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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. And this week I'm talking to the writer and broadcaster Tarik Ali, who has a piece in the current issue of the paper

on Maxim Rodensohn's recently reissued biography of

Muhammad. Hello, Tariq, and thank you very much for joining me. Hi, Tom. Good to be with you.

Maximus Rodensohn's life of the prophet Muhammad was published in French in 1961. To begin,

could you tell us a bit about Rodinso's own quite remarkable life story?

Rodinsohn came from a family of Russian Jews. They fled the Tsar's pogroms in the late

19th century. And like many other refugees from Tsarist Russia, they spread to different parts

of Europe. Some went to North America.

The Rodin Saint family, a family husband and wife, settled in Marseille, where they lived.

That's where Maxim was born. And, you know, the way immigrants and refugees and asylum seekers move, they think that the move

they'd made, however painful, will be the last one.

In the case of the Rodin Sons, it was extremely unfortunate, but some decades after they'd moved. And Maxim was born and grown up and

etc., etc. France went fascist in the shape of the Vichy regime. And the Vichy administration

actually took the initiative well before the Germans asked them

to start listing, herding, disposing the French Jews.

...