Lyn Julius
The Jews of Tunisia

Lyn Julius - The Jews of Tunisia

- All right, we’ve three minutes past the hour, so I just want to say thanks once again for coming on, for joining us for the same, and today, we’re going to do the Jews of Tunisia.

• Absolutely, well thank you so much, thank you.

• Thanks a lot. Oh, whenever you’re ready.

• Lovely. Well, good afternoon from London. Good evening, good morning, wherever you may be. And welcome to my talk on the Jews of Tunisia. I’d like to thank Wendy again, I’d like to thank Trudy, Judy, Lauren, and of course my husband Laurence who helped me with the slides of this wonderful presentation. Now, if you were listening to Trudy last week, she was talking about Suleiman the Magnificent who was alive then, presiding over the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. And so this dovetails rather nicely with the Jews of Tunisia because Tunisian Algeria came under Turkish control and remained so for the next 300 years. And this is Suleiman the Magnificent. There’s also a link with the Medicis, which you’ve been hearing a lot about in the last three weeks, and we’ll come to that a bit later. But first, I’d like to take you back 2000 years to the origins of the Jewish community. Here is a map showing Tunisia and it is actually sandwiched between Algeria to the West and Libya, which is immediately to the east of the island of Djerba, which you see there in the south. Of course, there were no hard and fast borders until the 20th century and the Jews of Tunisia really form a single unit with the Jews of Morocco and Algeria and there was plenty of movement back and forth.

So the origins of the Jewish community are shrouded in mystery, Jews are thought to have arrived from Judea with the Phoenicians who founded the city of Carthage, which is today a suburb of Tunis. Then came the Romans, and after he destroyed the second temple, the Emperor Titus sent 12 boatloads for some 30,000 Jews from Palestine to North Africa. The island of Djerba in Eastern Tunisia was one of the earliest Jewish settlements. It is known as the island of the Kohanim, and it’s reputed to been settled by the high priest Zadok and his fellow Kohanim, his fellow priests, after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, or even before, some people say the Jews arrived after the destruction of the first temple. Legend has it that the priests carried a stone from the altar of the destroyed temple and incorporated it into the building of the synagogue of El Ghriba which you see here which is still an important centre of pilgrimage today. Like the indigenous Berbers, Jews lived in troglodyte limestone caves in the south. A large cave in the centre served as a synagogue, another as a stable, no family was ever homeless, as another cave could simply be hollowed out, out of the limestone. This is the Roman synagogue of Hammam-Lif which dates back to the third or fifth century. It testifies to a sophisticated and well organised community.

The Jews fared worse when Christianity became the official religion. The Arabs conquered North Africa in 642, they subdued the Berber queen Kahina and converted the local Berber population, which was mainly pagan and Christian to Islam. Here she is, Queen Kahina. She was reputed to be a Jewish Berber, and the word Kahina comes from Cohen. There’s a theory that some Jews descend from Judaist Berbers but no one really knows. As the Arabs were outnumbered, it was the Berbers who subdued North Africa in the name of Islam. Thereafter, the Jews were Dhimmi, which if you heard my discussion with Rick Sopher yesterday, you’d be familiar with the term, and I will tell you more about that a bit later. But basically, the Dhimmi status is an inferior status to the Muslims. The Jews and Christians were spared their lives on condition they paid the Jizya tax, but they had no legal rights, they were tolerated but under sufferance. The Talmudic academies of Babylon provided the intellectual leadership for the Sephardi Jewish world. However, several Rabbis were born in Carthage and in the early Middle Ages, Kairouan in Tunisia was an important centre of Jewish scholarship. In the 10th century, a Jew named Isaac ben Solomon Israeli taught at the Kairouan Medical School and served as the personal physician to two rulers.

