David Yellin

David Yellin (Hebrew: דוד ילין; March 19, 1864 – December 12, 1941) was an educator, a researcher of the Hebrew language and literature, a politician, one of the leaders of the Yishuv, the founder of the first Hebrew College for Teachers, one of the founders of the Hebrew Language Committee and the Israel Teachers Union, and the Zikhron Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem.

David Yellin was born in 1864 in Jerusalem. He was named after his grandfather, a financier and meshulach, who moved from Poland to the Holy land in 1834. His father Yehoshua Yellin was one of the founders of the Nahalat Shiv'a neighborhood in Jerusalem and his mother Serah was the daughter of Shlomo Yehezkel Yehuda, the son of Ezekiel Judah, a Rabbi and educator from Iraq.

At the age of 14, Yellin started writing a newspaper, Har Tziyon ("Mount Zion"), which was published in one copy twice a month; he sustained it for 43 issues. He later wrote for the Hebrew newspapers Ha-Levanon, Hamagid and Ha-Melitz. In 1885 he married Ita, the daughter of rabbi Yechiel Michel Pines.

In 1890 he founded the Hebrew Language Committee together with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who served as chairman. Other members were rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn, Ze'ev Yavetz, Abraham Moses Luncz, rabbi Yaakov Meir (who later became the Sephardi chief rabbi), and Yechiel Michel Pines. The committee disbanded after one year, but was reestablished in 1904 when school teachers complained about the lack of Hebrew terminology. Yellin served as president until his death. In 1953 the Academy of the Hebrew Language was established on the basis of the committee.

In 1903 he participated with Menachem Ussishkin in the founding of the Assembly of the Land of Israel (הכנסייה הארצישראלית)—an attempt to create a representative body of the Jews in the Yishuv. This Assembly only met once but founded the Teachers Union, the first Jewish labor union in Palestine. Yellin was the president until 1906.

Like his younger brother Shlomo Yellin, David was a staunch supporter of the Ottoman Empire in the years after the Young Turk Revolution. He have dozens of speeches praising the reforms of the Second Constitutional Era. In one 1909 speech he described "the unity and beauty which caused the whole people of the homeland to be brothers in one endeavor—the success of the homeland and its people and the pride of membership in one family: the Ottoman family". For both Yellin brothers the reforms represented the possibility of an Ottomanism that was compatible with the goals of Zionism. Ottoman Jews could enjoy the benefits of being citizens in a multi-ethnic Ottoman state and still maintain their distinctly Jewish cultural and social traditions.

In 1913, at the time of the War of the Languages in the Yishuv, Yellin resigned from the teachers college that was sustained by the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Aid Society of German Jews), which supported German-language professional education in the Technion, and founded the Hebrew school for teachers. It still functions in the Beit HaKerem neighborhood of Jerusalem and is now named after its founder.

In 1917 during World War I Yellin was exiled to Damascus. After the Balfour Declaration was issued, and Mandatory Palestine established under the British Mandate for Palestine, Yellin began to support dividing Jerusalem into separate municipalities.