the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

According to some definitions a dead language is one that has no native speakers. By another definition, a dead language is one that may have no native speakers but is nevertheless still in limited use for certain purposes such as religious texts or academic studies. By this definition, Hebrew was a dead language for nearly 2,000 years, from the second century BCE to the late 19th century CE.

Several factors led to the decline of Hebrew as a spoken language. According to some sources, it had been in a slow decline since possibly 200 BCE, but ultimately met its fate during the Jewish–Roman_wars, culminating in the Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 CE, which resulted in a crushing defeat and ultimately a mass Roman enslavement of the Jews.

After the wars, the Jewish culture was ground under the heel of the Romans. Many Jewish settlements were destroyed, and many Jews exiled from their homeland, with the Romans imposing harsh restrictions on Jewish cultural practices. As a consequence, many Jews adopted Aramaic, Greek, or Latin as their primary languages. However, despite the efforts of Rome, the Hebrew language was never completely extinct, for though it was forced underground, it was preserved and used secretly by many Jewish communities around the world for religious ceremonies prayers, and private literary reading.

It is important to note that by the second century CE the Hebrew language now existed only in a stripped down and static form, encapsulated in the holy books and other religious educational literature.

During this early period, the language was saved only by the written word, but due to natural linguistic evolution and aided by the widespread immigration of the Jews, a wide variety of accents and pronunciation variants came to exist withing the language, and the verbal language became somewhat less standardized.

The stilted usage of the language necessitated a variety of explicit programs to encourage literacy within the populace. Beginning around 500 CE, the Masoretes devised a clever system of diacritics in an attempt to aid in memorization of the holy scriptures. This was deemed to be necessary, probably because language's lack of usage in everyday speech had stripped the written words of much of its semantic value. It is exceedingly difficult to memorize long passages of text written in a language in which the reader is not verbally fluent, even if they do understand many of the written words.

By the 10th century, several distinctive Jewish cultures had formed in Central Europe, notably the Ashkenazi Jews centered in Germany. This distinct cultures spoke a blend of Hebrew and German which eventually became known as Yiddish. Similar processes occurred elsewhere resulting in other dialects.

By this time, the language was vastly different from the ancient form in which the holy texts had originally been penned.

In the late 19th century, a movement to revive Hebrew as a spoken language began, led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a linguist and Zionist activist. But the new Hebrew was markedly different from the ancient language. Ben-Yehuda and his followers created new words, grammar rules, and pronunciation guides for modern Hebrew, based on the ancient and medieval sources, and added many borrow words from other languages.

They encouraged Jewish immigrants to Palestine to adopt Hebrew as their common language, and established schools, newspapers, and institutions that used Hebrew. By the time Israel declared its independence in 1948, Hebrew was one of its official languages, along with Arabic. Today, Hebrew is spoken by about nine million people, mostly in Israel, but also in Jewish communities around the world.

So, to summarize, Hebrew was once a dead language, but it was revived and is now a living language. It is a unique example of language revival in history, and a testament to the resilience and creativity of the Jewish people.

The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language began in the late 19th century, as part of the Zionist movement, which aimed to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine2. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a linguist and Zionist activist, is considered the father of modern Hebrew, as he and his followers created new words, grammar rules, and pronunciation guides for modern Hebrew, based on the ancient and medieval sources, as well as borrowing from other languages2. They also encouraged Jewish immigrants to Palestine to adopt Hebrew as their common language, and established schools, newspapers, and institutions that used Hebrew2. By the time Israel declared its independence in 1948, Hebrew was one of its official languages, along with Arabic2.