A second Kairouan Jew named Dunash ibn Tamim was a physician and philologist, who also served as a doctor in the Fatimid court. And this picture shows you a sort of typical Kairouan synagogue, you can just see the Hebrew inscription on the wall, and I think a Rabbi is blessing a couple who’ve just got engaged and you could just see the girl wearing a flowing veil with her fiance. The golden age of Kairouan lasted until the 11th century, then came an invasion by Islamic fundamentalists, the Almoravids and the Almohads, and the size of the Jewish community declined significantly. The Christians disappeared rapidly altogether. During the 16th century, a war was raging between Christianity, represented by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was also king of Spain for 40 years, and Islam represented by the Turks, led by Suleiman the Magnificent. This war was mainly being fought at sea between the Spanish Armada and the Turkish fleet. One man was to make a huge difference, his name Hayreddin Barbarossa. Barbarossa’s name means redbeard in Italian. He was a corsair in the pay of the Turkish Sultan. What’s the difference between a corsair and a pirate? Well pirates, rob ships on the high seas at random, while corsairs were employed by a particular ruler to do the same to the enemy’s fleet. As Admiral in Chief, Barbarossa rebuilt the Ottoman Fleet. His naval victories secured ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean. During the mid 16th century, Barbarossa and his brother Oruc Reis, captured Algiers from Spain. Barbarossa conquered Tunis in 1534, the city changed hands several times between Spain and Austria and the Turks. But the Turks conquered Tunis decisively in 1574, ushering in rule by the beys and the deys. The beys were the local Ottoman governors, and the deys were military commanders, usually janissaries or converted Christians.

Thereafter, the Port of Tunis became an important outpost of the Ottoman Empire and the headquarters of the Barbary Pirates, what did they traffic in? Well, whatever they could lay their hands on, but mainly people. The towns on the North African coast were notorious in Roman times for their slave markets, and this trend continued into the Mediaeval Age. Prisoners were captured by the thousand and bought and sold as slaves in Tunis. In the 17th century, there were in Barbary around 15,000 renegades and these were Christian Europeans who converted to Islam, and half of the corsair captains were in fact, renegades. Some were slaves who converted to Islam, Barbarossa himself had a Turkish Muslim father and a Greek Orthodox Christian mother. In the 1880s, sorry, in the 1800s however, piracy in Tunis declined with the sacking of Algiers by the British. In 1830, French forces captured Algiers. The city of Tunis was forced to put an end to their Christian slave trade and 50 years later, the French set up their protectorate in Tunisia. So before the French arrived, the Jews lived mostly in a state of abject poverty, confined to the Hara or Jewish quarter. Many Jews were peddlers selling their wares to the Muslim consumer.

Jewish life was punctuated by outbreaks of violence as Arabs raided the Jewish quarters for loot. Here you see a sort of typical Jewish female wearing the traditional headdress, this sort of pointed cap called the Hennin. And you will note that this lady is extremely corpulent, and that was considered very attractive in those days. And in the 19th and 20th centuries, girls who were about to get married would be sort of fattened up before their marriage, and how did they do this? They had a lot of this stuff called Helba, which was a substance, I can’t tell you what was in it, but it was specifically for women to put on weight, how things have changed, in this age of zero models. You can still buy it on Amazon apparently. But in the 17th and 18th centuries, the community was to be invigorated by an influx of Jews from Europe coming from Livorno in Italy. And here’s a family group showing a Jewish family wearing traditional dress, the couple in the centre, and the wife, obviously, quite corpulent. And you can see the gradual influence of the West here, as some of the people in this photograph are actually wearing Western modern dress. So the important link between the Medicis and the Tunisia, sorry, I’ve got slightly confused here, ah, here we are, is because of this man here, whose name is Ferdinando I de Medici.

He was the Grand Duke of Tuscany between 1549 and 1609. Like the Ottoman Sultan, and unlike Ferdinando’s namesake, the Spanish King, who expelled the Jews from Spain, Ferdinando I de Medici was wise and liberal enough to welcome Jews, fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition to the port city of Livorno in Tuscany. Ferdinando fostered commerce and enacted an edict of tolerance for Jews and Heretics. Livorno became a haven for the persecuted. In order to populate his new city, Ferdinando de Medici passed a series of laws known as the Leggi Livornine, primarily intended to invite Sephardi Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal to settle in the city. The laws guaranteed religious tolerance, but also tax benefits to those who set up businesses in Livorno and this encouraged foreign merchants to come from all over Europe. As a result, Livorno became a cosmopolitan city, home not only to a large Jewish population but also to Greek, Armenian, Dutch, French, and British merchants. It was not long before Livornese Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition, set up trade links with North Africa. In the early 17th century, they established branches in Algiers and Tunis. They ransomed slaves, yes, some of them were Jewish. They engaged in manufacturing and finance, they were tax collectors and used as intermediaries by the beys who trusted them. But the long established Jewish community in Tunisia, the Touansa who’d been there 2000 years eyed the newcomers known as the Grana or Gurni with suspicion.

