Shmuel Trigano

Shmuel Trigano was born in 1948 in Blida

Trigano was born in 1948 in Blida, Algeria, to a Jewish family. In 1962 he moved to France and settled in Paris. He studied Latin, Greek and philosophy at a Paris high school.

In 1969 he went to Israel and in 1973 completed a bachelor's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in political science, international relations and Jewish philosophy. Back in France, he earned an M.A. in political science at Paris II University. He wrote a doctorate in political sociology at Paris Nanterre University on the religious origins of political modernity in Judaism.

He taught sociology at Paris Nanterre University and held visiting posts in Livorno, New York and Jerusalem. He founded the journal Pardes with Annie Kriegel in 1985 and the journal Controverses in 2006. He also founded and led the college of Jewish studies of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Observatoire du monde juif.

He has written many books on Jewish identity, exile, religion and the Jews of France. In 2017 he founded Dialogia, an Israeli association linking French Jewish thought with Israeli intellectual life, and he heads it.