Vitalis Danon was born in 1897 in Edirne, Ottoman Thrace, to a traditional Sephardic family. He graduated cum laude from the Alliance Israélite Universelle [AIU] school and was sent to the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), the AIU teachers’ college in Paris. In 1919, he was appointed director of the AIU school in Sfax. From 1921 to 1926, he directed the Tunis Ecole de la Hafsia, the largest AIU school in Tunisia. Thereafter, Danon returned to Sfax to his previous position as school director and settled with his family on the school grounds…