Ya'ackov Ben-Dov · Public domain

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda took a language used mainly for prayer and scholarship and made it a living vernacular again: his Hebrew dictionary and his newspaper HaZvi, both produced after he settled in Ottoman-ruled Jerusalem in 1881, were central to reviving Hebrew as an everyday spoken language for the first time in nearly two thousand years. That revival underpins the national language of modern Israel.