Gabriel Abensour

IIJS Postdoctoral Research Scholar
ga2763@colubmia.edu

Gabriel Abensour is a historian of modern North African Jewry, with a focus on its cultural and intellectual formations. His work examines the internal logics of Jewish life in the Maghreb as they appear in legal discourse and communal authority, while also attending to vernacular textual practices. He is especially interested in how Jewish communities responded to colonial rule and religious transformation by reworking their normative traditions from within.

Abensour received his doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2025. His doctoral dissertation, Between Integration and Subversion: Algerian Jewry During the Colonial Period (1865–1940), was awarded the Alex Berger Prize for an outstanding doctoral dissertation. It examines how Algerian Jews negotiated the epistemic and institutional frameworks imposed by French colonial rule. The study follows rabbinic authorities alongside lay leaders, and places vernacular writers in dialogue with juridical intermediaries. It asks how these actors inhabited and contested emerging colonial categories of religion and law, including the ethnicized distinctions that structured colonial governance. The archive brings responsa literature into conversation with Judeo-Arabic writing. Colonial administrative records provide a further institutional layer. The dissertation shows how competing normative systems were selectively rearticulated within Jewish communal life, and it highlights the ambivalent ways in which modern legal and cultural subjectivity took shape across overlapping regimes of power.

His next project, By the Books, Off the Page, examines legal evolution and gendered popular practice in early modern Maghrebi Judaism from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. It explores how Jewish legal culture in North Africa evolved in the centuries following the Iberian expulsions, as displaced Sephardic communities adapted to local Jewish society and the broader Islamic context. Focusing on responsa literature and communal enactments, Abensour reads these legal texts as arenas of negotiation between elite norms and popular practices. A further axis concerns the encounter between inherited Sephardic models and local Maghrebi forms, especially in relation to Islamic legal reasoning. At stake is a rethinking of the halakhic archive as a porous and dynamic field in which questions of gender and sexuality became entangled with custom and communal power. The project brings together comparative legal history and gender theory to examine how Maghrebi rabbis engaged, explicitly or tacitly, with Maliki jurisprudence. It also asks how the margins of halakhic writing reveal the textures of everyday Jewish life in a multi-legal and multilingual environment.

Selected publications include:

Critical Editions and Translations

1.     Elissa Rhaïs, The Jews, or The Daughter of Eleazar. Translated by Rama Ayalon. Edited by Gabriel Abensour and Tsivia Frank-Wygoda. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2026. (forthcoming)

2.     Nationalism, Judaism, and Humanity: Chapters in the Theopolitical Thought of Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh, edited and translated by Gabriel Abensour (Hebrew). Jerusalem: Makom Publishing & The Shalom Hartman Institute, 2026.

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

1.     "A Rabbinical Critique of Colonial Space-time in Algeria," Jewish History 39 (2025), 61-88. v  Awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines (First Prize, Doctoral Category, 2025)

2.     "An Algerian Rabbi Advocating for the Use of the Organ in Synagogue Services," Zutot 20 (2023), 1-18.

3.     "Droit rabbinique transnational à l'ère de l'impérialisme européen: deux sagas de conflits testamentaires," Revue des Études Juives 181/3-4 (2022), pp. 405-428.

4.     "In Praise of the Multitude: Rabbi Yosef Knafo's Socially Conscious Work in Essaouira at the End of the Nineteenth Century," Jewish Social Studies 27/1 (2022), pp. 115-149.

5.     "Lishkat Yessod Hamaaravi: A Moroccan-Jewish Association in the Late Nineteenth Century", Zion 87/1 (2022), pp. 103-124. (Hebrew)

6.     "Kabbalah and Halakha in R. Yossef Messas' works," Pe'amim: Studies in Oriental Jewry 157 (2019), pp. 107–134. (Hebrew)

7.     "God’s Plurality Within Unity: Spinoza's Influence on Benamozegh's Thought," Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History (2017), 12, pp. 1-19.