Abir (Hebrew Warrior Art)
A modern Israeli system founded by Yehoshua Sofer in 2002; the claim to an ancient Hebrew lineage rests on his own testimony alone.
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Organisation & Competition
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About Abir (Hebrew Warrior Art)
Abir, in full Abir Qesheth, is a modern fighting system founded in Israel in 2002 by Yehoshua Sofer. The association operates in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and presents itself as a Hebrew warrior art. The claim on which it stands is an exceptionally strong one. Sofer says it is a family tradition reaching back to Israelite antiquity, preserved by an underground school called Bani Abir in Habban in Yemen, and that he inherited the title Aluf Abir from his father; he adds that his forebears served Saudi and Ethiopian rulers.
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We have not been able to document any of this, and the testimonies contradict one another. A report from 2015 states that Sofer was born in Jamaica into a Breslov family and that in the nineteen-nineties he was a pioneer of Israeli hip hop under the name Nigel Ha'Admor; elsewhere he himself said that a Chinese man in Kingston brought him to the martial arts, which does not square with a family lineage. The musician Yair Nitzani, who worked with him on a rap record, said that until recently he had never heard of anything called Abir. The honest placing is therefore different from the one the name offers. The founder, the year of founding and the existing organization are documented; the ancient lineage is not. That does not make Abir a fabrication — it makes it a modern system that ascribes a history to itself, and the reader is entitled to know which of the two rests on sources.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.