A recent newspaper headline described Mordechai Arbell as "Soldier, Diplomat, Business Executive, and Scholar." Bulgarianborn, he fled with his family to Israel during the Second World War and became an Israeli air force navigator during the War of Liberation in 1948. After studies at The Hebrew University, he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Among numerous posts, he was assigned for a time as consul in Bogota, Colombia, as ambassador to Panama and as ambassador to Haiti. In those places, and many others in the Americas to which he traveled, he encountered descendants of Jewish colonists who recalled their religious heritage.

In 1993, Mordechai Arbell was the Touro National Heritage Trust Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and a fellow in the American Jewish archives. He is presently a Research Fellow at the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an advisor to the World Jewish Congress.

Arbell has devoted a good part of his life to uncovering and documenting the elusive story of the Jews who lived in areas of Central and South America at one time ruled by the French, the Dutch, the Danish and the British.