Diana Muir Appelbaum

The North African Jewish community was never very large, maybe 600,000 people if you add the Jews of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and Libya together at the early twentieth century peak. 

That’s a pretty small community to have produced 3 Nobel Prize winners.  All emigres, or the children of emigres.

Baruj Benacerraf, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1980, has a complicated biography, he was born in Venezuela to a Moroccan Jewish father and an Algerian Jewish mother, the family lived in France from the time he was 5 through his high school years, before fleeing the Nazis by returning to Venezuela.  He was sent to Columbia University in New York for medical school and became an American citizen.  I suppose that Sephardi Jews, Algeria, Morocco, Venezuela, France and the United States can all claim him.  And the whole world should be proud.

Serge Haroche, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, 2012, born in Casablanca, Morocco to a Moroccan Jewish father and a Russian Jewish mother in but moved to France as a child.

Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics 1997, was born to a Sephardi Jewish family  in Constantine, Algeria in 1933 and went to France to complete his education and still lives and works in France.