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Yona Sabar

Yona Sabar is a linguist born in Zakho, Iraq, and a professor emeritus of Hebrew at UCLA who studies Jewish Neo-Aramaic and the folklore of the Jews of Kurdistan.

born 1938Research on Jewish Neo-AramaicFolklore of Kurdistani JewsA Neo-Aramaic dictionarySubject of My Father's Paradise

Occupation: linguist, university teacher, Hebraist, arabist
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yale University

Yona Sabar was born in 1938 in Zakho

Sabar was born in 1938 in Zakho, in northern Iraq, as Yona Sabagha. He was the last known Jewish boy to have a bar mitzvah in Zakho. In 1951 his family moved to Israel as part of Operations Ezra and Nehemia and settled in Jerusalem.

As a poor Aramaic-speaking immigrant, he found it hard to adapt at first, and he worked for the Histadrut. The family changed its surname to Sabar, after the word for the prickly pear.

He earned a B.A. in Hebrew and Arabic from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963, where he was the first student to receive a research grant from the Ben-Zvi Institute. He then completed a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1970. His doctorate was an edition of 17th century Neo-Aramaic manuscripts from the town of Nerwa in Iraq.

In 1972 UCLA hired him to teach Hebrew and Aramaic. A native speaker of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, he has published more than 90 articles and books, including a Neo-Aramaic dictionary. He also wrote on Hebrew word origins for the Jewish Journal and coached Aramaic for a 2013 episode of True Blood.

In 2008 his son, journalist Ariel Sabar, published a memoir about his life, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. His brother is folklore scholar Shalom Sabar.