Yaakov Bentolila

Yaakov Bentolila is an Israeli philologist, a professor of Hebrew language at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, and a member of the Hebrew Language Academy since 2004.

Biography

Bentolila was born in 1935 to Vidal and Mercedes Bentolila, a Sephardic Jewish family. He studied at a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and later at the Spanish Lyceum in Tétouan. In 1950, he moved to France, and made Aliyah a year later, arriving in Yavne. Upon reaching adulthood, he served in the Israel Defense Forces under the Nahal Brigade.
His parents immigrated to Israel in 1956, along with his two brothers. They passed through an immigration center to Kiryat Gat, where Bentolila worked as an electrician. In 1958, he began working with Bnei Akiva, travelling back to Morocco, France, and other Maghrebi countries. While working for Bnei Akiva, he met his wife, a French Jew of Hungarian origin. They married in Strasbourg in 1961.
Bentolila was the head of the Hebrew Language Department at Ben-Gurion University from 1974 to 1992. Concurrently, he conducted research at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, and became well known among researchers studying Haketia and Judeo-Spanish culture of North Africa.

Works

Haketia: The Judeo-Spanish of North Africa Los Muestros N°61,
La palabra en su hora es oro, co-written with Tamar Alexander
THE ON THE MEANING OF PERSONAL NAMES IN HAKITIC PROVERBS, co-written with Tamar Alexander<

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