Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

Born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman in 1858 in the Russian Empire, he arrived in Ottoman Jerusalem in 1881 carrying an improbable project: resurrect Hebrew as a living tongue. He compiled the first modern Hebrew dictionary, rendered the ancient liturgical language into something you could use to ask for bread or argue about the weather. As editor of HaZvi, one of the first Hebrew newspapers in the region, he had a platform and used it relentlessly. The revival wasn't inevitable — it was willed into being, one word and one stubborn sentence at a time. He died in Jerusalem in 1922, having spent four de…