Testimony of Dr. Howard M. Sachar

Professor Emeritus, The George Washington University

May 4, 2007

The Circumstances of the Twentieth-Century Jewish Exodus from Islamic Lands

Yemen

The exodus of Jews from Islamic Lands, as the exodus of Arabs from Palestine, was a mixture of anomie, intimidation, and desperation. This can be gauged most graphically in the “career” of the ancient Jewish community of the Imamate of Yemen, an obscure little principality tucked into the southwestern corner of the Arabian peninsula. Descended from refugees and exiles of the Judea of biblical antiquity, the Jews community of Yemen were among the first casualties of the Islamic conquest of the Middle East. From the eighth century on, they were transformed into a dhimmi people–-a barely tolerated, second-class minority. Denied the right to own land, they were obliged to pay special taxes, to live is ghetto quarters in Tsan’a and other Yemeni towns, and restricted to marginal livelihoods as petty artisans.

For these intensely religious and ethnocentric Yemenites–-the 50,000 Jews of Yemen–-the birth of Israel in l948 was both a catastrophe and an opportunity for messianic redemption. Indeed, several thousand of them had managed to migrate to their idealized Holy Land even earlier, in the early 20^th century. But by l949, the impulsion to leave for Israel was animated by sheer survival. Enraged by the defeat of Arab armies in the Palestine war, Yemeni mobs began pouring through Jewish neighborhoods, pillaging and burning. Hereupon, the Imam of Yemen decided to place no obstacles in the way of the Jews’ departure for Israel--so long as they left all of their workshops, homes, and chattels to the government. With their packsacks and the clothes on their back, they literally walked the more than l00 miles from Yemen to the British Crown colony of Aden, arriving three weeks later as living skeletons. From Aden, nursed back to health by medical teams supplied by Jewish philanthropies, 48,000 of these survivors were later flown by chartered planes to Israel. Accordingly, the Yemenites became the one Jewish community in the world that was transported in its entirety to Israel. Penniless they left, and penniless they arrived.

Iraq

If there existed a Middle Eastern Jewish population even older than that of the Yemenites, it was the Jews of Iraq. These latter traced back to the Israelites of ancient Babylon, and thereby comprised the oldest Jewish population on earth. No Jewry in the Middle East, not even the Yemenites, was ever more thoroughly arabized. They blended almost completely into the ethnographic landscape. As dhimmi, to be sure, they too were subjected over the centuries to second-class status and ghettoization. Yet, by l9l4, numbering some ll5,000, Iraqi Jewy had become Ottoman citizens in the fullest sense of the word, spared the need any longer to pay dhimmi taxes or to live in dhimmi neighborhoods. They were allowed to send delegates to the Ottoman parliament in Constantinople, to serve in the law courts and municipal councils.

Moreover, if they experienced any lingering insecurities, these were dissipated almost completely upon establishment of the British quasi-mandate in l920. In ensuing years, four Jews sat in the Iraqi parliament, and one served as minister of finance. Throughout the l920s and l930s, Jewish children attended government schools and universities, and went on to be leading businessmen and doctors and lawyers in Iraqi public life. By l949, numbering approximately l40,000, Iraqi Jews had achieved an economic and educational distinction unequaled in the Moslem world, except for Egypt.

Prefigurations of a recurrent vulnerability appeared after the outbreak of World War II. With Britain on the defensive in the Middle East, a pro-Nazi military cabal briefly assumed control of the Iraqi government in May l94l, and Arab riotors launched forays into Jewish commercial and residential quarters, killing over 200 Jews before the arrival of a small British expeditionary could restore order. In the early postwar years, however, demonstrations against Zionism mounted in intensity, and with them anti-Jewish propaganda. By the spring of l948, the termination of the British mandate and the withdrawal of British garrisons posed an acute threat to the Jewish minority. All the more so when the Palestine War began in May l948. Zionism was proclaimed a capital offense, and hundreds of Jews were arrested, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment on that charge.

