Yuri Enohovich Bregel (Russian: Юрий Энохович Брегель; 13 November 1925 – 7 August 2016) was one of the world's leading historians of Islamic Central Asia.
When he was sixteen years old, his family relocated to the town of Fergana and in 1943 he joined the Soviet army where he was to serve in an anti-tank artillery unit.
In 1955, Bregel married Liliya (Liusia) Davydovna Rozenberg, then a doctoral student (and later faculty) at Moscow State University and a specialist on the social and administrative history of Portuguese India in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Yuri Bregel's scholarship had already gained considerable reputation, having worked on the 10-volume collection and republication of Vasily Bartold's works; on the production of the famed Monuments of the Literature of the East (Pamiatniki pis'mennosti Vostoka) series and the Russian translation and significant expansion of Charles Storey's essential, multi-volume Persian Literature.
To these endeavors, Bregel added original scholarship on political, economic and ethnic history of 19th-century Khiva and its Turkmen peoples.