The name Grana incidentally derives from Leghorn, the British name for Livorno, a rift, or you could call it a schism, developed between the two communities, and it actually lasted until 1944. The Grana thought of the Touansa as not being advanced enough, while the Touansa thought of the Grana as not religious enough. At one point, the Touansa were banned from buying meat in the Grana butcher’s shops, thinking it was not kosher enough. There was another difference between the communities. The Touansa had long been resigned to being subjugated Dhimmis under Islam. Towards the end of the 18th century, Jews were banned from owning land or property, so they put their wealth into precious metals and coins. So let’s talk about the Dhimmi rules a little bit, which we heard about yesterday. These were a set of limitations, restrictions, humiliations, which Jews had to comply with under Islam. And one of those restrictions was that Jews were not allowed to marry Muslims. So if a Jew married a Muslim woman or even consorted with her, he could be executed. One terrible case resulted in the woman being put in a sack and drowned.

The Jewish man was beheaded and dragged through the street. In another terrible case during the rule of Hammuda ibn Ali, who ruled between 1782 and 1814, a Jew who had shared a joke with a Muslim woman, was brought before the bey. The Jew protested that the woman was old and not much to look at, the bey did not believe him when he said that he had converted to Islam, and the bey condemned the Jew to death. He was beheaded and his body given over to the mob and chopped up into little pieces. As Dhimmis, the Jews continued to pay the Jizya tax, which constituted 2% of total tax revenues. And they paid higher customs Jews than Muslims and more than Christian merchants. But the Grana were not so easily persuaded to give up their Tuscan mode of dress, because one of the Dhimmi rules was that Jews had to wear black or navy turbans, and here in the picture you see the gentleman wearing such a turban, the Lebanese, sorry, the Livornese Jews wore European style hats, but there was a bey in Tunis called Lebanese ibn Muhammad, and he ruled between 1814 and 1824. And he wanted to the wide brim fedora warned by the Livornese Jews and extend the ban to foreign Jews. The British got involved after a complaint by a Jew from Gibraltar. It was not unusual for the European powers to intervene with the Ottoman Empire to champion the rights of minorities.

Two Livornese Jews were beaten up and only released when they were found to be subjects of the Duke of Tuscany. After 1846, new arrivals in Tunisia could keep their foreign nationality. It was frustration that the Dhimmi rules, which pushed the Tunisian Jews continually to ask for French nationality or to obtain the protection of foreign consulates. In an effort to distance themselves from the Ottoman Turks, the beys of Tunisia introduced reforms, and in 1856, abolished all special taxes on Jews. This liberalising trend was abruptly ended by a scandal called the Batto Sfez Affair. A Jewish coachman named Batto Sfez was accused of being drunk, insulting a Muslim, and cursing the Islamic religion, some say he ran over a child. He was brought to justice under Sharia law and sentenced to death for blasphemy and that was another of the Dhimmi rules. You could die if you were caught insulting the Muslim religion. Jews and Christians were outraged by the cruelty of this sentence. They appealed to the consular authorities to stop the execution, and they implored Mohamed Bey to show mercy.

A few days before the arrest of Batto Sfez, the Bey had executed a Muslim soldier who had murdered a Jew. So to appear evenhanded, the Bey ordered to enforce the same sentence on Batto. The difference being that Batto Sfez was not a murderer. He was beheaded on the 24th of June, 1857. This tragedy shook the Jewish community. After all, they thought the Dhimmi rules had been abrogated the previous year. Faced with this travesty of justice, the community was all the more offended that Sfez’s head was picked up by an Arab gang and kicked around like a football. The community managed to retrieve the head and bury it with dignity in the Jewish cemetery. The incident may have been forgotten by the Bey, but for the consoles of France and England, it presented an opportunity, a pretext, to pressure the Bey to introduce reforms based on justice, security, and the freedoms granted to all subjects. After some hesitation, the Bey introduced reforms based on the principles of justice and freedom, this was known as the Pact Fondamental. But the popular reaction at the loss of Islamic privileges was so fierce that the Pact was withdrawn. It was only in 1881 when the French established their protectorate that Jews were promised equal rights. 18 years earlier, the Jews of Algeria had been given French citizenship, but this had created resentment, both from the white settlers known as the Pianva and the native Muslims, and the French were in no rush to give French nationality to Jews in Tunisia.

