Sasson Somekh

Sasson Somekh (Hebrew: ששון סומך; Arabic: ساسون سوميخ) (1933 – 18 August 2019) was an Iraqi-Israeli academic, writer and translator.

He served as chairman of the Arabic Language and Literature department at Tel Aviv University in 1972–1984.

Over the past 50 years Somekh published hundreds of articles in literary magazines and supplements such as Iton 77, Halikon and Moznayim.

[4] At the age of 70, Somekh wrote the first volume of his autobiography, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew.

He shows that the educated middle class that achieved prominence in the 1930s and '40s was the main influence on the norms of life in the Jewish community.

The book moves between the four major stations of his life: Tel Aviv - where he lived and worked for 40 years as a professor of Arabic literature; Oxford - where he received his PhD; Princeton - where he was occasionally a visiting professor in the 1970s and '80s; and Cairo - the city in which he did much literary research and where he headed the Israel Academic Center.