André Amar

Origins and early life

André Amar was born at Salonika on 10 February 1908, into a Jewish banking family of that city, then the greatest Sephardi community in Europe; his father Saül Amar was a Salonika banker.

Work and career

He made his life in France as a banker himself, and in 1942 joined the Organisation juive de combat, the armed Jewish resistance, and led its Paris section: recruitment, weapons, false papers and the execution of the movement's decisions in an occupied capital where a Jew doing such work had months, not years. He was arrested on 18 July 1944 and put on the last convoy to leave France for the camps, and near Morcourt he and thirteen others sawed through the bars of the wagon window and jumped.

He received the Médaille de la Résistance in 1946. He then taught for nearly thirty years at Sciences Po in Paris and at Grenoble, from 1945 to 1973, and wrote: psychoanalytic essays on money and economic life in the 1950s, philosophical pieces later, and in 1977 a book on Moses and Jewish identity. Almost the whole Jewish community of the city where he was born was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943, while he was fighting in Paris. He died at Rueil-Malmaison on 8 April 1990.