Yitzhaq Shami

Yitzhaq Shami was born in 1888 in Hebron

Shami was born Yitzhaq Sarwi in Hebron in 1888, the eldest of three children. His father, Eliyahu, was a textile merchant who moved from Damascus to Hebron in 1885 and was called a-Shami, the Damascene. That name became the writer's pen name and later his legal name.

He spoke Arabic with his father and Ladino with his mother, Rivka Castel, who came from a Sephardic family of Hebron. He studied at the yeshiva of Rabbi Chaim Hezekiah Medini but was asked to leave after rebelling against religious education. In 1905 he moved to Jerusalem and studied at the Ezra teachers college until 1907.

In Jerusalem he met Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and Shmuel Yosef Agnon and came into contact with Zionism. He taught in Gedera, then in Damascus and in Bulgaria, where he married the teacher Pnina Gingold. World War I kept them in Bulgaria, and their son Yedidya was born there.

After the war they returned to Hebron and worked as teachers. He was elected to the first Assembly of Representatives for The Young Worker. Pnina died in 1925, he later married Sarah Kalish, and he survived the 1929 Hebron massacre by hiding in the home of the Mani family.

He later lived in Tiberias and then in Haifa, working as a teacher and court clerk. He published short stories, the novella The Vengeance of the Fathers, poems and essays. He died in Haifa in 1949.