By September l949, the worst of the violence abated. Yet the economic ordeal was just beginning for the Jews. Most of their import-export and banking licenses were revoked. Accordingly, in despair of their future in Iraq, several thousand younger Jews arranged to be smuggled across the border to Iran, and from there to Israel. But even the most respected Jewish businessmen now recognized their group vulnerability, and awaited only a safer opportunity to clear out. That chance materialized in March l950. Under a secret deal between the Iraqi prime minister’s office and representatives of the Jewish Agency, the government announced that Jews wishing to emigrate to “occupied Palestine” were be permitted to do so, and on charter aircraft leased by the Jewish Agency. It was the government’s condition, however, that the Jews renounce their Iraqi citizenship and forthwith dispose of their homes, businesses, and chattels, which presumably would be made available to local Arabs. Immediately, thousands of Jewish householders accepted these conditions and lined up at makeshift registration offices. (They were joined by some l4,000 backward Jews from the mountainous Kurdish territories.)

By the end of l950, therefore, fully 65,000 Jews had left Iraq for Israel. Selling off their homes, shops, and offices at distress prices, they departed with only the smallest residue of their savings. Yet some 55,000 or 60,000 Jews decided to wait, in the hope that market conditions would improve. But early in l95l, with obvious government concurrence, acts of violence against Jews broke out again, including synagogue bombings and mob attack attacks on Jewish neighborhoods. When the remaining Jewish inhabitants hurried to sell out for whatever they could get, they soon discovered that they had waited too long. In March of that year, all Jewish assets were frozen, emigrating Jews afterward were permitted to take with them only forty pounds each. By June l95l, the deadline for legal emigration, some ll0,000 Jews had relinquished their citizenship and departed. Another l3,000 Jews had earlier fled illegally, via Iran. As a result, Jewish assets valued at the equivalent of $200 million were transferred to the government, which then proceeded to auction them off for hard cash.

By l952, only 6,000 Jews remained in the country. By l967, in the wake of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day, their numbers totaled 3,000. In l97l, as a consequence of intense pressure by Western governments, this final remnant was allowed to leave Iraq, although without money or property of any kind.

Syria and Lebanon

As late as l947, some 26,000 Jews were living in Syria, a population divided almost equally between Damascus and Aleppo. Despite their intense communal ethnocentrism, their legal and political circumstances were not uncomfortable. Earlier, under the listless Ottoman administration, they had endured no serious political disabilities, and had even achieved a certain eminence in commerce. Under the French mandate, they shared in the dramatic upsurge of the Levant’s economy, especially the 5,000 Jews of Beirut, Lebanon–-a separate mandate after l925--who lived at the gateway to Mediterranean trade. Moreover, these latter continued to enjoy political security well after the French departure and the establishment of Lebanese independence in l946–-and even following the birth of Israel two years after that.

Indeed, Jews remained in the Lebanese civil service. As late as l962, several Jews participated in the Lebanese delegation to the United Jews. Offering refuge to the Jews of Syria after the Palestine War of l948, Lebanon was the one Arab state in which Jewish numbers actually increased following Israeli independence, from 5,700 (in the l944 census) to 9,000 in l949. Afterward, however, emigration to Israel and to other nations swiftly depleted this population, to less than 200 by l984. Although they suffered losses in the sale of their property, their departure was not significantly hindered, nor were their funds sequestered. Lebanese Jewry cannot properly be described as a refugee community.

But Syrian Jewry was an altogether different story. During the last years of the French mandate, there were occasional violent demonstrations against the “supporters of Zionism.” In l945, the director of the Alliance school in Damascus was murdered. Following the UN Palestine Partition Resolution of November l947, a series of anti-Jewish outbursts in Aleppo were climaxed by the sacking of the Bah-sita–-Jewish–-quarter. And in the aftermath of the Palestine War, Jewish circumstances deteriorated dramatically. Jewish identification papers were stamped with the word Musawi (Mosaic). Most of the Jews’ communal schools were closed. To inhibit illegal Jewish departure, and the possible augmentation of Israel’s military manpower, the government in l948 prohibited the sale of Jewish property, and five years later froze Jewish bank accounts. Most chilling of all, Jews were subject to periodic arrest, interrogation, and torture for suspected Zionist activities; or were obliged to visit their district police stations on a daily basis as an earnest of their good behavior, whenever their children or other close relatives succeeded in escaping over the Syrian border.