We’ve spoken in previous lectures about the Alliance Israelite Universelle, this was a network of schools set up by a group of French Jews and over 200 were established mainly in the Muslim world. The boys’ school in Tunis was opened in 1878 with a girl’s school shortly afterwards, which was absolutely revolutionary because up until then, girls just did not receive an education. So the Alliance’s mission was to defend the Jews against abuses and equip them with the skills to thrive in the modern world. It had an absolutely revolutionary impact on the Jews all over the Muslim world, although the Grana usually preferred to send their children to Catholic missionary or Italian schools. But the advent of French education triggered a process of acculturation, many Jews began to speak French rather than Judea or Arabic. But they also learned Arabic and Hebrew in school. An emerging middle class moved to new quarters in the cities, but emancipation was limited, and Jews continued to be judged by Muslim law in matters of personal status, and in French courts only in criminal cases. And this meant that the Muslims always had an advantage if they were being judged in a Muslim court.

The Jews asked to be given French nationality just as France had granted the Algerian Jews French nationality, but there were so many conditions attached that it was very hard to get, by the end of the protectorate, about a third of the community, which numbered about a hundred thousand, had managed to get French nationality. During the first World War, only those with French nationality were drafted into the French army. The Muslims were conscripted too, but the fact that the Jews of Tunisian nationality were exempt from the colonial army triggered uproar among the Muslims. A football match in 1917 between Tunisian Muslims and Jews, almost caused civil war. Matters were not helped by the recent announcement of the Balfour declaration in favour of a Jewish home in Palestine, just after the 1917 Armistice was signed, and in honour of Tunisian soldiers returning from the front, the Stade Tunisien, all Jewish team were due to play the Franco-Arab Stade African team in the Franco-Arab Cup.

The Jewish team won two-one, scuffles broke out between supporters of the opposing teams and the players themselves. Some were professional boxers, Hasan Karosh, Tunisian heavyweight champion exchanged blows with Judas Cohen, a Stade Tunisien player and Korean boxer. Cohen beat up the linesman who ended up in hospital, violence spread beyond the stadium into the streets of Tunis and then to other cities. Jewish shops were broken into and windows smashed. The situation deteriorated so badly that all sporting activities were suspended for a whole year and this was the end of interfaith football. The interwar period was a time of intellectual ferment, some Jews wanted to assimilate into French culture and move away from religion, others were still traditionalists attached to religion. There was a fledgling Zionist movement, and this photo shows a Hebrew class in 1922. I love this photo because it’s got a sort of like Greek-like quality. And some Jews did turn to Marxism, Leninism or Communism. The French writer Guy de Maupassant actually visited Tunis in the late 19th century, declared that Tunis was a Jewish city because Jews formed a huge proportion of the inhabitants, and they dominated culture and intellectual life. Albert Samama who you see there sporting his splendid moustache, introduced the bicycle, the wireless telegraph, and the first x-ray machine to be installed in a Tunisian hospital.

He filmed Tunisia from a hot air balloon and was the first to film underwater sequences. There were several Tunisian swimming and boxing champions in the interwar period. Victor Young Perez was deported to Auschwitz from France where he was living and perished on the death march in 1945. And in her tragically short life, Habiba Messika was a hugely popular singer and actress, 5,000 people, Jews and Arabs turned up to her funeral. But this was a period where Tunisian Jews really embraced modernity with gusto. World War II ushered a difficult period for the Jews of Tunisia. In 1940, the pro-Nazi Vichy government in France instituted the anti-Jewish laws, known as the Statut des Juifs, banning Jews from public service and setting quotas for the professions. But the resident general in Tunisia, Admiral Esteva, who was a practising Christian, tried to delay implementing the rules as long as possible. At the back of his mind perhaps was the idea that he wanted to spare the Grana from persecution. They numbered 3000 people, and they were the leading doctors, they were the cinema owners, they owned 40% of the property and ran 80% of the businesses. In November 1942, Tunisia came under direct Nazi control for six months, the Nazis were wedged between the advancing Americans in Algeria and Montgomery’s eighth Army in Egypt, and they wanted to consolidate their position. The Nazi commanding the occupation was Walter Ralph, inventor of the mobile gas ban and responsible for the murder of a hundred thousand Jews in Eastern Europe.

