Yitzhak Rachamim Navon (Hebrew: יצחק נבון‎‎; 9 April 1921 – 6 November 2015) was an Israeli politician, diplomat, and author. He served as the fifth President of Israel between 1978 and 1983 as a member of the centre-left Alignment party. He was the first Israeli president to be Sephardi and born in Jerusalem, then within the British Mandate for Palestine, while all previous presidents were born in, and immigrated from, the Russian Empire.

Navon was born in Jerusalem to Yosef and Miryam Navon, a descendant of a Sephardic family of rabbis, and had ancestry in Jerusalem going back centuries. On his father’s side, he was descended from Spanish Jews who settled in Turkey after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The Baruch Mizrahi, or in Arabic: Al Mashraki family, moved to Jerusalem in 1670. On his mother’s side, he was descended from the renowned Moroccan-Jewish kabbalist Chaim ibn Attar, who emigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem in 1742.

He attended the “Doresh Tziyon” beit midrash, the “Takhemoni” school and Hebrew University Secondary School, where he developed an ability in Islamic and Arab texts. Navon studied Arabic and Islamic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught Hebrew literature for some years. After the Second World War ended, many survivors and displaced persons came to live in Palestine. Navon decided to join the Haganah’s Arab Intelligence Unit working undercover in Jerusalem. During the war Navon was in a secret basement listening to tapped conversations of the British Army. He was fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Ladino, French and English; an expert linguist with dovish inclinations. Later he was sent by the Israeli foreign service to Uruguay and Argentina to help hunt Nazis. Navon’s wife, Ofira Navon née Resnikov, died of cancer in 1993. They had a son, Erez, and an adopted daughter, Naama.

Navon wrote two musicals based on Sephardic folklore: Romancero Sefardi (1968) and Bustan Sefardi (“Sephardic Garden” 1970), which were successfully performed at Habimah, Israel’s national theater in Tel Aviv. He is also the author of The Six Days and the Seven Gates (1979), a modern legend of the reunification of Jerusalem, first published in Hebrew by Shikmona Publishing Company and later translated into English.

He died in Jerusalem on 6 November 2015, aged 94.