Soleiman Haim

Origins and early life

Soleiman Haim was born in Tehran in 1887 into the Jewish community of the city, the son of a quilt maker from Shiraz, and he remained a Jew all his life, active in Iranian Jewish communal and cultural affairs.

Work and career

He was educated at the Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Tehran and at the American College there, and he taught English before turning to the work that occupied him for four decades. Beginning with the New English-Persian Dictionary of 1929, he produced the first comprehensive bilingual dictionaries of modern Persian: English to Persian and Persian to English, a French-Persian dictionary, a Hebrew-Persian dictionary, and volumes of Persian proverbs and idioms with their foreign equivalents.

Iranians still call him the father of the bilingual dictionary, and his works, revised and reprinted continuously since his death, remain in daily use; the Encyclopaedia Iranica devotes an article to him as the lexicographer who gave Persian its modern reference tools. He also worked as a translator for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Alongside the dictionaries he wrote and staged Persian plays on biblical themes, including Esther and Mordecai and Ruth and Naomi, performed by Jewish amateur companies in Tehran, and he translated Hebrew liturgical poetry into Persian. He died in Tehran on 14 February 1970.