קוֹמְבִּינָה (kombina) — a scheme, fix, or clever informal arrangement

Etymology

The word קוֹמְבִּינָה is distinctively Israeli yet its roots stretch to late Latin. The Latin verb combinare ("to put together") — compounded from com- ("together") and binus ("pair," from bis, "twice") — is attested as early as Augustine's Confessions (397 CE). Through the centuries it entered mathematical terminology when Leibniz published his Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria in 1666, and by the early twentieth century combinatorics was an established mathematical discipline, the term adopted into Russian among other languages.

The decisive moment in the word's journey to Hebrew came from fiction. In 1928 the Russian satirists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov published Dvenadtsat stulev (The Twelve Chairs), featuring the con-man Ostap Bender, dubbed "the Great Kombinator." Bender's specialty was devising schemes — framed as "combinatorial problems" — for profiting without honest labor. The word קוֹמְבִּינָטוֹר, used 78 times in the novel, passed into Russian colloquial speech as a label for someone who uses cunning — legal and illegal — to obtain money, goods, or advantage.

Soviet Jewish immigrants brought קוֹמְבִּינָטוֹר to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s. A 1935 Hebrew newspaper article about currency forgers in Tel Aviv refers to a suspect as "a great kombinator." Only in the 1990s was the derivative noun קוֹמְבִּינָה coined in Hebrew, denoting the act or scheme itself rather than its practitioner. The verb לְקַמְבֵּן (to pull off a kombina, to obtain by cunning) followed by 1997 at the latest, built on the novel root ק.מ.ב.נ.

Key Quotes

"בין הרובד העליון למעמד הבינוני הרחב של מנהלים ומומחים צמחה גם שכבה של 'מתככים', מבקשי הצלחה מהירה ונטולת מאמץ באמצעות מניפולציות ו'קומבינות'." — Uri Yizhar, Nachala lelo Menucha, 1992

"כלם רצו להסתלק מהעניין... שבן עמי הוא קומבינטור גדול" — Doar HaYom, 1935

Timeline

• 397 CE: combinare attested in Augustine's Confessions
• 1666: Leibniz uses combinatorics as a mathematical concept
• 1928: Ilf & Petrov's The Twelve Chairs introduces "Kombinator" as a literary-slang type
• 1930s: קוֹמְבִּינָטוֹר enters Hebrew via Soviet immigrants
• 1935: First attested in Hebrew press (Doar HaYom)
• 1992: קוֹמְבִּינָה first attested in Hebrew (Uri Yizhar)
• by 1997: לְקַמְבֵּן (verb) in use

Related Words

• קוֹמְבִּינָטוֹר — the schemer (earlier borrowing, 1930s Hebrew)
• לְקַמְבֵּן — to scheme, to wangle (derived verb, ~1997)
• פְּרוֹטֶקְצִיָּה — protectzia; using connections for favors (parallel cultural concept)