José Aboulker

Origins and early life

José Aboulker was born in Algiers on 19 March 1920 into one of the distinguished Jewish families of Algeria, of Spanish origin and rabbinical tradition: his father Henri Aboulker was a professor of surgery and president of the local Zionist movement, his mother Berthe Bénichou-Aboulker was a poet and playwright who has her own fiche on this site, and his grandfather Moïse Aboulker had been the first Algerian Jew to earn a French doctorate in medicine.

Work and career

A medical student in 1940, he was expelled from the university by the Vichy laws that stripped the Jews of Algeria of the French citizenship they had held since 1870. He built, with his cousins and friends, a clandestine network of some 400 young volunteers, most of them Jews, and made contact with the American consul Robert Murphy. On the night of 7–8 November 1942, as the Anglo-American fleet approached, his group seized the police headquarters, the telephone exchange, the radio station, the governor-general's palace and the military command of Algiers, arrested General Juin and Admiral Darlan for several hours and kept the city paralysed until the Allied landings, so that Algiers fell in a day with almost no fighting.

Operation Torch was the first great Allied offensive of the war in the West, and its success in Algiers owed much to the twenty-two-year-old student who had planned it. Vichy officials left in place by the Americans jailed him and his companions for weeks.

Recognition

Freed, he joined the Free French in London, was parachuted into occupied France in 1943 to organize the medical service of the Resistance, and was made a Companion of the Liberation by de Gaulle, with the Croix de Guerre and the American Medal of Freedom. After the war he became a neurosurgeon and professor in Paris, sat in the Consultative Assembly, and as a communist deputy from Algiers in 1946 argued for equal political rights for Algerian Muslims. He died in Paris on 17 November 2009.