Évariste Lévi-Provençal was a French medievalist, orientalist, Arabist, and historian of Islam.
Background
The scholar who would take the name Lévi-Provençal was born 4 January 1894 in Constantine, French Algeria, as Makhlóuf Evariste Levi (Arabic: مخلوف إفاريست ليفي), his second name revealing that his North-African Jewish family was already somewhat Gallicized.
Education
He studied at the Lycée in Constantine, and served in the French army during World War I, being wounded in the Dardanelles in 1917.
Career
By the age of nineteen when he published his first paper he had rechristened himself Évariste Lévi-Provençal. He then joined the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines. He held positions at the University of Algiers (1926) and later the Sorbonne (1945).
He worked on editing and translating the Arabic sources for the medieval history of Spain, often with Spanish Arabist Emilio García Gómez.
Throughout his scholarly work, he tended to ignore or underplay Jewish sources and obfuscate his own Jewish origins to avoid French Antisemitism.