Évariste Lévi-Provençal (4 January 1894 – 27 March 1956) was a French medievalist, orientalist, Arabist, and historian of Islam.
The scholar who would take the name Lévi-Provençal was born 4 January 1894 inConstantine,French Algeria, asMakhlóuf Evariste Levi (Arabic:مخلوف إفاريست ليفي),[1][2] his second name revealing that his North-AfricanJewish family was already somewhatGallicized.[2] By the age of nineteen when he published his first paper he had rechristened himself Évariste Lévi-Provençal.[2] He studied at the Lycée in Constantine, and served in the French army duringWorld War I, being wounded in theDardanelles in 1917. He then joined theInstitut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines. He held positions at theUniversity of Algiers (1926) and later theSorbonne (1945).[1]
Lévi-Provençal was the founder of the French study ofIslam and the first director of the Institute of Islamic Studies (Institut d'études islamiques) inAlgiers.[1] He specialized in the history ofal-Andalus and the Muslims of Spain.[1] He worked on editing and translating the Arabic sources for the medieval history of Spain, often with Spanish ArabistEmilio García Gómez. His writings about Muslims scholarship were both admiring and critical.[1] He was anticolonial in his leanings,[1] and he tended to ignore or underplay Jewish sources and obfuscate his own Jewish origins to avoid Frenchantisemitism.[2]
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