Victor Malka

Origins and early life

Victor Malka was born at Casablanca on 17 November 1938, in the Jewish community of Morocco, and made his life in France as a journalist, broadcaster and writer.

Work and career

For decades he was the voice through which French radio listeners, Jewish and otherwise, heard Jewish thought discussed seriously: he produced Écoute Israël and then Maison d'études on France Culture from September 2004 to September 2013, programmes in which rabbis, historians and philosophers were given the time to argue properly. He directed the journal Information juive and taught at the university of Paris X-Nanterre and at HEC.

His books, published from 1972 onward, run from Le Judaïsme in 1975 and Les Juifs sépharades in 1990 to the Journal d'un rabbin raté in 2009, and include lives of the great rabbis and collections of Sephardi proverbs and wisdom, a body of work devoted largely to keeping in French the memory of the Judaism of Morocco, which emptied within a generation. His brother is the journalist Shlomo Malka, long the voice of Radio Communauté and RCJ.