The Einsatzgruppen he headed had plans to liquidate the Jews. But in Tunisia, Ralph did not have many SS troops, and most of the occupying forces were Italian as Hitler were saving his best troops for the battle of Stalingrad, Ralph gave the Jewish community 24 hours to recruit 3000 Jews for forced labour and he threatened to shoot 10 community leaders if they did not do so. Enter one of the heroes of the Jewish community, Paul Ghez here on the right, a decorated war hero who said he would be the first to die. Ralph backed down and took a hundred Jews as hostages instead. During the six months of the Nazi occupation, 5,000 Jewish men were dragooned into forced labour camps. The yellow star was applied in some Tunisian towns. The General Arab population, nationalists and the lower classes were quite anti-Jewish, but the bey of Tunis and the Muslim aristocrats tended to be philosemitic. And I told you the story in a previous lecture of Khaled Abdul-Wahab who actually sheltered Jews during the Nazi occupation. The vast majority of the population were most likely indifferent. But as the allies continue to advance, in his diary, Ralph described the Jews as hopeful, the Arabs depressed. In April 1943, 40 Jews were deported to Europe by the Nazis and never came back. But most Jewish casualties in Tunisia itself occurred as a result of allied bombing and several hundred died. After the war was over, Zionism rose in popularity, although some Jews turned to Communism, then came the first wave of Jews departing for Israel, before independence, about 30,000 Jews left for Israel and 10,000 for France.

Tunisian independence followed in 1956. The first president of independent Tunisia, was Habib Bourguiba, now Bourguiba was not anti-Jewish, and he was reported to have said, “While I am alive, not a hair on Jewish heads will be touched.” In fact, he declared Yom Kippur a national holiday. Two Jewish ministers were appointed, but the honeymoon did not last. Jews were never made to feel part of the new Tunisia. They were sidelined and Arabs were promoted in their place. Imagine if the Board of Deputies of British Jews, or the Conference of Presidents, the Chief Rabbinate, and the Bahauddin were all done away with by official decree, the British or indeed the US Jewish community, would be shaken to the core if all their main institutions were abolished. That’s exactly what happened in Tunisia. The Bahauddin was dissolved in July, 1957. The council of the Jewish community of Tunisia was dissolved by presidential decree. To make matters worse, the Tunis Jewish Cemetery was expropriated and turned into a park. And the great synagogue of the Hara, the Jewish quarter, was demolished as part of an urban renewal scheme. Jews were pushed towards the exit by a series of small steps, taxes, financial controls by stealth, the misally distribution of commercial licences, the blocking of Jewish civil servants’ careers, as some complained that, for instance, air conditioning units were installed in all offices except that of the Jew. Then came the Bizerte Affair in 1961. And this was an example of how Jews could be caught up in anti-colonial crises. Bizerte was a French naval base.

The Jews wanted the French to leave, sorry, not the Jews, the Tunisians wanted the French to leave. But the Jews had become identified with the French colonials, eventually the Bizerte crisis resulted in the French withdrawing from their naval base. And this left the Jewish community without protection. “Just you wait, as soon as the French go, we will deal with you,” Jews were told. Some were arrested and charged with espionage. While the Jews of French nationality were evacuated, it was left to the Mossad in Paris to organise a rescue operation for Tunisian and stateless Jews, 15,000 Jews fled. Whoops, this is a picture from World War II showing the Jews being frog marched to forced labour camps. The six-day war broke out in 1967, and Jews suffered repercussions from the conflict. On June the fifth, 1967, thousands of residents of Tunis went on the rampage against the city’s Jews. About a hundred Jewish owned businesses were attacked and looted, windows were smashed, cars were overturned, and the Great Synagogue, which you see here on Tunis’ Avenue de la Liberte, was ransacked and set on fire. Rioters called to throw the Jews into the sea and to burden them.

