Reply #41: Tunisia - A Case Study [View All]

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Case study: The Tunisian Jewish minority in the face of oppression
The end of one of the oldest Jewish Minority in Tunisia, 1881-1967

This link tells the story of the Jewish community of Tunisia, who had lived there continuously since ancient times:

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~shaked/Tunisia/Jews.html

“The testimony of the Jews in Arab countries has gone practically unheard - the more than one million forgotten. This work describes the Jewish minority experience in its search for dignity, equality and national identity, and the kind of Jewish identity that has arisen out of the modern conditions of Tunisian Jewry. It explores how a community with more than 100,000 members disappeared after a Jewish presence exceeding 2000 years, within 10 years after Tunisia’s independence in 1956.

Snip

The article outlines the arrival of the French, who provided the Tunisian Jews with a safety net and a new way to interact with the world, free from the stigmatization of their second-class citizenship under Islam. It details the war years, when Tunisia was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Nazi philosophy spread to the Arab world. Of course, the birth of Israel affected this community as well:

“Many Jews choose another path of emancipation than French emancipation, and concretized ‘Next year in Jerusalem:’ the return to Zion. The 1st Zionist club Agudat Tsion was founded in Tunis in 1910. Between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and 1954, more than 20,000 Jews made aliya (emigration to Israel).”

The author briefly details the two forms of antisemitism visited upon the Tunisian community: that (some feel is) embodied in the Islamic point of view, and the European variety, which came via the French and reached violent proportions during the Nazi years. According to the article, Tunisian Jews were deported to Germany, were subject to forced labor, execution and the loss of their property.

Key to the eventual, near-total diaspora of the Tunisian Jews, however, was the Six Day War. Violence to the community ensued and it became apparent that departure was mandatory.

The author concludes, “In Tunisia between 1881-1967, antisemitism, French colonialism, Arab nationalism and the creation of Tunisia as a Muslim Arab state converged to create not only a shift of Jewish identity and Jewish condition, but also to bring about a mass exodus of the Jews from the country… in less than a generation, the Jewish community that had been rooted in Tunisia for more than 2,000 years, disappeared…”

Similar conditions prevailed in Algeria and Morocco, where independence from colonial domination and Arab nationalism “ were accompanied by the liquidation of their respective Jewish communities. The Jews of the Maghrib “abandoned their homes, businesses, and possessions and became penniless refugees with no thought of return.”1 North Africa’s Jewish communities that, until the early 1960s, contained one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, disappeared. Irrevocably attached to French culture and values, feeling unsafe, They were torn from their home and the land in which, their ancestors had been the earliest inhabitants.”