Sasson Somekh

Sasson Somekh was born in 1933 in Baghdad

Somekh was born in Baghdad in 1933 to a secular Jewish family. His father worked as a clerk in a British bank. He finished high school in Baghdad in 1950, and in 1951 he moved to Israel with his family, knowing no Hebrew.

He learned Hebrew in order to translate Arabic poetry, and his first translation appeared in 1954. After serving in the Air Force, he studied Hebrew language and Jewish history at Tel Aviv University from 1958. He earned a master's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a doctorate at Oxford on the novels of Naguib Mahfouz.

From 1962 to 1965 he was scientific secretary of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. At Tel Aviv University he headed the Arabic department from 1972 to 1984 and became a full professor in 1980. He headed the Israel Academic Center in Cairo from 1996 to 1998.

He wrote about 10 books, many translations from Arabic, and wrote regularly for Haaretz. He helped found the Academy of the Arabic Language in Israel in 2007 and wrote a two-volume autobiography. He died in Tel Aviv in 2019.