Paul Sebag

Paul Sebag (Tunisian Arabic: پول صباغ) (26 September 1919 – 5 September 2004) was a French-Tunisian sociologist and historian.

Biography After his studies in law and philosophy in Paris were interrupted by World War II and the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime, Paul Sebag returned to Tunisia and took an important part in the action of the Tunisian Communist Party (PCT) against the partisans of Vichy. Arrested and tortured, he was sentenced by a Bizerte court for life, but spent only ten months in prison. Released in the aftermath of the Allies' landings in North Africa on 8 November 1942, he resumed his political activity in the PCT illegally.

In 1943, after the Liberation, he became a journalist and edited the party newspaper. He then completed his studies and became, from 1947 to 1957, professor of letters at Lycée Carnot in Tunis. He also published several studies in urban sociology that led him to teach at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Tunis and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Tunis. In 1977, due to the non-renewal of his contract by the Tunisian authorities, he obtained a job at the University of Rouen, where he worked for two years before retiring. He devoted himself to his work as a historian and published on the history of Tunis and the Tunisian Jews.

In 1994, he was awarded the Tunisian Order of Cultural Merit.

A volume of posthumous homages is published in his honor in 2008.

Main publications Saturday night in a Jewish family in Tunis (1884) from his book Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie.

Personal works

Collaborative works

Text editions