Yitzhak Navon

• 1. Introduction

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  Yitzhak Navon spoke five languages fluently: Arabic, Hebrew, Ladino, French, and English. On the 19th of April 1978, the Knesset elected him Israel's fifth president. The vote was 86 in his favor in the 120-member chamber, and nobody ran against him. He was the first president born in Jerusalem and the first Sephardi Jew to hold that office. His family's roots in Jerusalem stretched back centuries, shaped by one of the most dramatic expulsions in Jewish history. Before the presidency, he had run intelligence operations, shaped Israeli government policy for over a decade, and written Sephardic musicals. What drove this man, and what did he make of the platform his presidency offered?

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• 2. Sephardic Roots

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  The Baruch Mizrahi family arrived in Jerusalem in 1670, having come by way of Turkey. Their ancestors had fled Spain after the expulsion of 1492. They rebuilt their lives in the Ottoman Empire before eventually making their way to Jerusalem. That was Navon's ancestry on his father's side, a family of rabbis within the Sephardic tradition. His mother's line carried its own distinction: she was descended from Chaim ibn Attar, a Moroccan-Jewish kabbalist rabbi of wide renown, who settled in Jerusalem in 1742. On the 9th of April 1921, Yitzhak Rachamim Navon was born in Jerusalem to Yosef and Miryam Navon.

  In 1924, the family moved from Jaffa Road to the Ohel Moshe neighbourhood in Nachlaot. They relocated to Sheikh Badr, near Jerusalem's western entrance, in 1932. Another move followed in 1936, to Mekor Baruch. Navon attended the Doresh Tziyon and Takhemoni elementary schools, then the Hebrew University high school. He went on to study Arabic and Islamic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught Hebrew literature for several years afterward. His childhood in Jerusalem's Sephardic community had given him one foundation. His formal training in Arabic had given him another.

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• 3. Intelligence and the Ben-Gurion Years

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  Navon joined the Haganah's Arab Intelligence Unit and worked undercover in Jerusalem. He gathered intelligence by listening to wiretapped conversations of the British Army. The Israeli foreign service then sent him to Uruguay and Argentina to help track down Nazis. Those assignments established his standing as someone the new state could trust with its most delicate work.

  In 1951, that standing brought him into the office of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. Navon became Ben-Gurion's political secretary. The following year he was appointed bureau chief. He retained that role under Prime Minister Moshe Sharett as well. His judgment shaped advice the government received during two of the era's gravest crises: the Suez Crisis and the Lavon Affair.

  When Ben-Gurion resigned in 1963, Navon moved to the Ministry of Education and Culture. There he found a problem that demanded action: around 12% of the Jewish population in Israel was illiterate. "It's a shame and disgrace that more than 200,000 adults in Israel do not know how to read or write in any language, and we must do everything possible to erase this stain from us," he declared. He ordered hundreds of female soldiers serving compulsory national service to teach illiterate adults to read and write Hebrew. Two years later he was elected to the Knesset as a member of Ben-Gurion's Rafi party. He served as deputy speaker and chaired the Knesset Committee on Foreign and Defense Affairs. That portfolio would shape the approach he brought to the presidency.

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• 4. A Ceremonial Presidency

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  On the 29th of May 1978, Navon assumed office at Beit HaNassi, the presidential residence in Jerusalem. He was the first president to move in with young children. His wife Ofira devoted herself to promoting the welfare of Israeli children throughout their years there.

  His meeting with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat gave him a direct role in the peace talks between the two countries. The Haaretz newspaper later noted that Navon achieved more in a single visit than Israel's prime minister had managed in five. The Israeli presidency is a ceremonial role by design. Navon used it anyway. In 1982, Lebanese Falangists perpetrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Navon became one of the most outspoken advocates for a judicial commission of inquiry into Israel's role in those events. That advocacy came in the fifth and final year of his term.

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• 5. Return to Politics

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  In 1983, Navon declined a second presidential term and returned to active politics. No Israeli ex-president had done so before. Polls showed him more popular than Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres. Peres faced pressure within the party to step aside and cede the leadership to Navon. Navon's fluency in Arabic had made him especially popular with Arab and Mizrahi voters. He did not accept the chairmanship.

  Instead, he won election to the Knesset in 1984 and served as minister of education and culture through 1990. The first Intifada placed the education portfolio at the center of one of the era's most fraught debates. During the summer of 1989, riots and protests swept through Jerusalem. Parents sent a petition directly to Navon asking him to reopen their schools. His response addressed the moral stakes directly: "This action is immoral and ineffective and will cause irreversible damage in the long and short run to Palestinian children and to our own." He remained in the Knesset until 1992.

  After leaving the legislature, Navon emerged from retirement to chair a Commission of Inquiry. Israeli medical authorities had been discarding blood donated by Israelis of Ethiopian origin, citing concerns about AIDS transmission. The practice had drawn wide criticism, and the commission examined it in full. His wife Ofira died of cancer in 1993.

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• 6. Literary Life and Legacy

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  Romancero Sefardi premiered in 1968, drawing on the folklore of the Sephardic Jewish community. Navon wrote it himself, and it reached Habimah, Israel's national theater in Tel Aviv. Two years later, Bustan Sefardi, meaning "Sephardic Garden," followed the same path to the national stage. Both musicals brought Sephardic cultural traditions to audiences across the country.

  The Six Days and the Seven Gates appeared in 1979, while Navon was still serving as president. It offered a modern legend of the reunification of Jerusalem. Shikmona Publishing Company released it in Hebrew; an English translation followed. In 2003, the Spanish government honored Navon at Herzliya, connecting his recognition to the Iberian heritage his ancestors had carried since 1492. Shortly before his death, he was placed in the honorary 120th position on the Zionist Union's list for the 2015 Israeli legislative elections. He died in Jerusalem on the 6th of November 2015 at the age of 94. The Jerusalem-Yitzhak Navon Station in central Jerusalem carries his name today.

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