As a key early theorist of decolonization, Albert Memmi was an important thinker in the twentieth century, writing noted additional works on the state of Otherness for the Jew in exile, and eventually about Jewish-Arab relations. Memmi immigrated to France when his native Tunisia became independent, and he adopted the French concept of laïcité, self-identifying as secular and therefore confounding his left-wing readers with his support of Jewish self-determination. When Memmi died in 2020, every obituary mentioned his commitment to secularism with approval, and his support of Zionism with bafflement. Yet the scholarly literature about Mizrahi Jewry is quite clear that the religious-secular binary that characterizes Ashkenazic observance is not quite apt in the case of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, many of whom self-identify as “traditional.” This paper decenters the religious labelling that characterizes writings by and about Albert Memmi, and considers the aspects of synagogue life that had a clear impact on his writings. I present ethnographic material from synagogue services in France (and some material from Morocco, Tunisia and Israel) to demonstrate that even if Memmi’s personal observance was resolutely secular, he was strongly influenced by religious categories of thinking. Offering an ethnographic analysis of synagogue rituals involving the Torah scroll and their relationship to Albert Memmi’s core texts and ideas, this paper re-evaluates one of the central assertions about a foundational postcolonial theorist, reimagining Memmi not only as a postcolonial thinker who was Jewish, but as a Jewish thinker.