In l957, the vise tightened. “Encouraged” to remain within their home cities, Jews no longer were issued driving licenses, and their business licenses were subjected to quixotic cancellations, often without advance notice. Moreover, the inauguration of a radical Ba’athist government in l962 launched a new era of political tension, and this in a country already notorious for political instability. The government’s essential purpose thenceforth was to militarize Syrian public life and to intensify public hostility toward the “imperialist” West and Israel. One of the regime’s ensuing mutations compensated for its political weakness by openly championing the one cause that was universally popular, a revanchist war against Israel.

Accordingly, it was the Six-Day War that ended any lingering Jewish hopes for security. In the aftermath of Syria’s defeat, under the administration of President Nureddin al-Atassi, Jewish population suffered an upsurge of arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, and permanent disappearances. No Jew henceforth was allowed to travel more than three miles from his home. By l97l and l972, out of sheer despair, the remaining Jewish men–-and some women–-began to run the grave risks of flight again. With the endless distribution of bribes, some of these people managed to develop new border contacts and exit routes through Turkey, occasionally even through Lebanon. In the earlier years, between l948 and l96l, approximately l5,000 Jews had succeeded in fleeing the country. Afterward, the rate had slowed. But in the nightmare period between l963 and l967, another 6,000 found ways to cross the frontier. By the end of the l970s, not more than 5,000 Jews altogether remained in Syria, most of them in Damascus.

By then, Syria’s reigning president, Hafez al-Assad had undergone the trauma of the Yom Kippur War. His economy had been savagely battered. In the course of the diplomatic negotiations of l974-75, it became as clear to him as to Egypt’s Anwar al-Sadat that only the diplomatic support of the United Stats would lever Israeli troops off Arab soil. During the next two years, then, Assad lifted restrictions on the transfer of Jewish property, and a number of Jews managed to obtain passports and exit visas for “business trips” abroad. Not coincidentally, they were required to post “bonds” in the equivalent of $6,000. Of course, the “bonds” were forfeited, and the Jewish population swiftly atrophied to less than a thousand by the l980s, and to a third that number by the end of the century.

Egypt

If Yemeni and Iraqi Jewry boasted a lineage extending back for centuries, even millennia, the majority of Egypt’s 66,000 Jews (at the end of World War II) traced their native settlement back hardly more than four decades. Most were born in the Near East, but not in Egypt. Some were émigrés from the Ottoman Empire’s former Arab provinces, and from North Africa and Corfu. During the l920s and l930s, they came precisely to shed their Asian inheritance, for Egypt under British rule offered refugees the opportunity of special “status” under European consular protection. AS a result, the newcomers regarded themselves increasingly as “Europeans,” members of that privileged economic and social class that included hundreds of thousands of British, French, Italians and Greeks. Later, to be sure, this favored extraterritoriality was withdrawn as a result of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of l936; and by the even of World War II, most of the Jews in Egypt were stateless. Yet, as “local subjects,” they still enjoyed full legal protection in their personal lives and business affairs.

They were almost exclusively a middle-class community. Beginning as petty merchants in Cairo and Alexandria, they flourished rapidly in both cities. Together with the Greeks and Armenians, they owned the finest shops, operated the most important textile firms. Hundreds of Jewish financiers served as executives in Egypt’s banking and insurance systems. Jewish brokers played leading roles in the currency and cotton exchanges and in the stock market. Other Jews prospered as doctors and lawyers. The economic boom of World War II consolidated their already formidable position. They rarely encountered prejudice. Indeed, the larger Egyptian firms vied with each other in engaging Jewish executives. If nationalist resentment festered below the surface of Egyptian public life, it was directed toward the British, rarely toward the other minorities. Affluent, Europeanized, and for the most part French-speaking, the Jews of Egypt guarded their Jewish traditions as a source both of cultural pride and social status.

