Esther Benbassa

Origins and early life

Esther Benbassa was born in Istanbul on 27 March 1950 into a Sephardi family descended from Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who had settled in the Ottoman Empire, and she grew up speaking the Judeo-Spanish of that exile. She took her first degree at Tel Aviv University in 1972, moved to France, and built her scholarship on the Jewish communities of the Ottoman world, the Balkans and France.

Work and career

She was a research director at the CNRS from 1989, and in 2000 became the first woman, and the first lay scholar, to hold the chair of the history of modern Judaism at the École pratique des hautes études, a chair created in 1896. With Aron Rodrigue she wrote the Histoire des Juifs sépharades, the standard account in French of the world that ran from Toledo to Salonica and Istanbul, and she is also the author of the Histoire des Juifs de France, of Le Juif et l'Autre and of the Dictionnaire des mondes juifs.

Her work has argued consistently that Jewish history in France is a history of citizenship as much as of religion, and that the memory of persecution is best served when it is not held apart from the memory of others. She sat in the French Senate from 2011 to 2023.