History of the Jews in Libya
After the war, anti-Jewish violence caused many Jews to leave the country, principally for Israel, though significant numbers moved to Italy and North America.
[1] Early Jewish settlement in Cyrenaica, a region with significant Greek influence in what is now northeast Libya, likely stemmed from their substantial presence in neighboring Ptolemaic Egypt.
While Jason's work suggests advanced education and an interest in Jewish nationalistic causes, it is unclear whether his perspectives were representative of broader Cyrenaican Jewry.
In 73 CE, during the First Jewish–Roman War in Judaea, there was also a revolt by the Jewish community in Cyrene led by Jonathan the Weaver, which was quickly suppressed by the governor Catullus.
[11] It is possible that the rebels in Libya, whose actions caused widespread destruction and included a raid into Egypt, were attempting to initiate a broader movement aimed at a large-scale return to Judea.
[12][13] Ancient sources depict the revolt as exceptionally brutal, with reports of mutilation and cannibalism; however, contemporary scholars often view these accounts as exaggerated for rhetorical effect.
[11] In Cyrene and its surroundings, the revolt inflicted extensive damage on civic infrastructure, temples, and roads, necessitating substantial reconstruction by Hadrian at the beginning of his reign.
The sense of mistrust, resentment and hostility towards a minority, reflecting also economic and religious differences remained latent, aside from occasional explosions of violence.
The standard interest rate for pledged monies was 60% per annum, which could reach as high as 90% for smaller amounts of the kind Arab hinterland borrowers depended on.
[16] General discontent spread during the final years of the Karamanli dynasty coinciding with a notable economic downturn, in what long remained a mere subsistence economy.
[17] In the wake of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, the Jewish community was courted, and with the appointment of Eliyahu Bekhor ben Raphael Joseph Ḥazzan as the their Hakham Bashi (1872-1886), provided with lavish funding.
Established along the main trade routes, Libyan Jews assumed an important role in credit by loans and deferral of incumbent payments, and were so trusted that Arab women would allow Jewish commercial agents access to their homes, something denied to other Muslims.
After 1861, pressure from European powers, duly informed of abuses by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), mitigated the impact of some abuses, and the growth of charities and schooling alleviated stress, though conducive to a certain fatalistic passiveness, which was considered to have traditionally marked these communities, whose ‘vegetative’ superstitiousness, and lifestyle in highly cramped and disease-ridden ghetto (hara) hovels, together with ignorance, was complained of by several AIU reports.
[19] Sectors of the Muslim community itself, exposed to emergent trends in Europe, began to develop their own rudimentary form of nationalism, taking on board the anti-Semitism which tainted the latter.
The government, though it did impose a special tax on those who did not do military service, opposed this drift in order to balance the pressure of European expansion, by recognizing the importance of developing the local economy where wealthy Jews played a significant role.
A number of international incidents also contributed to local outbursts of xenophobia, like the French occupation of Tunisia and the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) The resulting bigotry occasioned riotous outbreaks which targeted Jews, who were increasingly viewed as allied to European interests,[17] The aggravated conditions in the late Ottoman period in Libya led to a marked rise in intolerance and contempt as anti-Jewish sentiments, formerly unknown, set down roots.
Incidents of arson, murder, robbery and looting increased, with local authorities and rulers failingd to apply the laws protecting Jews laid out by the central ottoman government.
Due to the negligence of the authorities such as the resident walis in punishing the culprits, frequent attacks on Jewish families and theft of their property led to cases of murders in reports for 1880 and 1897.
[6] In the 18th and 19th centuries Benghazi had 400 Jewish families divided into two groups, those of the town and the surrounding region and those who were born in Tripoli and Italy, they both recognised the authority of one rabbi, but each had its own synagogue.
The meeting between the young Jews of Benghazi and the Tripolitanian Zionists bore fruit in the form of a “Talmud Torah” which was an evening school in Tripoli.
In 1936, however, the Italians began to enforce fascist legislation, aimed at modernising social and economic structures, based on conditions current in Italy.
With the implementation of anti-Jewish racial legislation in late 1938, Jews were removed from municipal councils, public offices, and state schools and their papers were stamped with the words "Jewish race.
[24] In 1942, German troops fighting the Allies in North Africa occupied the Jewish quarter of Benghazi, plundering shops and deporting more than 2,000 Jews across the desert.
Mussolini ordered the Jews of Benghazi, Derna, Tobruk, Barce, Susa and other towns in the region to be sent to a concentration camp in Gharian in retaliation.
Thus, several Jews were beaten up in mid-June 1948, a shop was looted, and a fire broke out in a synagogue, but the local police introduced order and there was no need for the British Army to intervene.
In the same year, however, it was discovered that Rina Debach, a then 80-year-old Jewish woman who was born and raised in Tripoli but thought to be dead by her family in Rome, was still living in a nursing home in the country.
"[31] On 9 December, Gaddafi also extended an invitation to Moshe Kahlon, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and son of Libyan immigrants, to Tripoli, purportedly to discuss Jewish property in Libya.
Occupation will bring disaster upon the Israeli entity, adding to his guests, We invited you because your voices are not being heard, and I want the world to hear you.In 2010, it was claimed that Gaddafi had Jewish ancestry.
Gerbi was reportedly warmly received by Berber rebels in the Nafusa Mountains in August 2011, and an Amazigh NTC official was quoted as saying, "We want to create closer relations between Muslims and Jews.
[38] With the help of a U.S. security contractor and the permission of NTC fighters and three local sheikhs, Gerbi hammered down a brick wall erected to block the entrance to the city's historic Dar Bishi Synagogue.
