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In this interview, Colette Zytnicki retraces her career as a historian from her first steps with a master’s degree under the direction of Robert Mandrou to her latest book. Through personal questioning and professional encounters, she focused on the history of the Jews in France and in the Maghreb in the contemporary period, and then on the history of colonial Algeria seen from different angles (the history of tourism, that of a village during colonization, or that of the earliest days of French colonization in Algeria). Her latest work revisits the history of the Jews in France with the biography of Madame Straus, who was at the center of one of the important salons of the Belle Époque, a dreyfusard salon.