Rimon Wehbi comes from Maalula, a Christian village in Syria and one of the last places in the world where Western Aramaic is still spoken, the language that was once the 'lingua franca' of the Middle East and in which Jesus also preached. As a child, his grandfather often told him and his siblings stories in Aramaic, which Rimon Wehbi recorded on a cassette recorder. "As a child, I just wanted to be able to record the stories and listen to them over and over again." As an adult, he became increasingly aware of the special nature of the Aramaic language - and the danger of it dying out as a living language.
This threat became particularly clear in 2013 when Jabhat al-Nusra - a jihadist militia close to al-Qaeda - captured Maalula, killing many people and extensively burning and destroying the village. The majority of the original 10,000 inhabitants fled from the jihadists. Although the village was recaptured by Syrian government troops in 2014, many of the inhabitants never returned, preferring to remain in exile - for example in Lebanon or other Arab or European countries. Some also moved to Damascus, 56 kilometres away, where they feel safer but mainly speak Arabic. The flight and worldwide dispersion of native speakers of West Aramaic could further accelerate the demise of this language. Experts estimate that a language only survives two generations in the diaspora.
In view of this situation, Rimon Wehbi looked for opportunities to start studying Semitic studies. He met with Prof Dr Werner Arnold, one of the leading experts on Aramaic, when he was on a research visit to Beirut. On his advice, Rimon Wehbi applied for a KAAD scholarship to study for a Master's degree in Semitic Studies at Heidelberg University: "I already had a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Damascus, but I initially lacked a lot of linguistic knowledge for a Master's degree in Semitic Studies. However, with the support of the lecturers, I was able to acquire these quickly." Rimon Wehbi's story is characterised by a thirst for knowledge and an academic approach to his native language, about which there is also a great deal of literature in German. With the knowledge of German he has acquired, he has now been able to absorb it. At the beginning of 2018, he completed his degree in Semitic Studies with a thesis on "The Aramaic Water Mills in Maalula" with a grade of 'very good' (1.3) and soon returned to Syria - despite the adverse living conditions.
"Perhaps 1,000 people currently live in Maalula. The churches and monasteries were the first buildings to be rebuilt, but many houses are still ruins that nobody cares about," he says, describing the current situation. Soon after his return, Rimon Wehbi began teaching Aramaic to the children of Maalula on a voluntary basis and developing his own curriculum. He currently teaches several classes of twenty to fifty pupils at St George's Church. He is also developing his own teaching materials especially for this purpose, as Western Aramaic is not a written language and there are virtually no textbooks, especially not for teaching children. He is also dedicated to further linguistic research into Aramaic: "I still keep the cassettes with the stories that my grandfather told us in Aramaic, but now I also use them for linguistic analyses."
In addition to teaching, he runs the non-profit educational project yawna.org, which means 'deaf' in Aramaic and aims to preserve the Aramaic language as well as the culture and heritage of Maalula. It introduces the village and its history and summarises the current state of historical and linguistic research on Western Aramaic in a generally understandable way. Rimon Wehbi earns his living by working in an optician's shop that he runs with his father and brother in Damascus, working on his Aramaic projects in the evenings and travelling to Maalula to teach at weekends.
Since September 2023, Rimon Wehbi, funded by the KAAD, has been continuing his academic qualification with a doctoral project in which he is learning modern linguistic methods for safeguarding and researching ancient languages and applying them to Western Aramaic.
