Yaakov Yitzhaki

Yaakov Yitzhaki (; ; September 1, 1846 – June 11, 1917) was a rabbi, scholar, religious Zionist and founder of the settlement of Be'er Ya'akov.

Biography Yaakov Yitzhaki was born in Derbent in present-day Dagestan, Russia, into a family of Mountain Jews. He received his religious education from his father, Rabbi Yitzhak ben Yaakov, and, like his father, at a yeshiva in Bila Tserkva. In 1868, when he was 22 years old, with the consent of the elders of the community, his father appointed him chief rabbi and religious judge of Derbent. Yitzhaki studied secular sciences and the Russian language in a realschule. He kept in touch with orientalists, including Abraham Harkavy and Judah Chorny.

In the 1880s, he was appointed by the tsarist government as crown rabbi of the Mountain Jews of Southern Dagestan and Azerbaijan.

He compiled the first Juhuri-Hebrew dictionary and a brief history of the Mountain Jews. He was buried on the Mount of Olives.

Archive In 1974 Yitzhaki's son Yitzhak Yitzhaki gave the part of his father's archive that he had preserved to the Central Archive of the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem. The collection has been digitized and is available online at the archive's website.