Ya'akov Cahan

Ya'akov Cahan was born in 1881 in Slutsk

Cahan was born in Slutsk, in the Russian Empire, to a family of well-off merchants. He spent his childhood in Zgierz, near Łódź, where he studied at a modern heder founded by the writer Yaakov Binyamin Katznelson. From age 13 or 14 he was largely self-taught.

From 1903 to 1909 he studied at universities in Bern, Munich and Paris. In 1909 he completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Bern and returned to Poland.

Cahan joined the Zionist movement in 1897 and worked to spread spoken Hebrew. He led a Hebrew culture society in Berlin, supervised Hebrew teaching in Jewish high schools, and taught Hebrew literature at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Warsaw. He was active in the Revisionist movement and in 1933 helped found the Hebrew State Party with Meir Grossman.

He wrote poetry, plays, stories and children's songs, and translated works by Goethe and Heine from German. His song written after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom became widely sung, and one of its lines became the slogan of Hashomer.

Cahan immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1934 and lived in Tel Aviv. He served as vice president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. He died in 1960 at Beilinson Hospital and was buried at Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.