The Awesome Power of Sababa

If you're visiting Israel soon and want to blend in with the Jewish population there, learning just one word—sababa—will get you surprisingly far. "How are you?" "Sababa." "How are you liking this weather?" "Sababa." "And how was the film last night?" "Sababa." "Want to go to a bar later?" "Sababa."

Sababa, originally Arabic, took off in the Hebrew lexicon sometime in the 1980s or '90s. "Sababa is one of the most important words now in Hebrew slang," says Ruvik Rosenthal, author of the 2005 Comprehensive Slang Dictionary in Hebrew. "Many ask about this specific word in my lectures." As used now in Israel, it essentially means "good." In different contexts, it can also mean "fun," "okay" and, according to the online Urban Dictionary, "shibby, cool, great, no problem, all-right."

But an Arabic dictionary will tell you something different—that sababa is a high-register, literary word meaning "ardent love, fervent longing." How it made the journey from Arabic poetry to Hebrew slang is unclear, says Uri Horesh, a linguist at the University of Texas at Austin. He suspects that the scenario that might initially seem most plausible—that the word jumped over into Hebrew from Palestinian Arabic—is not actually likely. Though Palestinians do use the word now in the Hebrew sense of "cool," there is some question as to whether they began to do so after Israeli Jews did. (The fact that it is used by urban Palestinians and not villagers seems to support this.) Horesh offers a different "educated guess": that native Arabic-speaking Jews might have brought the word with them upon emigrating to Israel. The cause of the shift in meaning is unclear, but Horesh easily finds parallels: the English word "awesome," for instance, before its life as everyday slang, was a reverent word with a particular, forceful meaning.

"Arab slang…is now the strongest influence on Hebrew slang, even more than English," Rosenthal says, not in terms of the quantity of words, but in their frequency and importance. Arabic words were prevalent in Hebrew slang in the 1940s and '50s, declining after that (though a 1960s study still said Hebrew slang was 40 percent Arabic in origin, 40 percent Yiddish and 20 percent everything else). Rosenthal favors his own provocative theory as to the early popularity of Arabic slang. It is not merely that the languages are cousins; he thinks that the early Jews who emigrated to Palestine were drawn to Arabic in an effort to reject what they saw as the weakness of the diaspora and acquire the strength they associated with their new home. That which was Arab, says Rosenthal, seemed manly. "They wanted to look like Arabs, speak like Arabs, because Arabs were the natives." Arabic's strong, deep consonants, as in the guttural word ahla (another slang word, almost interchangeable with sababa), feel "macho," says Rosenthal.

Not all Israelis are pleased with this borrowing trend. One of the most famous Hebrew purists, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, once complained to the Knesset about the tendency of Israelis to bid farewell with the Arabic-English mishmash, "yallah bye!" What was wrong with good old-fashioned "shalom?" he wondered publicly.

Sharon, however, was one man fighting a tsunami. The word sababa has even endeared itself to countless Israel tourists, to judge from the plethora of businesses and organizations that have named themselves with it. Maybe you've bought a Rubik's Cube or an action figure from Sababa Toys (an American company), grabbed some hummus at Nashville's Café Sababa or, if you were in Taiwan, visited the Sababa Pita Bar in Taipei. The University of North Carolina Hillel's a capella group is named Sababa, and you can buy a chic wristband from "Get Sababa," a clothing line by an enthusiastic American whose proceeds benefit the Israeli Defense Forces. Britain's United Jewish Israel Appeal recently founded "an exciting committee" to get young English Jews enthused about their identity. Its name? Sababa.

Both Rosenthal and Horesh are puzzled by this international sababa epidemic. Horesh, for one, thinks it a bit ironic that Americans and others feel hip by adopting this word because, he says, to Israelis sababa is actually a bit dated, with ahla being more current. Often, his American friends will say a word that they think is "the hippest, coolest thing in Hebrew, and I'll think, ‘That's so last year.'"

He adds: "I hardly ever use sababa."

—David Zax