‘A burning question’ by Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, annotated translation and commentary

Abstract

If, today, Hebrew is a spoken language and Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, that is because of Zionism. But in 1879, years before Herzl, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, then only 21 years old, wrote a polemical article called ‘A burning question’, which proposed settling the Land of Israel as a solution to the Jewish Question. That was the beginning of the political and intellectual work of one of the figures behind the revival of Hebrew. However, there is little awareness of that work among the general public, as there are few translations of such texts. This paper is innovative in that it is the second translation of the full article and the first in a language other than English. It is also the first translation with a commentary, which provides an insight into the context of the article, something that is undoubtedly necessary for a general idea of the social and political backdrop against which Zionism was born.