Central among those traditions in the l920s and l930s was Zionism. Zionist journals, libraries, and drama groups were active. Jews collected money for the Jewish National Fund, went to Palestine on visits, even invested money there. Then, in the late l930s, Egypt began to identify increasingly with the Arab cause, and Jews found it useful to become circumspect in their Zionist loyalties. In l938 and l939l, two right-wing fringe groups, the Moslem brotherhood and Young Egypt, were setting a new and ominous tone, calling for a boycott of Egyptian Jewish businesses. That same year, a number of Jewish communal offices were bombed. Although anti-Jewish violence came to an abrupt end with the martial law of World War II, it was plain that xenophobia was mounting among an Egyptian nation that until the l930s had maintained a wide distance between themselves and so-called “integral” Arabs.

Indeed, by the end of the war, King Farouk’s militant new pan-Arab stance encouraged an authentically anti-Jewish fanaticism in Egypt. In November l946, anti-Jewish demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria wee spurred on by the pro-royalist press. Hooligans smashed and ransacked Jewish shops, looted a Cairo synagogue. Ultimately, it was the Palestine partition debate in the United Nations, the creation of Israel, and the Arab-Israeli War in l948-49 that threatened the communal survival of Egyptian Jewry. In l947, a Companies Law was enacted, requiring at least 75 percent of all employees in private businesses to hold Egyptian citizenship. The blow was a crippling one for Jewish enterprises. On May l5, l948, the day the Egyptian army launched its invasion of Palestine, hundreds of Egyptian Jews were arrested, ostensibly for Zionist plotting. Two weeks later, the government was empowered to confiscate the property of individuals whose activities were “detrimental to the state;” and shortly afterward the holdings of some hundred Jewish companies were sequestered. In August and September l948, Egyptian natioanls alone were permitted to serve as brokers on the stock exchange, then to practice medicine. Bombs planted in Jewish neighborhoods killed and wounded 242 individuals.

In December l948, the assassination of Prime Minister Mahmud al-Nuqrashi by the Moslem Brotherhood finally brought the terrorism to a halt. The new premier, Ibrahim al-Hadi, immediately and courageously emptied the prisons of “Zionist suspects” and filled them with members of the Moslem Brotherhood itself. The nation slowly returned to normal, to its characteristic easygoing indolence. In July l949, the government released substantial portions of confiscated Jewish assets. Jewish schools were authorized to reopen, a Jewish communal newspaper to resume publication. Most significant of all, “non-Moslems” were allowed to leave the country without prejudice. Thus, taking advantage of the opportunity, some 30,000 Jews disposed of their homes and business between l949 and l95l, transferred their holdings to European banks, and summarily departed for France, Italy, and Israel. Fully three-fifths of Egyptian Jewry remained, however, cautiously optimistic that stability would continue.

That expectation lasted barely three years. In l952, a “Colonels’ Revolution” overthrew King Farouk and established a republic under military rule. Within the next eighteen months, Gamal Abd al-Nasser emerged as undisputed leader of the officers’ junta. Deliberately fanning the flames of anti-British and anti-Israel resentment, Nasser simultaneously focused public rancor on the European near-monopoly of Egyptian economic life. British, French, Greek, and Italian entrepreneurs were closed out of the national market. The Jews as a collectivity, in turn, were singled out as a putative Israeli fifth column. In December l954, Nasser exploited a treason trial of eleven Egyptian Jews, who were convicted of spying for Israel, to brand the entire Egyptian-Jewish population as a “nest of traitors.” During the ensuing winter months, Jewish shops were boycotted, Jewish importers deprived of their licenses, Jewish stock- and cotton-brokers denied access to their former underwriting houses. It was no less difficult for Jews to leave the country, even when exit visas were available. The market for Jewish properties had collapsed and the government prohibited money transfers abroad. Each month, the few hundred Jews who were allowed departure for Europe took with them the smallest fraction of their savings. Few of the 37,000 or so who remained managed to salvage their estates or their careers.

For this hostage Jewry, Egypt’s humiliation in the Sinai-Suez War was a disaster even more far-reaching than the original Palestine War. Once again, the European minorities provided a convenient target. Tens of thousands of British, French, Italian, and Greek inhabitants were expelled from the country, their businesses confiscated. Yet retribution against the Jews was harshest of all. Within the space of a year, 21,000 of them were shipped out of the country. None was allowed to take with him more than thirty Egyptian pounds. Other Jews were allowed leeway to leave at their own timetable, although under the same financial constraints. By the end of l959, approximately 36,000 Jews had departed for Israel, France, Italy, or Brazil, and other, smaller groups followed in ensuing years. By June l967, not more than 3,000 Jews remained.

