Shachar Elnatan was born in Jerusalem in 1993 into a family built around music. His father, Zohar Elnatan, is a jazz guitarist and music therapist who put a guitar in his son's hands at age six and taught him the instrument directly. His mother, Debby Elnatan, is the inventor of the Upsee, an assistive-walking harness for children with cerebral palsy; his middle brother, Rotem, has cerebral palsy, and the invention grew out of the family's own life. His youngest brother, Inbar, also became a musician and now plays alongside him.

At 17, Elnatan left school for a stretch to study in New York with Peter Bernstein, Lage Lund, Gilad Hekselman and Ari Hoenig. In February 2012 he performed alongside guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel across two Tel Aviv shows, and later that year he won Rimon School of Music's jazz competition, which sent him to the International Association of Schools of Jazz conference in Graz, Austria. He also spent two years playing in a youth band led by saxophonist Eli Degibri, and held an America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship from 2006 to 2013.

Elnatan's earliest recorded work surfaced on All Original: Best Young Israeli Jazz (Razdaz Recordz, 2014), a various-artists showcase curated by bassist Avishai Cohen that also carried tracks from pianist Omri Mor and drummer Ofri Nehemya. Two of his contributions, "Doira" and "Ease the Insanity," reappeared two years later on his debut album, One World (Razdaz Recordz, released September 9, 2016), which Cohen co-produced and on which Cohen also guests on upright bass, closing out the record on his own composition "Pachuki." The core band was pianist Gadi Lehavi, bassist Avri Borochov and drummer Nehemya, with additional guest spots from drummers Daniel Dor and Itay Morchi and vocalist Dana Herz. The material ranges from an 11/8 Moroccan-derived groove on the opener "At Distance" to a Yemenite-inflected title track and "Josa," written after a trip through the Spanish Pyrenees, an early statement of the world-jazz synthesis that has defined his writing since.

The same period put him in bassist Or Bareket's working band. Elnatan plays guitar across the whole of OB1 (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2017), Bareket's debut as a leader, alongside Lehavi and drummer Ziv Ravitz, and again across the entire ten-track 33 (Enja/Yellowbird, 2019), this time with pianist Nitai Hershkovits and guest appearances from vocalist/guitarist Camila Meza and saxophonist Eden Bareket. Both releases carry Elnatan's credit at album scale rather than as a track-limited guest: he is the one instrumentalist who plays on every track of both of Bareket's first two leader albums.

By the early 2020s Elnatan's work had shifted substantially toward Poland. He guests on guitar across five of the eight tracks of bassist Michał Barański's Masovian Mantra (Polskie Nagrania Muza, 2022), a record built around Mazovian folk material, and adds a sung/spoken guest turn to its "Itzhak of Opoczno." The two later co-wrote "Grochów Kibbutz" (2023), which Elnatan has described as a piece about reconciliation with a complicated shared history. He also leads his own Warsaw quartet, with pianist Michał Tokaj, drummer Patryk Dobosz and his brother Inbar Elnatan on bass, and has toured more broadly across the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Russia and Austria, including an appearance at the 2018 Aqua Jazz festival in Athens. His most recent recorded credits continue the pattern of working across scenes: guitar throughout Israeli-German pianist Stav Goldberg's Symphony of Water (Outside In Music, 2024), alongside trumpeter Itamar Borochov and bassist Avri Borochov; a guitar credit on "Długie Ręce," one track of Fisz Emade Tworzywo's chart-topping 25 (2025), where his brother Inbar also appears on kamancha; and guitar plus a co-writing credit on vocalist/cellist Tamara Behler's debut Bélair (Dna Audio, 2026).

Elnatan's writing treats jazz harmony and Western counterpoint as one layer among several rather than the whole foundation, folding in Moroccan, Yemenite and broader Sephardic material alongside Irish and Iberian folk color picked up from his own travels. Reviewing One World, Raul da Gama of Jazz da Gama called the record's blend of "sacred Jewish Psalters" and North African folk idiom an "old/new modern sensibility," and singled out Elnatan's guitar touch, strummed lines broken by single notes and block chords under long, unhurried melodic lines, as the record's clearest individual voice. That training runs back to his teenage study in New York with Peter Bernstein, Lage Lund, Gilad Hekselman and Ari Hoenig, a straight-ahead jazz-guitar lineage he has never abandoned even as his own writing moved further from it. His decade-plus tenure as the guitarist across bassist Or Bareket's first two leader albums shows the same instinct from the sideman's chair: a quiet, harmonically alert presence built to serve a bandleader's compositions rather than dominate them. The more recent turn toward Poland, guesting on a record built from Mazovian folk material and leading his own Warsaw-based quartet, extends the same basic method, an outside folk tradition read through a jazz vocabulary, to new material entirely.