HISTORIANS from Algeria

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Algerian Historians of all time. This list of famous Algerian Historians is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Évariste Lévi-Provençal (1894 - 1956)

With an HPI of 54.32, Évariste Lévi-Provençal is the most famous Algerian Historian.  His biography has been translated into 21 different languages on wikipedia.

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 in Constantine, French Algeria, as Makhlóuf Evariste Levi (Arabic: مخلوف إفاريست ليفي), his second name revealing that his North-African Jewish family was already somewhat Gallicized. By the age of nineteen when he published his first paper he had rechristened himself Évariste Lévi-Provençal. He studied at the Lycée in Constantine, and served in the French army during World War I, being wounded in the Dardanelles in 1917. He then joined the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines. He held positions at the University of Algiers (1926) and later the Sorbonne (1945). Lévi-Provençal was the founder of the French study of Islam and the first director of the Institute of Islamic Studies (Institut d'études islamiques) in Algiers. He specialized in the history of al-Andalus and the Muslims of Spain. He worked on editing and translating the Arabic sources for the medieval history of Spain, often with Spanish Arabist Emilio García Gómez. His writings about Muslims scholarship were both admiring and critical. He was anticolonial in his leanings, and he tended to ignore or underplay Jewish sources and obfuscate his own Jewish origins to avoid French Antisemitism.

2. Albert Soboul (1914 - 1982)

With an HPI of 53.38, Albert Soboul is the 2nd most famous Algerian Historian.  His biography has been translated into 17 different languages.

Albert Marius Soboul (27 April 1914 – 11 September 1982) was a historian of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was chair of the History of the French Revolution and author of numerous influential works of history and historical interpretation. In his lifetime, he was internationally recognized as the foremost French authority on the Revolutionary era.