Maghrebi Jews

Maghrebi Jews (מַגּרֶבִּים‎ or מַאגרֶבִּים‎, Maghrebim), are a Jewish diaspora group with a long history in the Maghreb region of North Africa, which includes present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

[1] The earliest known Jewish communities in North Africa, excluding Egypt, emerged in Cyrenaica (modern-day eastern Libya) as early as the third century BCE.

The geographer Strabo, writing in the early first century BCE, described Cyrene as comprising four groups, including Jews, indicating the community's size and importance at the time.

After Jewish defeat in the First Jewish-Roman War in 70 CE, Roman General Titus deported many Jews to Mauretania, which roughly corresponds to the modern Maghreb, and many of them settled in what is now Tunisia.

The oldest known synagogue in western North Africa, found in Hammam-Lif, in modern Tunisia, dates to the late fourth or early fifth century.

Berber lands east of Alexandria were relatively tolerant and were historically very welcoming for Christians and Jews during the Roman Empire notably.

The relationships between Muslims and Jews in the Maghreb were relatively good thanks to the Al Andalus peaceful era, until the ascension of the Almohades, who persecuted non-Muslims to a large extent during their early reign.

[12] Fez and Tunis, respectively in Morocco and Tunisia, became important Sephardic rabbinical centers, well until the early 20th century, when most Jewish populations emigrated to Israel, France, Canada and Latin America.

[13][14] This migration increased in the latter part of the 15th century due to anti-Converso violence in 1473 and the intensification of the Spanish Inquisition in the 1480s, which led to the expulsion of Jews from Andalusia.

As Spanish military forces advanced into Málaga and Granada, many Jews from these regions sought refuge in Morocco and Algiers.

[13] Upon arrival, Spanish and Portuguese Jews found North African cities already home to Jewish communities of diverse backgrounds.

[14] Sephardi Jews quickly dominated Jewish communal life in Morocco due to their scholarly and mercantile elite status.

Political protection and social status were often precarious, with frequent outbreaks of violence and economic pressures impacting both Jews and Muslims.

[17] Thus, the Jews of Spain overwhelmingly moved directly south to the Maghreb Region of North Africa and quickly prospered.

On the eve of World War II, 400,000 Jews resided in the Maghreb; throughout this time, each country differed in its treatment of its respective Jewish population.

France's Vichy Regime, then, oversaw the Jewish community in Algeria during World War II and imposed anti-Semitic measures such as stripping Jews of their civil rights, forcing them to wear identification markers, and putting quotas on their admission to primary schools.

This exodus was a combination of push and pull, augmented with the independence of the Maghreb countries in the 1950s and early 1960s, as Jews were seen as being supportive of the previous colonial French.

After Algeria won independence, the Jewish population of 140,000 began a massive and definitive exodus mainly to France due to increased animosity towards Jews.

The notion of Pan-Arabism came about in the earlier years of the 20th Century, and the cultural, linguistic, and political influences of European colonial powers in the region began to sharply decline.

A Jewish presence in Algeria existed since before the Roman-era,[28] but most Algerian Jews trace a significant amount of their history back to the culture of al-Andalus.

[32] After the German invasion of France, Algeria came under Vichy rule: Jews had their French citizens’ rights taken away, were sacked from public service jobs and subject to quotas and restrictions.

[36] In the last 15 months of the war, over 130 attacks against Jews or Jewish establishments occurred; the two most symbolically significant being the looting of the Great Synagogue of Algiers in December 1960,[36][37] and the assassination of popular singer Cheikh Raymond on a public market in Constantine in June 1961.

[40] Their "repatriation" represents a unique case in the history of Jewish migration given that even though they were psychologically uprooted, they "returned" to France as citizens and not as refugees.

The Nazis immediately arrested Moise Borgel, the president of the Tunis Jewish community, along with other prominent Jews,[41] before implementing a regime of forced-labor, property confiscation, hostage-taking, mass extortion, deportations, and executions.

Thousands of countryside Jews were forced to wear the yellow badge,[42] but none were transported to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe due to the distance from Tunisia as well as the short time span of the German occupation, which ended in May 1943.

[43] While Habib Bourguiba continuously worked to reassure the Jews of their safe and equal position within Tunisian society, going so far as to include a Jewish nationalist, Albert Bessis, in his first cabinet,[44] he failed to curb the increasing instances of violent anti-Jewish outburst, particularly following the Six-Day War in 1967, when the Grand Synagogue of Tunis was looted and burned to the ground.

Italy saw the Jews as enemies, and Mussolini sought to cleanse Libya of its Jewish population, a movement called Sfollamento.

[46] In 2012, a study by Campbel et al.[49] found that North African Jews were more closely related to each other and to European and Middle Eastern Jews than to their non-Jewish host populations.The genome-wide ancestry of North African Jewish groups was compared with respect to European (Basque), Maghrebi (Tunisian non-Jewish), and Middle Eastern (Levant) origins.