Dola Ben-Yehuda Wittmann

Dola Ben‑Yehuda Wittmann (12 July 1902 – 18 November 2004) was the daughter of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who was the driving spirit behind the revival of the Hebrew language in the modern era..

Biography

Dola and her brother Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda were the first native speakers of modern Hebrew. In 1921, she married Max Wittmann, a German who became the first non-Jewish language activist in Palestine to found a Hebrew-only family with a native speaker of Hebrew.^[1] At the time of her death, she was the world's oldest native speaker of Modern Hebrew. Both Dola and her husband are buried in the Alliance Church International Cemetery in the German Colony neighborhood of Jerusalem.^[2]

Relevance to linguistic scholarship

Dola's parents were the first people to raise a family in a strictly unlingual environment using only Modern Hebrew as a language for everyday use, thus producing the first native speakers of the language. Though it is common for modern linguists to have access to the last native speakers of dying languages, the opposite is rather exceptional. Modern Hebrew is the only known language to have afforded access to the first native speakers of a nascent "new" language, validating Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's claim that a "dead" and "holy" language such as Hebrew could be revived as a secular natively spoken language without the interference of religion and in spite of the opposition of the religious community. Dola survived her older brother by 60 years, well into a millennium in which Modern Hebrew has become the native language of three million people (out of seven million speakers as a whole), many of whom are not Jewish.

References

• Orbaum, Sam (2000). "Daughter of the Mother Tongue." Not Page One column, republished in Eskimos of Jerusalem And Other Extraordinary Israelis; 116 vivid stories of memorable people and places. Jerusalem, 2001.
• Wittmann, Dola Ben-Yehuda (1991). Tracks 01, 03, 17, 19, 23, 63, 65, 68 of Tongue of Tongues: A documentary to mark the centenary of Spoken Hebrew (BBC Radio Three, November 9, 1989), edited by Lewis Glinert. Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive, Hanover, NH.
• Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2009). "Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns." Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2.40-67.

Notes