Yona Sabar

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Yona Sabar (* 1938 in Zaxo , Iraq ) is a Kurdish-Jewish scholar, linguist and researcher.

He was born in the city of Zaxo in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. His family moved to Israel in 1951 . In 1963 he received his bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Hebrew and Arabic . In 1970 he received his doctorate degree in Middle Eastern languages at Yale University . In 2010 he is Professor of Hebrew at the University of California, Los Angeles . He is a native speaker of Aramaic and has published more than 90 articles on Jewish New Aramaic and the folklore of Kurdish Jews.

His journey from the hills of Kurdistan to the highways in Los Angeles is the subject of his memoir, written by his son Ariel Sabar. This book, entitled My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq , won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

Books

  • The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology , Yale University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-300-02698-6
  • A Jewish Neo-Aramaic dictionary: dialects of Amidya, Dihok, Nerwa and Zakho, Northwestern Iraq , Harrassowitz, 2002. ISBN 3-447-04557-4

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