Maxime Rodinson

In 1892, he helped to establish a community library, containing hundreds of works in Yiddish, Russian, and French.

Maxime Rodinson ( French pronunciation: ; 26 January 1915 – 23 May 2004) was a French historian and sociologist.

Ideologically a Marxist, Rodinson was a prominent authority oriental studies.

He was the son of a Russian-Polish clothing trader and his wife, who both were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

After studying oriental languages, he became a professor of Ge'ez at the École pratique des hautes études.

He was the author of a body of work, including the book Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam.

Rodinson was born in Paris on 26 January 1915.

Neither he nor his sister learned Yiddish.

The family was poor, so Rodinson became an errand boy at the age of 13 after obtaining a primary school certificate.

But his learning thrived through borrowed books and obliging teachers who didn't demand payment, and Rodinson began to study oriental languages, at first on Saturday afternoons and in the evenings.

In 1920, the Rodinsons joined the Communist Party and as soon as France recognized the Russian SFSR, in 1924, they applied for Soviet citizenship.

Rodinson grew up in a fervently Communist, non-religious and anti-Zionist family.

In 1932, thanks to a rule allowing persons without academic qualifications to take the competitive entrance examination, Rodinson gained entry to the Ecole des Langues Orientales and prepared for a career as a diplomat-interpreter.

He studied Arabic but later, preparing a thesis in comparative Semitics, he also learned Hebrew, which surprised his family.

Rodinson joined the French Communist Party in 1937 for "moral reasons" but was expelled in 1958 after criticizing it.

He became well known in France when he expressed sharp criticism of Israel, particularly opposing the settlement policies of the Jewish state.

In 1937, he entered the National Council of Research, became a full-time student of Islam, and joined the Communist Party.

In 1940, after the beginning of the Second World War, Rodinson was appointed to the French Institute in Damascus.

His subsequent stay in Lebanon and Syria allowed him to escape the persecution of Jews in occupied France and extend his knowledge of Islam.

His parents were murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.

Rodinson spent most of the next seven years in Lebanon, six as a civil servant in Beirut and six months teaching in Sidon at the Maqasid high school.

In 1948, Rodinson became a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he was put in charge of the Muslim section.

In 1955, he was appointed director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études, becoming a professor of classical Ethiopian four years later.

Rodinson left the Communist Party in 1958, following Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes amid accusations of using the association to further his career, but nonetheless remained a Marxist.

According to Rodinson himself, the decision was based on his agnosticism, and he explained that being a party member was like following a religion and he wanted to renounce "the narrow subordination of efforts at lucidity to the exigencies of mobilization, even for just causes."

He became well known when he published Muhammad in 1961, a biography of the prophet's life written from a sociological point of view, a book which is still banned in parts of the Arab world.

Five years later, he published Islam and Capitalism, a study of the economic decline of Muslim societies.

He participated with other colleagues committed to the left (Elena Cassin, Maurice Godelier, André-Georges Haudricourt, Charles Malamoud, Jean-Paul Brisson, Jean Yoyotte, Jean Bottero) in a Marxist think tank organised by Jean-Pierre Vernant.

This group took on an institutional form with the creation, in 1964, of the Centre des recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes, which later became the Centre Louis Gernet, focusing more on the study of ancient Greece.

Published in June 1967 under the title "Israel, fait colonial" (Israel, a colonial fact) in Jean-Paul Sartre's journal, Les Temps Modernes, Rodinson's article made him known as an advocate of the Palestinian cause.

Some credit him with coining the term Islamic fascism (le fascisme islamique) in 1979, which he used to describe the Iranian Revolution.

The parents of Maxime Rodinson were Russian-Polish Jewish immigrants who were members of the Communist Party.

He was awarded the 1995 Prize by the Rationalist Organisation.

Rodinson died on 23 May 2004 in Marseille.

Rodinson took a public stance in favour of Palestinian self-determination during the Six-Day War.

A few months before publishing his famous article, Rodinson took part in a meeting organized in the "Mutualité" in Paris for the Palestinian struggle.

They arrived in France at the end of the 19th century as refugees from pogroms in the Russian Empire.

His father was a clothing trader who set up a business making waterproof clothing in the Yiddish-speaking part of Paris, called the Pletzl, in the district of the Marais.

They became port-of-call for other Russian exiles, most of them revolutionaries hostile to the Tsarist regime.

His father tried to unionise and organize educational and other services for his working-class immigrant group.