Freddy Raphaël

Origins and early life

Freddy Raphaël was born at Colmar on 27 June 1936, in a Jewish family of Alsace; his grandmother and his mother came from Turckheim in the Haut-Rhin and his father was a cattle dealer, the trade that had been the livelihood of Alsatian Jewish villages for centuries.

Work and career

During the war his father was held as a prisoner of war in Upper Silesia, in a camp for Jewish soldiers. He became a sociologist, professor at the University of Strasbourg and for fifteen years dean of the faculty of social sciences; he directed the laboratory of the sociology of European culture and edited the Revue des sciences sociales until 2016. His work is a sustained study of the Judaism of Alsace, conducted mostly by listening to those who still remembered it: the Judeo-Alsatian language, Yédisch-Daïtsch, in which the Jews of the villages spoke; Jewish humour; kosher cooking; the relation of Judaism and capitalism, against and with Max Weber; and the memory of communities that had almost entirely gone.

He gathered testimony while the last speakers were alive, which is the reason a great deal of it exists at all. The Académie française gave him the Prix Albéric-Rocheron in 1978 and the Prix Toutain in 1981, and he was made a commander of the Ordre national du Mérite in 2012.