Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Hebrew was hard to come by in the streets of Jerusalem. Yet in the early twentieth century, after significant Jewish immigration to the city, Hebrew was suddenly everywhere. Stone inscriptions on Jewish institutions, pilgrims’ graffiti, token coins in the market, Ottoman postcards in Hebrew, commercial placards, rabbinical notices, big signs on modern schools and hospitals, newspapers and more. As I explore in my forthcoming book "City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem" (Stanford University Press, 2020), this dramatic proliferation of Hebrew in the streets accommodated several competing, and contradictory political projects. The historiography provides a narrative of the Haskala followed by the movement of Hebrew Revival, the Tehiya, in which the language acquired distinct national, Zionist dimensions - against Ashkenazi Orthodox hostility. Yet the emphasis on the Hebrew’s revival as a national language obscures its no less important, and equally novel, colonial dimension. Hebrew became a language of territorialization, of claiming land, of rewriting and erasure. For Labour Zionists, Hebrew was a field to be colonised, as much as it was a tool of colonisation. The colonizing impetus of Hebrew is often discussed in the context of post-48 Israel, e.g. in the creation of the “Hebrew map”. In this talk I investigate the early moments of this transition in late Ottoman Jerusalem. In this paper I consider the fractured and contested transformation of Hebrew into a language of colonization, focussing particularly on the role of language in urban space. I argue that the Zionification of Hebrew was a tool not only to colonise territory but also to colonise local Jewish communities. I explore local Jews’ ambivalent and sometimes hostile engagement with the project of Revival. I consider the diversity of modern Hebrew forms in late Ottoman Jerusalem, and the difference between non-colonial and colonial approaches. Finally, I ask what we could learn, from the urban texts of early twentieth century Jerusalem, about the possibilities of decolonising Hebrew.