Chaim Menachem Rabin (Hebrew: חיים מנחם רבין; 1915–1996) was a German, then British, and finally Israeli professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages.
Chaim Rabin was born in Giessen, Germany, 22 November 1915, the son of Israel and Martel Rabin. Having completed his school studies in April 1933 he spent the year 1933–1934 in Palestine, studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[1][2]
He then emigrated to England, where he eventually became a British citizen.[2] He enrolled as a student at the School of Oriental Studies of the University of London where he received his BA degree in 1937. In 1939 he was awarded his PhD with a thesis entitled Studies in Early Arabic Dialects at the now renamed School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where from 1938 was employed as a lecturer.
On the outbreak of the war he was briefly interned on the Isle of Man, but was soon released. In 1941[3] he moved to the University of Oxford, where he received his MA, then D.Phil. in 1942, with a thesis entitled The Development of the Syntax of Post-Biblical Hebrew. In 1943 he was appointed Cowley Lecturer in Post-Biblical Hebrew there.
In 1956 with his wife, Batya, he emigrated to Israel, and took a post of Associate Professor, then full Professor of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he remained until his retirement in 1985.[1]
At the Second International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies, held at Madras (now, Chennai), India, Prof. Rabin presented a study on "Loanword evidence in biblical Hebrew for trade between Tamil Nadu and Palestine in the first millennium BC" and projected his hopes "that some day a Tamil scholar may try and discover whether there are in Tamil any loanwords from Hebrew or from South-Arabian".
Following his early interest in Arabic dialects, Chaim Rabin's field were all aspects of Hebraic linguistics, in particular, translations of the language of the Bible, the Dead Sea Manuscripts, and the detailed study of medieval codices. He succeeded Moshe Goshen-Gottstein as chief editor of the Hebrew University Bible Project.[4]
Rabin was a pioneer in training Israeli translators. Together with Shoshana Bloom, he established the Hebrew University's Department of Scientific Translation. He was a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and died in Jerusalem on 13 May 1996.
