Editing Zionism (section)

=== Revival of the Hebrew language ===
{{Main|Revival of the Hebrew language}}{{See also|Modern Hebrew|Hebraization of surnames|Hebraization of Palestinian place names}}
[[File:Portrait of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (cropped).jpg|thumb|[[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]] (1858–1922), founder and leader of the movement to [[Revival of the Hebrew language|revive the Hebrew language]], is considered the father of [[Modern Hebrew]].{{sfn|Mandel|2005|pp=85}}]]
The revival of the Hebrew language in Eastern Europe as a secular literary medium marked a significant cultural shift among Jews, who per Judaic tradition used Hebrew only for religious purposes.<ref>{{harvnb|Rabkin|2006}}: "The political movement of Zionism was preceded in Eastern Europe by a revival of the Hebrew language as a nonreligious, literary medium. Jews always used Hebrew in their prayers and religious writings, but this was a revival of Hebrew as a language of novels and poems, polemical articles, and journalistic feuilletons. This development was an anathema to the rabbis who saw in it a desecration of the Holy Tongue. The origins of this movement are found in ethnically mixed Lithuania and later in Galicia, where the German Kultursprache of the Austrian rulers contended with both Polish and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) nationalism. Secularized, modern Jews began to ask for the origins of their culture, for the roots of their history; to extol the glories of Jerusalem; to ask whether they should not look into their own past just as members of other groups were doing."</ref> The primary motivator for establishing modern Hebrew as a national language was the sense of legitimacy it gave the movement, by suggesting a connection between the Jews of ancient Israel and the Jews of the Zionist movement.{{sfn|Dieckhoff|2003|pp=104}} These developments are seen in Zionist historiography as a revolt against tradition, with the development of Modern Hebrew providing the basis on which a Jewish cultural renaissance might develop.{{sfn|Rabkin|2006}}

The [[revival of the Hebrew language]] and the establishment of [[Modern Hebrew]] is most closely associated with the linguist [[Eliezer Ben-Yehuda]] and the Committee of the Hebrew Language (later replaced by the [[Academy of the Hebrew Language]]).{{sfn|Fellman|2011|p=7}}{{sfn|Blau|1981|p=33}}