Yonatan Ratosh

Uriel Shelach (Hebrew: אוריאל שלח‎‎) (November 18, 1908 – March 25, 1981), better known by his pen name Yonatan Ratosh (Hebrew: יונתן רטוש‎‎), was an Israeli poet and the founder of the Canaanite movement.

Uriel Heilperin (אוריאל הלפרין) was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1908 to a Zionist family. His father, Yechiel, was a Hebraist educator who raised Uriel and his siblings in Hebrew. In 1921, the family immigrated to Mandate Palestine. Uriel changed his last name from Heilperin to Halperin, then to Shelakh. Later he used the pseudonym Yonatan Ratosh in poetic and political writing. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Sorbonne, and published his first poem in 1926. In the mid-1930s, he edited the Revisionist movement's newspaper and was active in right-wing underground organizations.

Ratosh was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize. His son Saharon Shelah, a mathematician, won the Israel Prize. Another son, Hamman Shelah, was killed along with wife and daughter in the Ras Burqa massacre. One of his brothers was linguist Uzzi Ornan. Ratosh died in 1981.

In the late 1920s, Ratosh (using his birth name, Heilperin) embraced Revisionist Zionism, becoming close friends with Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Avraham Stern. A talented writer, Halperin became the editor of the official publication of the Irgun, "Ba-Cherev" (בחרב, "By the Sword"). In 1937, Jabotinsky demoted Halperin for the extremism of his views. Frustrated, he travelled to Paris to meet with another disillusioned Revisionist, Semitic language scholar Adia Gurevitch (A.G. Horon). Heilperin and Gurevitch formulated "a new Hebrew consciousness" combining the former's political ideas with the latter's historical outlook. In their minds, the Jewish People were a part of a larger Hebrew civilization bound together by Canaanite languages and nationhood in Canaan. With the outbreak of World War II began writing (as Ratosh) for Haaretz.

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