In 1948, Rodinson became a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he was put in charge of the Muslim section. In 1955, he was appointed director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études, becoming a professor of classical Ethiopian four years later. Rodinson left the Communist Party in 1958, following Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes amid accusations of using the association to further his career, but nonetheless remained a Marxist. According to Rodinson himself, the decision was based on his agnosticism, and he explained that being a party member was like following a religion and he wanted to renounce "the narrow subordination of efforts at lucidity to the exigencies of mobilization, even for just causes."