Maurice Sidi

Born in Pazardzhik during that region’s transition from Ottoman to Bulgarian rule, Maurice Sidi was educated in the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) system, where he later worked as a teacher in their Tunisian schools from 1902 to 1906. In 1907, he became director of the Alliance school in Ottoman Mosul, where he lived through the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. After 1911, Sidi worked at Alliance schools in Beirut, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. He was one of the many Jews from the Balkans who directed francophone AIU schools across the Arab world in the early twentieth century. Sidi attained French citizenship in 1913, and in 1935 he became director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale, the AIU teacher-training college in Paris that he had attended as a teenager.