Jewish Education in the Land of Islam

Haïm Zafrani was born in Essaouira, Morocco. He was committed to educational reform in the newly independent Morocco and worked with the Alliance Israélite Universelle to integrate an Arabic curriculum into Jewish community schools. In 1962, Zafrani moved to Paris to be the chair of Hebrew at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes. In 1969, he founded a department of Hebrew language and Jewish civilization at the University of Paris, where many of his students wrote dissertations on Judeo-Arabic. Zafrani was a prolific writer and scholar of Jewish literary, linguistic, musical, and religious culture in Morocco and in Muslim Spain. He also studied the Jewish and Maghrebi mystical traditions.