Simon Epstein

Origins and early life

Simon Epstein was born in Paris in 1947 and holds French and Israeli nationality; he settled in Jerusalem in 1974, an aliyah that is itself the documented route by which he appears in this directory, and worked there as an economist at the Israeli finance ministry before turning to research. He took his doctorate in political science at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1990 under Pierre Birnbaum, became a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and directed its international centre for the study of antisemitism.

Work and career

From 1982 his work has been on racism and antisemitism, and above all on France in two periods, the Dreyfus Affair and the German occupation. His best-known book, Un paradoxe français, published in 2008, examines a fact that French historiography had preferred to leave alone: that a number of antiracists and Dreyfusards of the 1900s ended as collaborators, while a number of antisemites of the nationalist right went into the Resistance.

He drew no comfortable moral from it, and the book is uncomfortable reading in every direction, which is the point of it. He received the Prix François-Millepierres in 2001.