Zvi Yavetz (1925–2013)

Zvi Yavetz, né Harry Zucker, was born to a Jewish family in Czernowitz, Bukovina (present-day Chernivtsi Ukraine). His parents were Amalia (Yavetz) and Leo Zucker. The family spoke German and Hebrew at home, and he was taught Romanian in private schools, where lessons were also given in Latin, Russian, and Yiddish. At age five, he had polio. In 1941, when Zvi was 16 years old, Nazi Germany invaded the country in World War II. He was sent to various ghettos and concentration camps, but managed to escape from a transport train. In 1944, he traveled by small boat down the Danube to Turkey, and was transferred to the British authorities, who sent him to Cyprus. Eventually he reached Mandatory Palestine. He fought in Israel's War of Independence in 1948, then joined a kibbutz in the Jordan valley. He adopted his mother's birth surname of Yavetz when he learned that she and all the members of her family had been killed in the Holocaust. In 1949, he married Dvora Markus, with whom he had two sons. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he earned a master's degree in history in 1950 and a doctoral degree in sociology and politics in 1958. He also studied at Oxford University in 1954. While at Hebrew University, Yavetz worked as a teacher for deaf and speech-impaired children. In 1956, he helped found Tel Aviv University, and was professor and chair of the Department of History for 30 years. He later served as dean of the Humanities Division. He was a visiting professor at many universities, including Cornell, Princeton, London, Oxford, Munich, Florence, and Paris. He was named a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, and taught there one semester each year for more 10 years. Yavetz became an esteemed scholar of the history of ancient Rome, publishing numerous books and articles, including Slaves and Slavery in Ancient Rome, and studies of the Roman lower classes as well as of the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. In 1990, Yavetz was awarded the Israel Prize for humanities. He published his autobiography, My Czernowitz, in 2007.