David Jacoby

David Jacoby was born in 1928 in Antwerp

David Jacoby was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1928 and grew up there. In the fall of 1942, when the deportation of the city's Jews to Poland began, he fled with his family to Switzerland. He immigrated to Israel in 1947 and took part in the War of Independence.

He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at the Hebrew University, focusing on the medieval West. His master's thesis dealt with a Catalan company that settled in Greece in the early 14th century. He wrote his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris on the demography of the Byzantine peasantry, and it was approved in 1958.

He taught in the Hebrew University's history department from 1958, headed it in 1970 to 1972 and 1979 to 1980, and became a full professor in 1974. He was a visiting professor at Berkeley, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Venice. In 1973 he received the Gustave Schlumberger Prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.

His research covered the eastern Mediterranean, including Byzantium, the Crusader states and Egypt, and their ties with Italy in the 11th to 15th centuries. He wrote on feudalism in medieval Greece, the population of Constantinople, Benjamin of Tudela and trade between Byzantium and Egypt. He retired in 1996 and died in 2018.