Chaim Menachem Rabin 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. He then emigrated to England, where he eventually became a British citizen. 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, where from 1938 was employed as a lecturer. In 1941 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. Following his early interest in Arabic dialects, Chaim Rabin's field was all aspects of Hebraic linguistics, in particular, translations of the language of the Bible, the Dead Sea Manuscripts, and the detailed study of mediaeval codices. He succeeded Moshe Goshen-Gottstein as chief editor of the Hebrew University Bible Project. Rabin was a pioneer in training Israeli translators. Together with Shoshana Bloom, he established the Hebrew University's Department of Scientific Translation. Rabin was a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. He died in Jerusalem on 13 May 1996.
Published Work
Hayim M. Nahmad with C. Rabin: Everyday Arabic: conversations in Syrian and Palestinian colloquial Arabic with vocabulary, phonetic and grammatical introduction, lists of useful culinary, military, political and commercial terms. with a Foreword by H. A. R. Gibb. London: Dent, 1940
Arabic Reader. London: Lund Humphries 1947
Everyday Hebrew - Twenty-nine Simple Conversations with English Translation and Full Grammatical Introduction London: Dent 1948
Hebrew Reader. London: Lund Humphries 1949
Ancient West-Arabian: a study of the dialects of the Western Highlands of Arabia in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. London: Taylor's Foreign Press 1951
Maimonides, The guide of the perplexed, with introduction and commentary by Julius Guttmann. translated from the Arabic by Chaim Rabin. London: East and West Library 1952
The Zadokite Documents. I. The Admonition, II. The Laws. Edited with a translation and notes by Chaim Rabin. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1954
The Beginnings of Classical Arabic. in Studia Islamica 4 pp. 19–37. reprinted in Ibn Warraq, What the Koran Really Says
"Alexander Jannaeus and the Pharisees". in: Journal of Jewish Studies 7, pp. 3–11
Die Renaissance der hebräischen Sprache. Zürich : Israel-Informations-Büro, 1963
The influence of different systems of Hebrew orthography on reading efficiency. Jerusalem: The Israel Institute of Applied Social Research 1968
Loanword Evidence in Biblical Hebrew for Trade between Tamil Nad and Palestine in the First Millenium B.C.. in Asher R. E., Proceedings of the Second International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies
Thesaurus of the Hebrew language in dictionary form. Jerusalem: Kiryat Sepher, 1970–1973
