Albert Antébi

Albert-Abraham Antébi (Hebrew: אלברט אברהם ענתבי; 1873 – 1919) was a Syrian Jewish public activist and community leader born in Ottoman Syria, who worked for the defense of the interests of the Jewish old and new settlement in Palestine during the Ottoman rule, especially in the realm of education, philanthropy and land purchase, as representative of the Alliance israélite universelle and of the Jewish Colonization Association founded by Baron Hirsch. He was an engineer and teacher by professional formation.

Originating from the Sephardic Jewish community of Damascus, he was the scion of an old Jewish family. His grandfather, rabbi Jacob Antébi, had been one of the victims of a blood libel associated with the Damascus affair. After learning the craft of blacksmith at an Alliance israélite universelle professional school in Rue de Rosiers in the Marais, a Paris city quarter inhabited by Jews in his time, he studied engineering at the Écoles d'arts et métiers in the province - at Châlons-en-Champagne and Angers. In 1896, he arrived to Palestine where he received an appointment as director of the Jerusalem professional school of the Alliance, a position he held until 1913.

French diplomats thereafter referred to him as "the consul of the Jews". He was throughout his life a passionate Francophile, and subscribed to the ideal of the Jewish emancipation under the Turkish rule and French cultural and political influence. He records experiencing difficulties in his dealings with both American Jews and European Ashkenazi Jews, denouncing the "arrogance" he thought characteristic of the former, and episodes of violence, such as a physical assault and death threat from a German representative of the latter when he refused to comply with a demand that he expel Muslim students from a school he ran. Antébi found that the Jewish communities in Jerusalem were riven by factional dissensions, and analysed in particular the antipathy he encountered among Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants for Arabs and Jews who came from an Arab cultural background, like himself.