André Azoulay

Origins and early life

André Azoulay was born in Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, on 17 April 1941, into a Moroccan Sephardic Jewish family, and went to Paris to study economics, journalism and international relations.

Work and career

He spent his first career at the Paribas bank in Paris, from 1968 to 1990, rising to executive vice-president in charge of the Middle East and North Africa and of the bank's public affairs. In 1991 he became an adviser to King Hassan II, and he has remained a senior adviser to his son, King Mohammed VI, contributing to the economic reforms of the kingdom and to the privatisation programme launched in 1993. For more than forty years he has worked for dialogue between Jews and Muslims: he was elected in 2008 to preside over the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, and he heads the executive committee of the Foundation of the Three Cultures and the Three Religions in Seville.

As president of the Essaouira-Mogador Association he led the revival of his native city, and on 15 January 2020 he welcomed King Mohammed VI to Bayt Dakira, the House of Memory, a centre devoted to the Jewish heritage of Essaouira around the Slat Attia synagogue, built in 1892. “In Morocco, in the land of Islam, I am a proud Jew, and I live my Judaism to the fullest,” he told the Moroccan news agency in September 2023.

Recognition

On 6 September 2023 President Isaac Herzog presented him in Jerusalem with Israel's Presidential Medal of Honour, the presidency citing his contribution to Moroccan Jewry and to the Jewish world and the advice he gave Israeli leaders in their search for peace. That month the Jerusalem Post placed him thirtieth on its list of the fifty most influential Jews, together with his daughter Audrey Azoulay, then director-general of UNESCO.