Aharon Ben-Shemesh

Aharon Ben-Shemesh was born in 1899 in Dnipro

Aharon Ben-Shemesh was born in 1899 in Yekaterinoslav in the Russian Empire, under the name Aharon Shpaktorov. His parents were Shmuel Moshe Shpaktorov and Lina Kaplonik. In 1905 the family moved to the Land of Israel and settled in Jaffa.

He studied at the Ezra teachers' seminary and later worked as a clerk and joined the Palestine Land Development Company. He then studied law at the Mandate law school in Jerusalem and received his license in 1929.

As a lawyer he advised the Jewish National Fund and assisted Yehoshua Hankin in land purchases. He led a legal team that worked around the land limits of the 1939 White Paper, a group he named the juridical underground. In 1935 he married Naomi Dvora Leistina.

In 1955 he submitted a doctorate in Philadelphia under Raphael Patai, and from 1958 to 1969 he published 3 books on taxation in Islam. He taught Islamic law at Tel Aviv University for many years. His Hebrew Quran translation appeared in 1971, followed by an English version in 1979.

He died in 1985 and was buried in Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery in Tel Aviv. The Jewish National Fund later set up a prize fund in his memory for research on land law.