This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Benzion Netanyahu (Hebrew: בֶּנְצִיּוֹן נְתַנְיָהוּ, IPA: [bentsiˈjon netaˈnjahu]; born Benzion Mileikowsky; March 25, 1910 – April 30, 2012)[2][3] was a Polish-born Israeli encyclopedist, historian, and medievalist.

[5] Nathan Mileikowsky began signing some of the articles he wrote "Netanyahu", the Hebrew version of his first name, and his son adopted this as his family name.

The couple had three sons: Yonatan (1946–76), former commander of Sayeret Matkal, who was killed in action leading Operation Entebbe; Benjamin (b.

During his studies, he became active in Revisionist Zionism, a movement of people who had split from their mainstream Zionist counterparts, believing those in the mainstream were too conciliatory to the British authorities governing Palestine, and espousing a more militant, right-wing Jewish nationalism than the one advocated by the Labour Zionists who led Israel in its early years.

The revisionists were led by Jabotinsky, whose belief in the necessity of an "iron wall" between Israel and its Arab neighbors had influenced Israeli politics since the 1930s.

[9] Netanyahu was co-editor of Betar, a Hebrew monthly (1933–34), then editor of the Revisionist Zionist daily newspaper Ha-Yarden in Jerusalem (1934–35)[2] until the British Mandate authorities ordered the paper to cease publication.

In 1940, Netanyahu went to New York to serve for a few months as assistant to the secretary of Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build American support for his militant New Zionists.

[11][12] As executive director, Netanyahu was one of the Revisionist movement's leaders in the United States during World War II.

At the same time, he pursued his PhD at Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia (now the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania), writing his dissertation on Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508), a Jewish scholar and statesman who opposed the banishment of Jews from Spain.

"[16][17] Having previously struggled to fit into Israeli academia without success, perhaps for a combination of personal and political reasons,[18] Netanyahu nonetheless continued his academic activities upon his return to Israel.

Subsequently, he moved first to the University of Denver as professor of Hebraic studies, (1968–71), then to New York to edit a Jewish encyclopedia.

Eventually he took a position at Cornell University as professor of Judaic studies and chair of the department of Semitic languages and literature, from 1971 to 1975.

At the time of his death, Netanyahu was a member of the Academy for Fine Arts[dubious – discuss] and a professor emeritus at Cornell University.

His publisher and friend Jason Epstein wrote of the book: The 1,400-page work of scholarship overturned[20] centuries of misunderstanding, and predictably it was faintly praised and in a few cases angrily denounced or simply ignored by a threatened scholarly establishment.

Dispassionate scholars soon prevailed, and today Benzion’s brilliant revisionist achievement towers over the field of Inquisition studies.