Their climactic ordeal took place in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Shocked to near-hysteria by the scope of its military debacle, the Nasser government arrested hundreds of Jews, including the aged rabbis of Cairo and Alexandria, and interned them in concentration camps. Three years passed before the prisoners were released. Most of them eventually succeeded in departing Egypt by paying out all they owned in bribes. The three of four hundred sick or aged Jews who remained lived essentially on funds transmitted by international Jewish charities. Of these, barely two hundred survived to extend tearful greetings to Menachem Begin in Cairo’s Sharei Shamayim Synagogue, during the Israeli prime minister’s visit of April l979, a month after the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

North Africa

Libya

The trauma of Jewish departure from the Islamic world was not limited to the Middle East. Across the Maghreb, the exodus was played out on a wider scale, if only because the Jewish presence among North Africa’s Berber populations was demographically more extensive than among Arabs and Egyptians. Among this vast scattering of some half-million Jews (in l945), even the modest Jewish enclave in Libya was not spared. Libyan Jewry was an indigenous community, extending back to native tribes that had been proselytized by Jewish traders and refugees in Carthaginian times. While in no sense a prosperous or a vibrant minority, the Jews of Libya had enjoyed reasonable security under Berber, Ottoman, and (since l9ll) Italian rule, even under Mussolini, who showed them favored treatment in peacetime, and protected them from the Germans in wartime. Numbering 32,000 by l945, most earned their livelihoods as merchants and artisans in the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi; but a fourth of them lived a rather atavistic, semi-tribal existence in the desert interior.

In l945, too–-ironically, under British occupation–-an eruption of anti-Jewish riots left several hundred Jews dead and wounded and destroyed over a thousand Jewish homes and shops. The outburst was linked to the emergent Libyan nationalist movement; and the emergent Palestine issue simply exacerbated the unrest. In June l948, a renewal of violence inflicted additional Jewish casualties. By then, few Libyan Jews believed that it was possible to remain on in the country. Fortunately for them, in l949 the Jewish Agency and the (Jewish) Joint Distribution Committee succeeded in organizing direct sailings from Benghazi to Haifa, or, alternately, to Brindizi and Naples. By the summer of l95l, virtually the entire Libyan Jewish population had jettisoned their businesses and homes and embarked for more assured security abroad. Whether their principal destinations were Israel or Italy, they were archetypical refugees, arriving in their new homelands in a state of near-destitution.

Morocco and Tunisia

Yet the bulk of North Africa’s half-million Jews had devolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the ambit of French rule. As late as l948, fully 285,000 of them were concentrated in Morocco. Algeria accounted for another 135,000, and Tunisia for an estimated l05,0000. As in Libya, approximately two-thirds of this population traced their ancestry to Berber tribesmen who had been converted to Judaism nearly a millinium before, and whose vernacular, Judéo-Berber, subsequently remained distinct from that of their Moslem neighbors. A smaller number were Sephardim, descendants of Iberian Jews, and some of these maintained their own Ladino dialect.

Among this teeming littoral Jewry, the Moroccans were by far the most deprived, economically and culturally. Over the centuries, among the local sultans, they were reduced to near-pariah degradation, they lived in wretched ghettos that frequently were swept by epidemics and native mobs. Functioning by tradition with a millet–-quasi-autonomous–-governing hierarchy of their own, they were permitted to adjudicate their personal and communal affairs before their own rabbinical courts. The establishment of the French protectorate in l9l2 assured them of more extensive physical security and even a measurable degree of economic improvement. But as late as l948, perhaps half the Moroccan Jewish working population survived as peddlers and artisans, the rest as small shopkeepers, clerks, or manual laborers. Except for a handful of affluent merchant and professional families, urbn Jews by and large continued to live in their own neighborhoods, still on the alert to occasional outbursts of Moslem violence.

