Tsion Avital was born to Avraham and Preciada Dorit Avitbol Avital, and grew up in the city of Sefrou in Morocco. Avital views this biographical fact as having decisive implications for his intellectual work throughout his life. Sefrou, his birthplace, is an ancient walled city, divided by a river and waterfalls, and its gates were closed at sunset. Sefrou was a cultural bubble which preserved in almost perfect manner the culture of the Middle Ages.
Avital naturally had internalized the strict values of this culture and this had crucial impact both on his personal and intellectual life. This was a mythical, religious, mystic, feudal culture, with a rigid hierarchical structure in which the law governing things is that of fate, identical to the will of God. In Sefrou everything that occurs in phenomenal reality is just a sign or symbol of a reality beyond, and so many Jews of Sefrou studied Kabbala. It is a culture that had not heard of science, and reacted with suspicion and aversion to technology, which was not allowed past the city walls, with the exception of electricity to provide light.
Avital immigrated to Israel with his family in January of 1951, when he was eleven. The encounter with Western culture was a great shock for him, and the deep need to bridge the two worlds, the two cultures, finally led him to discover the structural characteristics common to all cultures beyond space and time, and this became the central subject of all his research.
