David Raziel: The Ilui Who Fought Back

A seven-year-old boy was walking with his father at the edge of a town in Eastern Europe when a stone flew at them out of nowhere. They turned to find a gentile child a little way off, arm already cocked for the next throw. The boy moved to chase him down, but his father caught his arm and, instead of scolding, asked a question: don’t we say three times a day, “v’limkalelai nafshi tidom, and to those who curse me, let my soul stay silent, my soul like dust to everyone”?

The boy’s face burned. “That’s how we behave? Then I’m leaving that line out of my davening from now on.” He meant it. For the rest of his life, David Raziel skipped that line every time he stood for Shemoneh Esrei.

Before Menachem Begin, there was David Raziel. As commander of the Irgun, he ended the policy of havlagah, “restraint,” under which Jews absorbed Arab attacks without striking back, and put the underground on the offensive for the first time. The fighting force he built became the army Begin inherited.

What set Raziel apart was not that he was a gifted commander, but that he was also an ilui, a Torah prodigy, who left the beit midrash because his people needed him. Barred by the British from entering the Land, Raziel met Jabotinsky in France, arriving in religious garb. Secular though he was, Jabotinsky said: “For a man like him I have been waiting these fifteen years.”

Raziel was born in 1910 in Smorgon, in modern-day Belarus. His family made Aliyah in 1914, just as the First World War broke out, and the Ottoman authorities promptly expelled them from the Land for holding Russian citizenship. He spent the next several years of his childhood in exile, wandering with his family through Russia and Lithuania before they finally returned home for good in 1923.

Through those years his only teacher was his father. It didn’t hold him back. By eight he knew nearly all of Tanach by heart; by twelve he had finished Shas. At eleven, learning Pesachim, he was already mailing his own chiddushim to his grandfather, Rav Yehuda Leib Gordin, head of the beit din of Łomża and a rabbinic advocate for Mizrachi. Rav Gordin showed the boy’s writings to his fellow rabbis and took to calling David his malach, his angel.

He applied to the Slabodka yeshiva in Hebron, then withdrew, because Slabodka taught in Yiddish and he would not learn Torah in any language but Hebrew. He went to Merkaz HaRav instead, where he became a close student of Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook. He studied there in the summer of 1929, when Arab rioters massacred the Jews of Hebron, among them the students of the yeshiva he had nearly joined. Raziel enlisted in the Haganah in Jerusalem that week, and his first task was to help bury the dead of Chevron.

He advanced quickly in the Haganah. But the group was committed to havlagah, and when a group of commanders broke away in frustration, Raziel joined them, and became a founding member of their new movement, the Irgun. The night after Yom Kippur, 5691, he left the yeshiva and dedicated himself to the underground.

Raziel wrote to Rav Zvi Yehuda to break the news. “When I recall the state of my learning at the time I entered the yeshiva, it is very sweet to feel that I have climbed level upon level, and that my strength now is not what my strength was then. These two years… left their imprint on the entire course of my life to come.”

The reply came two days later. “Peace and blessing to you, my dear and beloved David… I am, however, greatly pained, and all the members of our circle will be pained by this as well when they learn of it.” Still, Rav Zvi Yehuda would not let the parting be a rupture: “Even if this announcement of yours does indeed hold, you are not withdrawing and severing yourself from us entirely. Your parting is hard upon us, but the fruit of your faith is beautiful upon us.”

In the Irgun, Raziel was committed to Torah and halacha. Through all his years in the underground he would not even drink a cup of coffee before Shacharit. 

Raziel was appointed commander of the Irgun in 1938, at the impossibly young age of twenty-seven. In 1941, with Rashid Ali’s pro-Nazi coup threatening to open Iraq to the Germans, the British released him from prison and asked the Irgun to send a sabotage team. Instead of sending his men, he led them, as he always had. A German plane strafed his car near Habbaniyah and killed him at thirty-one.

David Raziel was the first of a line we now know well. Today’s heroes of Hesder and the mechinot, the holy warriors who carry a sefer in one hand and a sword in the other, are his children.

Sources: David Raziel memorial biography, Gal-Ed Memorial Park archive (park.gal-ed.co.il); Moshe Nachmani, B’Koach U’v’Ruach: The Life and Writings of David Raziel, and related articles at hakibbutz.org.il; Ze’ev Carmeli interview in Boaz Dromi, “In Strength and in Spirit,” Olam Katan, Matot-Masei 5786; Doron Bar, “David Raziel: A Pre-State Hero’s Story of Final Rest,” schechter.edu.

Rabbi Elie Mischel is the Editor of HaMizrachi magazine and the author of the author of Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption (2026).