On the other hand, the extensive concentration of Jews in Marrakech, Casablanca, and Fez provided Moroccan Jews with certain educational advantages. Their children had acces to Alliance Israélite schools, which successive French administrations discreetly supported as effective disseminators of France’s mission civilizatrice. Although the majority still received a more parochial Jewish education, the beacon of French culture shone before they eyes, too. They understood well that it was the protection of France that enabled them to maintain their religious and communal traditions in relative peace. Manifestly, that protection broke down in World War II, when France’s North African Empire was reserved for the administration of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Moroccan Jews lost their access to the local French economy, and even their business and professional licenses to minister to a substantial part of the native market; and of course Jews were purged from employment in government offices. The Vichy interregnum clearly represented a painful setback, but at least it was a brief one. It was the economic hardships of the postwar period that endured substantially longer. Even well into the early l950s, the Joint Distribution Committee was obliged to provide relief for tens of thousands of Moroccan Jews.

Yet the principal threat to Moroccan Jewry emerged from two major political changes. The first was the establishment of Israel and the Palestine war of l948, which unleashed Moslem pogroms. Crowds of Berber lumpenproletariat invaded the Jewish sector of Oujda in June l948, massacring scores of inhabitants, wounding many hundreds of others, and pillaging shops and homes. It was this assault that touched off a wave of emigration, mainly by the poorest and most devout sectors of the Jewish community, those who had least to lose by departure. By l954, approximately 100,000 of these people had left, two-thirds of them for Israel, the rest for France.

The second political development was the emergence of a fiery indigenous Moroccan nationalism. By the early l950s, a mounting series of riots and demonstrations against the French protectorate brought the country to brink of revolution; and in l954 France’s Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France committed his government to Moroccan independence within two years. The prospect of Berber rule deeply unsettled Morocco’s remaining Jewish population. It was at this point that the World Jewish Congress succeeded in establishing contact with Morocco’s Istiqlal–-nationalist leadership. Eager for Jewish support abroad, the Istiqlal spokesmen guaranteed their Jewish “brothers” full constitutional rights and political security in a free Morocco. If the Jews, however, did not wish to stay, they would have the right to emigrate to Israel or France.

Indeed, upon achieving independence in l956, the new Moroccan regime honored its promise. Proclaiming complete equality for all inhabitatns, the government included a Jew in its first cabinet, and continued to protect Jewish interests. It was economic, not political, failure that determine the Jews’ course. With the loss of French capital and industry, the nation was reduced to near-bankruptcy. The likelihood of economic collapse was particularly frightening to those Jews who had remained on after the first wave of departures, most of them now middle-level or small businessmen, those who were more thoroughly attuned to French culture. Now, during the first ten months of Moroccan independence, another 33,000 Jews left the country, this time almost exclusively for France.

For its part, the Moroccan government continued to assure full security to its remaining Jewish citizens, and to recruit additional Jews into the government. In l967, during the Six-Day War, King Hassan ordered the arrest of anyone engaged into anti-Jewish violence or even anti-Jewish propaganda. Yet emigration quietly continued through the l960s and l970s, and the government mad e no serious effort to restrict. By the end of the century, the Moroccan Jewish population had atrophied from its pre-World War II plateau of 285,000 to less than l0,000.

Tunisia

the second of France’s Maghreb protectorates, was a kind of North African Uruguay or Switzerland, enjoying a long Mediterranean coastline and a temperate climate. Of its 3,500,000 inhabitants by the end of the war, some l05,000 were Jews, and fully 70 percent of these lived in Tunis. They were by no means a backward or impoverished community. Nearly half of them earned their tolerable livelihoods as craftsmen, as small shopkeepers, or as functionaries in the French administration.

Indeed, under the French protectorate, the Jews enjoyed almost total physical security and civil equality on a par with the nation’s Moslem subjects. As in Morocco, France’s puppet sultanate respected the autonomy of its Jewish minority and even contributed financially to Jewish communal institutions. Here, too, the wartime Vichy administration represented a setback in Jewish legal rights, but the Italian Control Commission in Tunisia protected the Jews’ physical security, and their basic economic freedom of action. After the war, and between l948 and l953, some l8,000 Tunisian Jews emigrated to Israel; yet these were essentially poor and backward Jews from the bled, the tribal interior. Few urban Jews were interested in joining them.

