Dov Zerah

Origins and early life

Dov Zerah was born at Tunis on 31 July 1954 into a Sephardi Jewish family, part of the community that left North Africa for France in the years after independence. He studied at Sciences Po and took a master's degree in economics at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, then entered the École nationale d'administration with the Voltaire class of 1978 to 1980, where he came ninth in the economics stream.

Work and career

He served in the Treasury and in ministerial offices, and in April 2007 he was appointed conseiller maître at the Cour des comptes, the French national audit court. From 2010 to 2013 he was director general of the Agence française de développement, the state agency that finances development projects across Africa, Asia and the French overseas territories, and his years there were marked by a strong African orientation.

In the institutions of French Jewry he was an administrator of the Consistoire de Paris from 2009 to 2014 and briefly its president, from January to June 2010. He was a municipal councillor at Neuilly-sur-Seine from 2008 to 2014 and again from 2020. He was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 2004, and he holds the Order of Merit of Senegal at the rank of commander and the National Order of Benin at the rank of officer.