Evariste Lévi-Provençal (né Maklouf Evariste Lévi) was a distinguished and highly assimilated French-Jewish orientalist who was  born in Algeria in 1894, and taught in Morocco, Algeria, and France. Deprived of his teaching post under the Vichy regime, he spent the war years in Toulouse and then in Cairo, but returned to France and a chair at the Sorbonne after the Allied victory in 1945.

Lévi-Provençal was one of the most productive and influential French Islamists of his day, founding or editing several scholarly journals and serving as an editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedi…