Dr. Gabriel Abensour

I am a historian of the cultural and intellectual history of North African Jewry in the modern period. My work focuses on the internal logics of Jewish life in the Maghreb, especially as they emerge through legal discourse, communal authority, and vernacular textual practices. I am particularly interested in how Jewish communities responded to colonial, religious, and epistemic transformations by reshaping their own normative traditions from within.

My doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Between Integration and Subversion: Algerian Jewry During the Colonial Period (1865–1940), examines how Algerian Jews negotiated the epistemic and institutional frameworks imposed by French colonial rule. Rather than treating the community as a unified subject, the project traces how divergent social actors—rabbinic authorities, lay leaders, vernacular writers, and juridical intermediaries—inhabited and contested the emerging colonial categories of religion, law, and ethnicity. Drawing on responsa literature, Judeo-Arabic texts, and administrative records, the study explores how competing normative systems overlapped, collided, and were selectively rearticulated within Jewish communal life. It highlights the ambivalent ways in which modern legal and cultural subjectivity was internalized, resisted, and translated across overlapping regimes of power. Earlier, my MA research offered a microhistorical account of competing Jewish intellectuals in late 19th-century Mogador (Essaouira), revealing how locally rooted visions of reform and tradition shaped alternative paths to modernity.

As a Polonsky Fellow, I will undertake a new research project entitled By the Books, Off the Page: Legal Evolution, Gender Dynamics and Popular Practices in Early Modern Maghrebi Judaism (16th–19th centuries). The project explores how Jewish legal culture in North Africa evolved in the centuries following the Iberian expulsions, as displaced Sephardic communities adapted to local Jewish groups and to the broader Islamic context. Focusing on responsa literature and communal enactments, I read these legal texts not only as normative frameworks, but as sites of negotiation between elite and popular practices, between inherited Sephardic models and local Maghrebi forms, and between Jewish and Islamic legal reasoning. At stake is a rethinking of the halakhic archive: not simply as a record of rabbinic authority, but as a porous and dynamic field in which questions of gender, sexuality, custom, and communal power were contested and re-inscribed. The project brings together comparative legal history and gender theory to examine how Maghrebi rabbis engaged, explicitly or tacitly, with Maliki jurisprudence, and how the margins of halakhic writing reveal the textures of everyday Jewish life in a multi-legal and multilingual environment.

List of Publications :

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

A Rabbinical Critique of Colonial Space-time in Algeria," Jewish History.  )To be published in the next coming issue).

Awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines (First Prize, Doctoral Category, 2025)

An Algerian Rabbi Advocating for the Use of the Organ in Synagogue Services," Zutot 20, 1-18.

"Droit rabbinique transnational à l'ère de l'impérialisme européen: deux sagas de conflits testamentaires," Revue des Études Juives 181/3-4, pp. 405-428

In Praise of the Multitude: Rabbi Yosef Knafo's Socially Conscious Work in Essaouira at the End of the Nineteenth Century," Jewish Social Studies 27/1, pp. 115-149

Lishkat Yessod Hamaaravi: A Moroccan-Jewish Association in the Late Nineteenth Century", Zion 87/1, pp. 103-124. (Hebrew)

Kabbalah and Halakha in R. Yossef Messas' works," Pe'amim: Studies in Oriental Jewry 157, pp. 107–134. (Hebrew)

God’s Plurality Within Unity: Spinoza's Influence on Benamozegh's Thought," Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 12, pp. 1-19.