אברהם בן מרדכי כהנא (1874–1946)

Abraham ben Mordechai Kahana was born to a Jewish family in the town of Skomorochy, Russian Empire. Though he received a traditional Jewish education as a child, he was largely self-taught. He moved to Warsaw with his family in 1922, and the following year emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine. He settled in Tel Aviv, where he became the librarian at the Sha'ar Tzion Library and taught at the Levinsky Seminary, before devoting himself full-time to Biblical and historical research in 1929. He focused especially on the editing, annotation, and translation into Hebrew of Jewish apocrypha. His two-volume Apocrypha (1936–1937) went through many reprints. His other writings included a biography of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Ba'al Shem Tov (1900) and History of the Jews in Rome (1901). Kahana's contribution to linguistics included a Russian-Hebrew dictionary (1907) and a Hebrew grammar (1931). In 1937, he was awarded the Bialik Prize for Jewish Thought.