Ezra Zion Melamed (1903–1994) was a talmudic scholar, philologist, educator, and rabbi. Born in the Jewish community of Shiraz, he was taken to Ottoman Palestine by his father, Rabbi Raḥamim Melammed ha-Kohen, at the age of two. He grew up in one of the first new neighborhoods built outside and west of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, where many of the neighbors were hard-pressed, struggling Jews from Iran.

Melamed received his early education from his learned father, and later attended a religious elementary school, completing his high school studies in a r…