Yosef Dayan

Rabbi Yosef Dayan in 2016

Yosef Dayan (Hebrew: יוסף דיין; born 1945) is a Mexican-Israeli Orthodox rabbi and right-wing Israeli monarchist and nationalist, who is considered by many leading rabbis of the Nascent Sanhedrin to be the most reputable heir to the Davidic line. He is the founder and director of , a religious right-wing political party which advocates for a return of the monarchy in Israel. In 2004, Dayan became a founding member of the newly reconstituted Sanhedrin. He is the author of several books in Hebrew, Spanish, and Italian and has worked to translate modern Spanish literature into Hebrew.

Biography[]

Yosef Dayan was born in 1945 in Mexico to Sephardic Jewish parents from Aleppo, Syria, where the had lived for some seven hundred years. Dayan's family can trace their ancestry in a direct paternal line to the Medieval Babylonian Exilarchs, who in part were direct paternal descendants of the Davidic line. He and his family paternally descends from Hasan ben Zakkai,^[1] the younger brother of the Exilarch David ben Zakkai (d. 940), whose genealogy is generally accounted for in the rabbinic work Seder Olam Zutta which traces the line of the Exliarchs back to Kind David.^[2] One of Hasan's descendants Solomon ben Azariah ha-Nasi ('the Prince') settled in Aleppo were the family became dayanim ('judges') of the city and thus assumed the surname Dayan.^[1][3] In 1933, Yitzak Dayan, a cousin of Yosef Dayan's father was considered by many leading Orthodox rabbis to be the heir and titular "King of Israel".^[4] After his death none of his three sons pursued their father's dynastic claims. After Yosef Dayan made aliyah to Israel in 1968, he was encouraged by several leading Orthodox rabbis to be an active claimant to the Davidic line. Soon after this, Dayan became a member of the right-wing Kach movement, where he was instrumental in establishing the Hebron Hills settlement of El-Nakam, which was destroyed on the orders of the then-Minister of Defense, Moshe Arens in 1982. Dayan later founded "Malchut Israel", a right-wing religious-political group in Israel advocating a return of the monarchy. In 2004, he became a member of the newly reconstituted Sanhedrin, a duplicate of the religious tribunal which convened during the time of the Second Temple, a group that had traditionally had seventy-one members.^[5][6] He has also achieved certain notoriety for his alleged central participation in so-called "death curse" ceremonies or Pulsa diNura aimed at Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. These curses were presumably to request divine retribution after those former Prime Ministers advocated Israeli withdrawal from certain areas considered by some as inalienable parts of the promised land. Incidentally, Yitzhak Rabin was murdered soon after the first curse, and Ariel Sharon left in a persistent vegetative state after a brain haemorrhage following the second.^[7] He is also known to have supported Baruch Goldstein's (a fellow Meir Kahane disciple) terrorist actions in the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre.

His son, Hananel Dayan-Meged, is notorious for his refusal to shake the hand of Dan Halutz, the (former) Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Force, while receiving the "President of Israel Excellence Citation" during the Israeli Independence Day celebrations.^[8]

References[]

External links[]

• Malchut Yisra'el Website
• Soldier who snubbed Halutz ejected