Yaakov Bentolila

Yaakov Bentolila was born in 1935 in Tétouan

Bentolila was born on June 30, 1935, in Tétouan, Morocco, the eldest son of Vidal and Mercedes. His father was secretary of the Jewish community, and his grandfather Yaakov was a rabbinic judge and head of a yeshiva. He studied at an Alliance Israélite Universelle school and spent a year at the Spanish secondary institute in the city.

In 1950 he left with Youth Aliyah and stayed in children's homes in France. In 1951 he sailed to Israel and joined the youth group at Kvutzat Yavne. He later served in the IDF in a Nahal group that joined Kibbutz Lavi.

In 1957 he moved to Kiryat Gat to live with his parents and worked as an electrician. From 1958 he served as a Bnei Akiva emissary in North Africa, and in 1961 he married Tamar in Strasbourg. That year he began studying Hebrew language and French culture at the Hebrew University, and he earned a doctorate in 1983.

He headed the Hebrew Language Department at Ben-Gurion University from 1974 to 1992 and became a professor there in 1996. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard and other centers abroad, and he studied Haketia and the Judeo-Spanish culture of North Africa. He retired in 2005 and was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 2015.