Maxime Rodinson

Maxime Rodinson (French: [ʁɔdɛ̃sɔ̃]; 26 January 1915, Paris – 23 May 2004, Marseilles) was a French Marxist historian, sociologist and orientalist. He was the son of a Russian-Polish clothing trader and his wife, who both died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. After studying oriental languages, he became a professor of Ethiopian (Ge'ez) at EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études, France). He was the author of a body of work, including the book Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam.

Rodinson joined the French Communist Party in 1937 for "moral reasons", but later turned away after the party's Stalinist drift. He was expelled from the party in 1958. He became well known in France when he expressed sharp criticism of Israel, particularly opposing the settlement policies of the Jewish state. Some credit him with coining the term "Islamic fascism" (le fascisme islamique) in 1979, which he used to describe the Iranian revolution.

The parents of Maxime Rodinson were Russian-Polish ethnically Jewish immigrants who were members of the Communist Party. They arrived in France at the end of the 19th century as refugees from pogroms in the Russian Empire. His father was a clothing trader who set up a business making waterproof clothing in the Yiddish-speaking part of Paris, called the , in the district of the Marais. They became port-of-call for other Russian exiles, most of them revolutionaries hostile to the Tsarist regime. His father tried to unionize and organize educational and other services for his working-class immigrant group. In 1892, he helped to establish a community library, containing hundreds of works in Yiddish, Russian and French.

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