My Early Life with Arabic

The launch in 2015 of the online Arabic-Hebrew dictionary—a massive, fully searchable database complete with notes, examples, and expressions drawn from many historical layers of the Arabic language—capped many years of dedicated labor by Menahem Milson, professor of Arabic language and literature emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the essay below, adapted from remarks delivered on the 90th anniversary of the university’s Institute of Asian and African Studies, Milson reflects on the opening stages of his lifelong involvement with the language.

The attraction was evident from a very early age. In 1936, when I was about three, a scandalized neighbor informed my mother that her darling son had been overheard saying words that did not bear repeating. Evidently, during a quarrel with the neighbor’s son, I’d uttered phrases in colloquial Arabic containing, among others, the words for mother, father, and religion. Without going into further detail, suffice it to observe that, for the purpose of cursing, many Hebrew-speaking Israelis resort to certain Arabic formulations in which all three words figure prominently.

Actually, aside from such offense-giving loan words, I didn’t hear a great deal of Arabic in my childhood, but what little I did hear never failed to intrigue and entice me. Not far from where we lived—the neighborhood of Bat Galim in Haifa—lay the fishing village of Tel al-Samak, whose inhabitants were Christian Arabs of the Greek Catholic persuasion. Every morning the fishermen would come to Bat Galim with their catch and, with me in tow, my mother, who was from Tiberias and had learned Arabic as a child even before she knew Hebrew, would converse with them and interpret for the neighborhood’s Jewish housewives.