Didier Meïr Long

Origins and early life

Didier Meïr Long, born in 1965 to a Corsican mother, Valli Trentanoï, studied theology at the Institut catholique de Paris and was a Benedictine monk at the abbey of La Pierre-qui-Vire from 1985 to 1995, where he was known as Brother Marc.

Work and career

He left the monastery for the world of business, directed a Bible project on CD-ROM, worked as a consultant at McKinsey and founded the digital strategy firm Euclyd in 2001. He converted to Judaism in 2010, at the end of what he calls a long marrano road, accompanied by Grand Rabbi Haïm Harboun and by Haïm Korsia, who became chief rabbi of France in 2014, and he took the name Meïr on entering traditional Sephardi observance.

His books tell that journey and examine the frontier between the two faiths: Défense à Dieu d'entrer in 2005, Jésus le rabbin qui aimait les femmes in 2008, L'Invention du christianisme in 2012 and Des noces éternelles, un moine à la synagogue. In Mémoires juives de Corse, published in 2016, he traced the Jewish presence on the island and the tangled Jewish and Christian roots of its history. He remains one of the rare French writers to describe a conversion to Judaism from the inside and without polemic against the faith he left.