because they had a contem­ porary meaning and were full of life. In every single line of Lilienblum's "A World of Chaos"-about Mapu's The Love of Zion-I noticed a crude imitation of Pisarev's criticism of Eugene Onegin, by Pushkin; nevertheless, I was delighted that modern things like these were being written in Hebrew. As for Smolenskin's articles, such as "A Time to Plant," although the very question whether we are a nation or only members of a reli­ gious community did not seem particularly important to me be­ cause, in my view at the time, nationality was no better than religion-and, in particular, I disagreed with Smolenskin that a people can exist without a land of its own-I found some inter­ est in reading his sardonic attack on Moses Mendelssohn. This demolition of the "God" of the maskilim seemed to me to be a heroic act of intellect almost on a par with Pisarev's heroism in his demolition of Pushkin. Thanks to Ha-Shahar, the flame of love for the Hebrew lan­ guage, which was being stifled under the ashes of nihilism, did not go out completely and needed only a fresh wind to make it flare up again. And that wind came suddenly. The wind came blowing from the land of the Balkans. There the Bulgarians rebelled against the Turks; and in all Russia there arose a great cry that it was a sacred duty ofRussians to hasten to the aid of their "little brothers," free them from foreign yoke, and restore the Bulgarian people to their ancient territory. This call reverberated in all the Russian papers. I read the news in the papers thirstily, at first without recog­ nizing any link between it and mysel( I noticed only one thing: I was more interested in the news from the battlefield than any of my school friends, was happier at every Russian and Bulgarian

26

A Dream Come True

victory, and found more pleasure than they did in newspaper ar­ ticles about the freedom of the Bulgarian people and the libera­ tion of the land of Bulgaria. Then once again, at midnight. After reading the paper for some hours and giving thought to the Bulgarians and their future liberation, suddenly, something like lightning flashed across my mind, and my thoughts flew from the Shipka Pass in the Balkans to the fords of the Jordan in Palestine and I heard an astonishing inner voice calling to me: The restoration ef Israel and its language on the land of its ancestors! This was the dream. True, in the first moment the matter seemed to me no more than a nocturnal vision. But I quickly realized that this was no mere dream, or at any rate, it was a dream that would not leave me thereafter. Feelings and ideas, alternating and in conflict, waged a battle in my soul. On the one hand, the great Russian people and the lofty ideals of working for their liberation, and on the other hand, a vision that filled all my soul with unending pleasure, a vision of Israel returning to life on its holy land. But from time to time this vision was pushed aside, and before my eyes appeared the sight of a small people, emaciated and sickly, and I nearly choked at the daunting notion of uplifting this small, poor, and sick nation. Thus two nations wrestled within me: The Russian and the Jewish in me exchanged furious blows. And the Jewish triumphed. My lot was cast. My life and strength would be dedicated from now on to working for the re­ vival oflsrael and its tongue in the land of its fathers. Impatiently I waited for the light of day. I rose and ran to one of my pupils, the son of a wealthy Jew in the city, who studied Russian and the rest of the school subjects with me and was somewhat under my influence. I told him of the vision. At first he thought that I was out of my mind. After a few moments he started to listen in silence, and in the end we made a pact: Together we would work for the revival oflsrael. The rumor passed among my fr iends that I had become a her­ etic and was now a different person. Some of them left me, but

Chapter 2

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one of them who was a little less fanatical about working for the Russian people,* upon hearing of my new heresy, did not reject me like the others but came and told me that, in an English story he had read in translation in the monthly Russian journal Vestnik Evropi, a man was described who had a vision similar to my own. I asked him to get me the issue in which the story was printed, and after a few days he brought it to me. It was the novel Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot. After I had read the story a few times I made up my mind and I acted: I went to Paris, to the source of light and the center of international politics, in order to learn and equip myself there with the information needed for my work in the Land oflsrael. There I met my third teacher, who taught me the art of jour­ nalism, and it was he who urged me to write my first article, "A Weighty Question."

*This friend of mine, Nagid by name, emigrated to America some years ago, settling in New York. When I arrived here two years ago we met and remi­ nisced about this event.