David Tidhar

David Tidhar was born in Jaffa in 1897 to Moshe Bezalel Todrasovitch and Esther Rachel, daughter of Aharon Nirenberg.[4] He received a traditional Jewish education at the Shaarei Torah Talmud Torah and subsequently attended the Tachkemoni and Ezra schools.[4] During his youth he was active in communal institutions in Jaffa and Tel Aviv and founded the Young Maccabi organization.[4]

At the close of the First World War, Tidhar joined the Jewish Legion. That experience, together with his later service in the Haganah and the Palestine Police, gave him particular knowledge of Arab affairs and the Mandatory government, which he made available to institutions of the Yishuv and especially to the Jewish Agency.[1]

During the May 1921 Arab riots, Tidhar participated in the defense of Jaffa's Jewish community.[1] An early member of the Haganah, he joined the Palestine Police in 1922 and served as commanding officer in Jerusalem's New City.[1] His police service was credited with success in capturing criminals, and he was initiated into Barkai Lodge No. 17 of the Freemasons on 26 February 1926 while serving as a senior police officer in Jerusalem.[2]

Tidhar's public criticism of the heads of the British police force reportedly resulted in his being forced to leave Eretz Israel.[4] He lived with his family in Egypt from 1927 to 1931, an enforced exile that interrupted but did not end his public career.[4]

After leaving the police in 1926, Tidhar opened a private investigation bureau in Tel Aviv, described as the first of its kind in the city.[2] Among his later assistants was Uri Avneri, who subsequently became an investigative journalist and editor of Ha'Olam Hazeh.[2]

His reputation as a detective gave rise to a series of 28 Hebrew detective stories written by journalist Shlomo Ben-Israel (Gelfer), in which Tidhar was the hero.[1] The stories appeared as inexpensive 32-page booklets; reported sales climbed from 400 copies for Mysterious Murder to 4,000 for The Maharaja's Revenge.[2] Tidhar supplied his name and photograph for the covers, and his archive preserves 12 handwritten detective stories in Hebrew with occasional Yiddish words.[5] The series used settings including Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Tel Aviv beach, the mountains near Nablus, and caves near the Dead Sea, with plots featuring international criminals, spies, gangsters, mad scientists, and treasure hunts.[2]

The stories portrayed Tidhar as a courageous representative of the "new Jews of the Land of Israel," in contrast to the stereotyped image of the European Jewish merchant.[2] Tidhar ended his participation in the series in 1931, later saying that he had tired of people visiting his office merely to see the "Israeli Sherlock Holmes" and following him in public.[2] His former assistant David Almog subsequently became the series' central detective figure.[2]

During the Second World War, Tidhar served as an army investigator and became a liaison between the Haganah and the underground organizations Lehi and Etzel.[4] In 1940 he was among the founders of the Jabotinsky Institute, assembling material about the history of Ze'ev Jabotinsky to mark Jabotinsky's sixtieth birthday.[4] He also revived the committee for the Shaarei Torah Talmud Torah in Neve Shalom, an institution his father had originally founded.[4]

Tidhar founded the publishing house Sifriyat Rishonim, which issued 16 booklets about personalities of the Old Yishuv under the editorship of Yaakov Horgin.[4] In 1944 he organized an Aharon Aaronson Month commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Aaronson's death.[4] He was also active in B'nai B'rith and organized the Yitzhak Yelin Lodge in early 1949, establishing a loan fund and publishing two monthly magazines and three booklets about the lodge's history and members.[2]

In 1950 Tidhar turned to full-time writing and publishing, with his defining project being Enẓiklopedyah le-Ḥalutzei ha-Yishuv u-Vonav — the Encyclopedia of the Founders and Builders of Israel.[1] The first questionnaires, called "Dafdefet Bonei HaYishuv" ("Booklet of the Builders of the Yishuv"), began being sent to individuals in 1946.[6] Publication began in 1947, and the encyclopedia grew to 19 volumes.[1]

The work was a detailed biographical "Who's Who" of Eretz Israel.[1] Its thousands of biographies drew on questionnaires and other materials that Tidhar collected from pioneers, public figures, and their families.[4][2] Hebrew Union College describes the digitized encyclopedia as a database of primary sources concerning individuals involved in building the modern State of Israel, with images and text transcriptions available online.[7]

Tidhar's published output extended well beyond the encyclopedia. His earliest book, Hot'im veḤata'im be-Ereẓ Yisrael (Criminals and Crimes in Eretz Israel, 1924), described episodes from his efforts against crime and was presented as the first book of its kind in the country to portray the underworld in its various forms; it was translated into English and Arabic.[1][2] Bein ha-Pattish ve-ha-Saddan (Between Hammer and Anvil, 1932) was a collection of articles.[1]

His memoir Be-Maddim uve-Lo Maddim (In and Out of Uniform), published in 1938, covered his public activity from 1912 to 1937.[1][2] A later volume, Be-Sherut ha-Moledet (In the Service of My Country, 1960–61), brought together memoirs, documents, and photographs covering the period 1912–1960.[1] He also edited publications documenting the history, regulations, finances, and jubilee celebrations of Barkai Lodge No. 17.[2]

Tidhar died in 1970.[1] Three months before his death, the World Association of Detectives awarded him its annual prize for his work in the detective field, recognizing him as the "father of Hebrew detectives" and a pioneer of Hebrew detective literature.[2]

His personal archive, spanning 1920 to 1970, was acquired by the National Library of Israel from his heirs in November 1974. It encompasses correspondence with pioneers and their families, questionnaires for the encyclopedia, hundreds of envelopes of alphabetically arranged newspaper clippings and photographs, manuscripts of his Hebrew detective series, police memoirs, and personal documents.[4] A David Tidhar exhibition was held at the National Library from 15 February 1975 to 13 February 1976.[4]

The encyclopedia remains accessible as a research resource. Hebrew Union College describes it as a database of primary sources about people involved in building modern Israel, and Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Jewish Studies lists it among its full-text resources.[7][8] A Herzl Institute publication, for example, cites volume 3, page 1228, for Tidhar's account of a Jerusalem physician who personally and financially supported early Zionist initiatives.[9]

The 2024 documentary Water Tower Murder, directed by Oded Farber and Daniel Najenson, revisited Tidhar's investigation of the 1937 killing of engineer Yaakov Zwanger in Tel Aviv. The film reconstructs the case through AI animation, historical commentary, and interviews with surviving relatives, while acknowledging that questions about the case remain unanswered.[10]

Several distinctions associated with Tidhar are attributed claims rather than independently established priorities. The description of him as "the first detective and investigator in Eretz Israel" comes from a National Library catalog record for a portrait postcard dating approximately from 1930 to 1940.[3] The claim that criticism of British police chiefs forced him to leave Eretz Israel is likewise reported in the National Library archive description but is not independently corroborated by the other collected sources.[4]

Tidhar's 1924 book Criminals and Crimes in Eretz Israel classified communities according to their alleged propensity for crime. A 2023 study of Tidhar explicitly notes that such a classification would be unacceptable by contemporary standards.[2]