Georges Weill (archiviste)

Origins and early life

Georges Weill was born at Strasbourg on 31 January 1934, in the Jewish community of Alsace, and died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 14 June 2022, at eighty-eight.

Work and career

He made a full career in the French public archives — director of the departmental archives of the Meuse from 1963 to 1968 and of the Hauts-de-Seine from 1968 to 1987, director of the archives of Paris from 1987 to 1989, and inspector general of the Archives de France from 1989 to 1996 — and taught archival science at Paris X-Nanterre from 1971 to 1987. Alongside that, from 1958 to 1989, thirty-one years, he was archivist and conservator of the Alliance israélite universelle, whose library and papers are among the great collections of modern Jewish history, and he directed the building of its extension; the Alliance's schools had educated the Jews of the Mediterranean for a century and their records were in his charge.

His research bore on archival science, on the history of Alsace, on the Jewish communities of France and on the Alliance itself, and he was an associate professor at the Martin Buber Institute. He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1999, of the Ordre national du Mérite in 1991, and an officer of Arts and Letters in 1992.