Éliette Abécassis

Éliette Abécassis (born 27 January 1969) is a French writer of Moroccan-Jewish descent. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of Caen Normandy. Éliette Abécassis was born in Strasbourg into a practicing Moroccan Orthodox Jewish family. Her childhood is permeated by the daily life of the Strasbourg Jewish community. His father, Armand Abécassis, teaches philosophy and is a renowned thinker of Judaism whose thought permeated the Talmudic interpretation of Strasbourg. He notably played a considerable role in the creation and teaching of the Aquiba school in Strasbourg. Her mother, Janine, is a professor and specialist in child and developmental psychology. In several autobiographical novels, Éliette Abécassis declares to have been very influenced by the Sephardic religious environment and education, but to have also sometimes been suffocated by it and tried to emancipate itself from it on numerous occasions, especially during her youth. She declares her attachment to French universalism.

After the baccalaureate, she left Strasbourg at 17 to go to Paris to study in preparatory literary classes, at the Lycée Henri-IV. She then joined the École normale supérieure in rue d'Ulm, where she obtained the agrégation in philosophy, and then taught philosophy at the University of Caen. "I wasn't much older than my students. They were very good, all passionate about philosophy, which, however, does not lead to anything other than itself."

At 23, she went to the United States for a year at Harvard University, in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a scholarship. She then wrote her first novel, Qumran, a metaphysical detective story that deals with mysterious murders linked to the disappearance of the recently discovered Dead Sea scrolls.For her first novel Qumran, Éliette Abécassis is not satisfied with her prior knowledge of the Hebrew world, she pushes her research as far as Israel, Jerusalem, Qumran and also went to the United States in several libraries, archives and places of contemporary Jewish culture in order to obtain as much information as possible. Her research lasted three years and they paid off: Qumran was released in 1996 and immediately achieved immense success; the book being translated into eighteen languages. The main publishing houses had however refused the manuscript, until Ramsay editions accepted it.In 1997, she began to teach philosophy in Caen and published L'Or et la Cendre, the mysterious story of the murder of a Berlin theologian, still with Ramsay editions. In 1998, she wrote an essay on Evil and the philosophical origin of homicide: Little Metaphysics of Murder at the Presses Universitaires de France.

In September 2000, she published with Albin Michel La Répudiée. For this novel she received the Prize of Believing Writers 2001. This novel is inspired by the screenplay she wrote for the film Kadosh by Israeli director Amos Gitai. In 2001, Le Trésor du temple recounts Qumran's follow in the footsteps of the Templars: Ary Cohen and Jane Rogers meet to investigate the secret of the Jerusalem temple. Qumran's trilogy borrows the form of the adventure and suspense novel but conceals in the plots a real erudition and a real metaphysical ambition. The same year, she directed the short film La Nuit de noces, the screenplay of which was co-written with Gérard Brach.

In 2002, her novel Mon père is published, which tells of the questioning of an idyllic father-daughter relationship, while Qumran is adapted into a comic book by Gémine and Makyo. In 2003, her novel Clandestin tells the story of an impossible love. It is part of the selection of twelve books for the Prix Goncourt.

In 2004, the last part of Qumran, The Last Tribe, appeared. In 2005, with her novel Un heureux événement, Éliette Abécassis tackles the theme of motherhood. She also directed the documentary-fiction Tel Aviv la vie, with Tiffany Tavernier.

In 2009, she published the novel Sépharade, whose heroine in her existential quest immersed herself in the world of the Sephardic Jews of Morocco. In 2011, she published Et te voici permise à tout homme where she talks about the difficulties of obtaining a religious divorce.In 2013, she publishes Le Palimpseste d'Archimède.In 2014, she published Un secret du docteur Freud, written with the help of her mother, a psychoanalyst. In 2015, Alyah appeared, a sort of testimony from a Jewish woman after the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks. Le maître du Talmud, published in 2018, is a new historical-religious thriller, the plot of which is set in the kingdom of France in the thirteenth century, marked by the emergence of the Inquisition and religious fanaticism.Éliette Abécassis is divorced and the mother of two children.