The rioting lasted up to six hours. The police apparently took little action to bring it to an end. The Tunisian president, Bourguiba went on TV to apologise, but it was too late. The beautiful modernist Great Synagogue has since been restored. Cierva Hayum witnessed the burning of the Great Synagogue in Tunis. His mother ran to escape the mob. “To my disappointment,” he recalls, “I saw some neighbours pointing out to the mob, Jewish stores and cars to be burnt. When you are a target for repression, even when not openly state sponsored, you don’t see any peaceful future for you and your kids. You don’t have much choice than to try to leave the country. When my parents made this choice in October 1967, we couldn’t take more than one suitcase and 50 Dinars,” probably equivalent to a hundred dollars, “necklaces or anything in gold, was confiscated at the point of departure, we closed our apartment door, leaving everything in it, 15,000 Jews did the same, just 7,000 remained behind.” And so we finish where we started on the island of Djerba. In 1948, there were about a hundred thousand Jews in Tunisia, today, there are just over a thousand in the whole country. The majority living in Djerba, 1% of the original population.

What is the future for the Jews? Not very bright, since the president Kais Sayed, who you see here visiting the El Ghriba Synagogue on Djerba, since he staged a sort of coup and became a dictator earlier this year, the jury is out as to whether Sayed is actually an anti-Semite. He was thought of declared that Jews are thieves, but his words were muffled. One thing is sure though, Sayed is against normalisation with Israel and won’t be signing the Abraham Accords anytime soon. This puts the Jews of Djerba in a difficult situation. Will there still be Jews in Tunisia in 20 years time? Only time will tell. So thank you very much for listening, I’m very happy to answer any questions you may have.

• Thank you for an excellent presentation.

Q&A and Comments:

• Oh, thank you, Wendy. Adrianne Wolf recommends “The Jihad Dictionary” by Nancy Kobrin, oh, interesting, thank you. And thank you very much for your kind words.

Is there genetic evidence of the Jewish Berber dissent? This is Harriet De Koven.

A: Actually, the evidence does not point to any affinity between Jews and Berbers. They are closer to Ashkenazi Jews than they are to Berbers. I think this whole theory of the Judaist Berbers really goes back to an Arab historian called Ibn Khaldūn who wrote a few sentences about it, and also the French encouraged people to think of Berbers as being Judaised.

Q: What was the stamp on the photo of the plump lady?

A: I’m going to have to check that for you, Laurie.

Q: Why did the Nazis use Barbarossa as the code name for the invasion of USSR in 1941?

A: I actually don’t that Dennis, perhaps somebody has the answer to that.

Q: Lynette asks, could Helba have been Halva, also fattening?

A: That’s true, Halva is very fattening, but I don’t think Helba’s got anything to do with Halva. Oh, here we go, Jane’s got the answer. Helba is the Moroccan Arabic word for fenugreek, that’s right, it’s used to make dishes like fenugreek sweet and fenugreek cake, thank you for that, which is made of semolina and fenugreek, and hence the plant, helban seeds is used to make fattening food. So it’s not the fenugreek itself, it’s really the semolina, isn’t it?

Q: So why did the Jews leave Livorno?

A: As I mentioned, they set up sort of branches of their businesses in Tunis.

Helen says there’s a wonderful story about a group of Icelanders captured by corsairs and taken as slaves to North Africa, and based on a real event told by Sally Magnusson in her novel, “The Sealwoman’s Gift.”

Yes, they reached as far as I’ve seen, gosh, they were everywhere.

Thank you, Heather. Yes, she’s got the low down on Helba as well.

Q: So Jewish women didn’t need to wear a veil, says Susan.

A: Yes, you are absolutely right. In fact, it was part of the Dhimmi rules that Jewish women did not wear a veil. This was really because they were sort of more available, if you like, to Muslims. I mean, there, there was a terrible problem of kidnapping and abduction of Jewish women in the Arab world. It’s a dirty little secret, if you like. And yes, so they didn’t need to wear a veil. Overweight women suggested wealth, absolutely right, Harlene. It was supposed to be an incentive to want to marry into a family that had so much wealth that their women were large, absolutely.

Q: Lena asks, what prompted the Jews from Italy to move to Tunisia?

A: Yeah, because they had trading branches, that was the reason, I don’t think it was political, it was definitely economic because they were actually ready to submit to the Dhimmi rules. It seems that women were treated far better in Babylon under Muslim rule than North Africa, certainly in the earlier centuries. Well, in the earlier centuries, the first 400 years of Islam, I’d say that all the Jews were treated better because the Arabs were spread so thinly on the ground that their priority was not really to convert, so they were quite happy to leave the Jews, leave them alone but certainly you are right, certainly under the Ottoman Empire, the conditions were much easier than in North Africa, and I think the worst situation really was in Morocco, which actually was never under Ottoman control.

