Gilbert Naccache was born in 1939 to a Jewish Tunisian family. After completing high school at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis, he studied agronomy in France, under the guidance of René Dumont at the National Agronomy Institute in Paris. Upon his return to Tunis in the early 1960s, he worked as an agricultural engineer for the Tunisian Ministry of Agriculture from 1962 to 1968. But Naccache is best known for his political and literary activities. At the age of fifteen, he joined the Tunisian CommunistParty, but was expelled in 1959 for his Trotskyite leanings. In the mid-1960s, h…