Moshe David Gaon (1889-1958) was a historian, scholar of Oriental Jewry, bibliographer, educator, journalist and poet. He made Aliya shortly before World War One. In 1921 he ran a Talmud Torah school in Izmir. In 1928 he travelled to Buenos Aires, where he helped to edit “HaBima HaIvrit” and taught in the Moroccan community school. At the end of the year, he returned to Israel and was invited to become the general secretary of the Sephardi Jewish community in Jerusalem, a post he was to hold for the rest of his life. Moshe David Gaon’s main occupation was the study of Oriental Jewry in Eretz Israel and the world. Over the years he collected newspapers in Hebrew and Ladino, and he wrote a comprehensive bibliography of Ladino newspapers and a lexicon of oriental rabbis in Eretz Israel. His personal archive includes correspondence with scholars and various institutes, documents that he collected about the Jews of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, notes and newspaper cuttings about Sephardi communities in Jerusalem, Tsfat, Tiberias and more.