Thank you for another Helba recipe, recommending a synagogue built in ACO, all done in mosaic floors, walls and ceilings, built by Jews and Tunis, yes, I’ve been there. Thank you, Judith.

Q: Were there many learned Rabbis in Tunisia?

A: I’ve heard of Rabbi David Kimchi.

Q: Was there a seat of learning there?

A: Yes, definitely a seat of learning at Kairouan in the 11th century.

Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Uta. Helba, yes, thank you Esther. Thank you Eleanor. Thank you.

Q: Are Jewish visitors safe if they visit Tunisia?

A: That’s a good question because Tunisia has had a problem with terrorism. There was a terrorist attack on the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba in 2002 and 19, mainly German tourists died there, there were recent attacks, I think there was a man who went on the rampage shooting tourists on the beach not so long ago. There was something at the Bardo Museum.

Q: How many Tunisian Jews fled between 1948 and 1950?

A: I don’t know the exact number, but about a third did flee before independence.

Q: Can Islam ever be regarded as a tolerant religion when considering the fate of most Jews under Islam?

A: Well, I think there is a difference between, that’s from Alan, there’s a difference between tolerance and respect. There’s a difference between the fact you are tolerated under sufferance but you are at the mercy of the ruler and it’s not the same as sort of multi multicultural respect, if you like, which we have in the West where there’s genuine pluralism and equal rights.

Oh, thank you very much Lynette. Fascinating to note is the Italian slang for money is called grana. Oh, thank you, I didn’t know that.

Thank you, Basil. He attended an academic congress in Tunis, by then the community had diminished substantially, that’s in the early ‘60s. He had an audience with the Yo Gabba, a grey bearded gentleman with whom he communicated via his secretary in fractured French. The Rabbi wanted to know if Hitler was still alive, on a Friday night, he and another Jewish attendee visited a few synagogues where there was no minyan, but lights were always lit, that was a kosher restaurant. Thank you for that.

Q: And Elaine says there is a genetic link with Kohanim. I think the question was, is there genetic support for the original thought that Djerba was the island of the Kohanim?

A: I don’t actually know that, it would be very interesting to find out if any genetic studies were done of the Jews of Djerba to see if they had the Cohen gene. Barry, yes, I mentioned the synagogue was destroyed, but later rebuilt, it was partially destroyed.

Q: Was it rebuilt by the Tunisian Jews or the Tunisian government?

A: I’m not absolutely sure about that, actually, I have to check and can I let you know?

Thank you for your kind words. Roland Timsit attended the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Tunis, he left in 1957 and immigrated to Canada. He heard a lot of interesting stories from his parents dating to the Warriors in Tunis and he’d be happy to share any of this, yes please, please do write to me, I would love to hear your interesting stories, thank you, so I do have a blog called Point of no Return and it could be interesting enough to put on the blog.

• [Laurence] They put the stamps on the front of the postcard.

• Oh, yes, so my husband here collects postcards and he has found stamps, oh they’ve all got stamps on the front of the postcard, I don’t know if you can see here, on the front, not on the back, I suppose to leave more room for you to write your message.

• [Laurence] There’s some with similar buyers.

• Okay, all right so they all have stamps on the front, there you go. So Basil found a restaurant in Paris, run by the same Tunisian family, wow! A lot of Tunisian settled in Paris. And you can find quite a lot of kosher Tunisian food there.

Wonderful film, “A Summer in La Goulette.” Yes, I’ve seen it. It is a very good film, Hendy, thanks, yes, it was set in 1947 and it showed how the relationships changed in 1948, absolutely.

Q: Jeffrey asks, why do the Jews of Djerba’s islands stay and not immigrate?

A: That’s a very good question. By the way, the Jews of Djerba are a flourishing community, and they’re not just a bunch of old people, they have children and schools and thriving families.

Q: Why do they stay there?

A: I’m not sure, I think it is because it’s probably not worth their while moving to Israel, I think they can’t afford it, actually. And they’re very religious, and the Djerba synagogue is very important to them and is a place of pilgrimage. A lot of them are in the jewellery business and when there were tourists to Djerba, obviously it was economical if you like, for them to run businesses on Djerba.

