The Glasgow-born Israeli diplomat, historian and genealogist Dr Neville Lamdan, has died aged 83. Former Israeli Ambassador to the UN in Geneva and to the Vatican, Dr Lamdan pioneered Jewish genealogy as an academic discipline, as the founder and director of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in the National Library of Israel.

He once said: “I turned to genealogy as a form of escapism from the ‘poisonous anti-Israel atmosphere’ which hung over the United Nations in New York in the year after the 1975 resolution that Zionism equals racism.”

For his role in helping to secure the removal of Palestinian terrorists from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity during the Second Intifada, he was appointed a Papal Knight by Pope John Paul 11.

Neville Mandel (the family name later Hebraicised to Lamdan) was born on April 29, 1938, the son of Jacob Mandel, a manufacturer born in Belarus, and Stella née Cantor. He was educated at Glasgow Academy, Glasgow University and Dropsie College USA.

He received his doctorate in Modern History from Oxford in 1965 and his thesis The Arabs and Zionism before World War I was published in book form by the University of California Press in 1976.

He began his professional career in the British Foreign Office in 1965 working there until 1971 and continued in the Israeli Foreign Ministry from 1973 to 2003. From 1976 until 1981 he was a member of the Israel Mission to the UN in New York, Diplomatic Representative in Beirut during the 1982 war and spent the rest of that decade as Liaison Officer to the US Congress in Washington, DC.

He spent four years as Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Geneva in 1994 and was appointed Ambassador at the Vatican in 2000, where he remained until 2003.

While stationed at the Israel Embassy in Washington DC during the 1980s, the Lamdan family lived next door to Anita and Irwin Pikus, who later helped found the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington, which Lamdan joined.

In the late 1990s, with retirement approaching, he took on a new challenge, one that occupied much of his time for the rest of his life.

Aware that the historical investigations and writings of the German rabbi Leopold Zunz had an important effect on 19th-century German Judaism and Jewish genealogy, Lamdan’s dream was to establish a modern-day institute, similarly devoted to academic Jewish genealogical research.

He was ahead of his time and had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve and persisted with tenacity. The International Institute for Jewish Genealogy and Paul Jacobi Center (IIJG) was inaugurated in Jerusalem in 2004.

Initial finance was agreed with Douglas Goldman of the Levi Strauss company and the late New York banker Harvey Krueger.

Over the years he conceived and pioneered a countrywide study of Scottish Jewish genealogy. Under his leadership, IIJG sponsored numerous academic research projects in Jewish genealogy, produced a multi-volume publication of the late Paul Jacobi’s rabbinic genealogy studies, followed by IIJG’s symposium on Genealogy and the Sciences at the Weizmann Institute in 2018.

He retired as IIJG Director in December 2012 and in April 2013 was elected Chairman of the IIJG’s Executive Committee till his retirement in 2021.

In August 2013, he received the IAJGS Lifetime Achievement Award for his vision in establishing the Institute and success in directing it from 2006 to 2012.

In recent years Lamdan dedicated his time to writing a book of his family history and the transition to modern society, due to be published later this year.

His contribution to Israeli diplomacy and to Jewish genealogy is profound. He is survived by his wife Susan, sons Ronen, Shai and Yakir and seven grandchildren.

Prof Wagner is Chairman of the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy & Paul Jacobi Center