and a rejection of shtadlanut(advocacy for the Jewish community), the pre-
dominant Jewish political strategy, which resorted to backdoor tactics by
well-connected individuals.
Conditions for Jewish settlement at the end of the nineteenth century were
difficult, to say the least. Centuries of Turkish mismanagement had left the
land untamed and the infrastructure in tatters. Bands of Bedouin robber
bands harassed settlers. Trade was minimal, often impeded by drought and
swarms of locusts. Nonetheless, during the First Aliyah (1882–1903), 25,600
Jews settled in Palestine. Most went there as refugees with little ideological
motivation. Ninety-five percent settled in towns, and only 5 percent on the
land. But those who did settle on the land established a few key settlements
such as Petah Tikva and Rosh Pina. By 1900, there were 50,000 Jews in the
Land of Israel, including 5,000 in twenty villages.
Among these early halutzimwas Eliezer ben-Yehuda (1858–1922, born
Eliezer Perlman). Ben-Yehuda was born in Lithuania into a Hasidic family. In
1871, he was sent to a modern yeshiva in Polotsk to study with his uncle. The
head of the yeshiva was secretly a maskil, and introduced young Eliezer to
Haskalah literature. In 1877, he graduated from Dvinsk Gymnasium. In
1878, amid the Russo-Turkish war and the struggle by Balkan peoples for
national liberation, ben-Yehuda began thinking about a Jewish national
revival, in terms of land and language, and planned to move to the Land of
Israel. The same year, he went to Paris to study medicine, so he would have an
income in Israel. In 1879, he published his first essay in Smolenskin’s
Hashacarcalled “She’ela lohata”, (The Burning Question), in which he began
to articulate his nationalist vision.
While in Paris, he met George Selikovitch, a Jewish traveler who had spo-
ken Hebrew with Jews in North Africa and Central Asia. From Selikovitch,
Ben-Yehuda realized that Hebrew might not be an entirely dead language.
Later in 1879, he contracted tuberculosis, quit medical school, and prepared
to relocate to a more favorable climate in the Land of Israel. To this end, he
attended an Alliance school in order to obtain a teaching post in Israel. There
he attended lectures by Joseph Halevy, an Assyriologist who had already
advocated the coining of new Hebrew words. In 1880, ben-Yehuda entered
Rothschild Hospital in Paris for treatment, where he met A. M. Luncz, who
spoke to him in Sephardic Hebrew and told him that in Jerusalem, Jews from
different communities spoke Sephardic Hebrew to one another. This further
reinforced Ben Yehudah’s belief that Hebrew was a living language and a
means of reunifying the Jewish people.
In 1881, he arrived in Palestine, and married his childhood sweetheart.
Beginning in October of that year, they decided to speak only in Hebrew, thus
becoming perhaps the first Hebrew-speaking household since biblical times.
They even posed as Orthodox Jews to be around the more Hebrew-literate
Orthodox community. In 1881, Ben Yehuda founded Tehiyat Yisrael (The
Revival of Israel), which had five aims: working the land, creating a modern
Anti-Semitism and Jewish responses, 1870–1914 189