Michael Block, yesterday Mr. Sopher kept downplaying Arab antisemitism by comparing the Arabs to the UAE Arab, which is like comparing apples to oranges. UAE and Bahrain are not the Palestinians or the Libyans, Tunisians. Well, that is certainly a point of view, Trudy, oh good, thank you Trudy for answering the question.

Barbarossa was the Great Germanic Conqueror, the creator of the first Reich. Thank you for that. Ronnie, yes you’ve also got the answer, absolutely.

Miriam, thank you. The book mentioned, so it was by Nancy Kobrin, I think. Thank you so much, Shirley. Hendy, saw a movie a few years ago about a beach resort in Tunisia, yes, that’s “A Summer in La Goulette,” a very good film. It shows the deteriorating relations between Arabs and Jews. Is there any data on intermarriage and its impact on the Tunisian community? Well, I think there was some intermarriage during the French protectorate, but there’s very little intermarriage between Jews and Muslims.

Thank you very much for the lecture, thank you, Alison.

Q: How many Jewish families are in Tunisia today?

A: Families, I don’t know, but there’re only just over a thousand Jews.

Thank you, Robert. He’s very sad to know how bad things were for our people in Tunisia, thank you. Well, it’s not just Tunisia. I’m afraid it’s across the Muslim world, of a million Jews in 1948, there are barely 4,000 still in the Arab world today.

Q: Once the Barbary pirates were defeated, did any of the Tunisian Jews flee to America?

A: Not that I know of, iPhone. Marilyn thinks the outfits of the women in the opening photo are gorgeous and they would be totally appropriate on a young woman today, very modern and fashion-forward, maybe some fashion designer will take you up on that.

And Joani says he’s had falafel with Hilda, sold at a Yemenite falafel Stand in Israel.

Thank you, ah, Moni Cohen sister of Va Laun Timsit, and you have many stories, yes please do send them to me, about the occupation. Frederick Barbarossa was a Holy Roman Emperor who won great battles and supported the crusades at the start, so that’s another Barbarossa, was it? And that’s why the Nazis found the name an attractive one to give to a crusade, that’s from Barbara.

Valerie Patie, for those interested in old photos of Tunisian Jews and of their life, there’s a Facebook group called La Tunisie d'Antan, thank you, Valerie.

Forgot, thank you, thank you very much, Jerome, USA Marines in the 19th century landed in Tripoli, yes, that’s absolutely true, and they fought the Barbary pirates, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli is the Marine anthem, how interesting is that?

Yes, great, well I think that brings me to the, no it doesn’t, I’ve still got a few more. Thank you Betina, she’s read a couple of books bought by her mother about the Jews of Tunisia where Tunisian Jews who immigrated to Canada in 1957, my uncle is Roland Timsit and my mother’s Moni Cohen, so welcome to the whole family.

Jane asks, right, yes, I think Jane has quite a lot of knowledge here, about the Great Synagogue in Tunis, in the mid 1990s, the Tunisian President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, paid for a massive rehabilitation of the building, according to former residents, the synagogue interior was originally mostly white with bold colours only added during Ben Ali’s restoration. Ben Ali wanted his Jews and synagogues, especially in Djerba, Tunis as they generate income from tourism for Tunisia, especially during Lag BaOmer when many Tunisian Jews and other Jews visit. Yes, well, the big pilgrimage to the Djerba synagogue, the El Ghriba synagogue takes place on Lag BaOmer and was the highlight of the calendar, as far as tourism was concerned. So it was definitely in the government’s interest to restore the Great Synagogue in Tunis, and of course, this has been a trend in the Arab world to restore synagogues. One day, if you’d like, I could do you a presentation on Jewish heritage and who owns it. Anyway, I think this might really be the last comment, so I think that’s it, Wendy.

• Lyn, thank you. That was really a brilliant, brilliant presentation. Excuse me, I’ve had my phone on, and I just jumped in a cab because I’ve got to go to a opening of an exhibition of one of my friends in London.

• How lovely!

• Absolutely brilliant, thank you so much. So, so appreciate it.

• It’s a pleasure, thank you.

• You had a 1200 devices open.

• [Panelist] It was 1300, Wendy.

• Oh, 1300, okay. Well done Lyn, that’s amazing.

• Thank you, thanks to all of you for joining me.

• Oh, brilliant, thank you so much, take care and see you soon.

• Thank you too, all the best to you.

• Thanks, bye-bye.