In the following years, however, tensions mounted between the Tunisian Neo-Destour nationalists and the French administration. The sequence of bombings and retaliations increased in scope and ferocity. The Jews were deeply unsettled. They maintained equable relations with both the French government and their Moslem neighbors; yet their businesses were hard hit by the months of strikes, violence, and mass arrests. Privately, the nationalist leaders Had assured their Jewish contacts that an independent Tunisia would guarantee equality for all citizens. Habib Bourguiba, leader of the Neo-Destour Party, endorsed this commitment personally. Most Jews were prepared to accept it. Indeed, many Jews supported the Neo-Destour in its struggle for self-rule. In l956, when France finally granted Tunisia its independence, Jews jointed Moslems in the street celebrations.

Indeed, Jewish security was unaffected at first. Most of the civil service remained French, and, by treaty, French troops stayed on the cruical ports and military bases of the country. Public order was maintained. Several Jews held prominent positions in the Tunisian cabinet and publi administration. Jews were among Prime Minister (later President) Bourguiba’s closest friends and associates. In every respect, they enjoyed identical civil and political rights with Moslems, and the government continued partially to subsidize Jewish communal activities.

Even so, Jews were concerned for their economic stability under a Moslem regime. In l955, on the eve of independence, the nation’s Jewish population still totaled approximately 90,000. By l963, it had fallen to 60,000. As in Morocco, poorer and more devout Jews had left earlier for Israel. The largest numbers of those departing now settled in France. Although a majority of this shrinking remnant still remained in Tunisia, their ambivalence was abruptly resolved by a shattering military confrontation between Tunisians and the French. Early in l962, responding to nationalist pressures, Bourguiba decided to reclaim the port and arsenal of Bizerte, facilities that had been reserved to France by earlier treaty agreement. When he ordered his troops into the protected area, however, they were annihilated by French military gunfire. An orgy of strikes and rioting then followed, and soon the nation’s economy was all but paralyzed.

For the Jews, caught in this chauvinist upheaval, it was not the time to risk further delay. Within the following year, their remaining poopulation was halved. Afterward, a steady, if slower, exodus continued. It was influenced both by the government’s increasingly militant pro-Arab stance on the Israel issue and by its shift toward domestic socialism. The cabinet had already declared a state monopoly in sugar, coffee, tea, fruits, grain, hides and cattle. Thousands of Jewish businessmen accordingly witnessed the elimination of their occupations. It was only a question of time, most believed, before they were liquidated altogether as a commercial element. Departure now inevitably would mean the abandonment of homes and businesses–-the transfer of capital abroad had recently been disallowed–-but younger Jews were unwilling to procrastinate. With or without resources, they made for the harbors and embarked for France. Later, they sent for their parents. By l965, some 80,000 Jews were living in France, and less than 8,000 remained behind. Today, their remaining population is estimated at less than 2,000.

Algeria

For the Jews of Algeria, France was not simply the protector. It was la patrie. They numbered 135,000 at war’s end, a community less than half the size of Moroccan Jewry. Yet if they represented a mere l.4 percent of Algeria’s inhabitants, they comprised nearly l4 percent of the country’s 950,000 European settlers. Unlike their fellow Jews in the Maghreb, Algerian Jews were substantially of Sephardic origin, tracing their roots back to Spain. Reduced to dhimmi status under Moslem rule in the ensuing centuries, they were also the first North African Jews to enjoy the blessings of French rule, in l830. Indeed, forty years later, Paris extended French citizenship to Algerian Jewry (as it had at the outset to the country’s other European inhabitants). Henceforth, unlike their kinsmen in Tunisia and Morocco, Algerian Jews shared all the rights and privileges of Frenchmen. Living mkainly in Algiers, Oran, and Constantine, they were a predominantly commercial element, although of a somewhat more advanced status than in Tunisia and Mkorocco. Several thousand of them also held positions in the civil service and in the professions.

At the same time, well into the twentieth century, even the best-educated and most gallicized Algerian Jews were not quite accepted by their European fellow citizens. If they attended French schools, moved freely in commercial and professional life, they still found themselves in a social ghetto–-a European social ghetto. Moreover, Algerian Jewry suffered even more acutely from the Dreyfus Affair than had the Jews of France; for the colons of Algeria were as prototypically xenophobic as any irredentist minority in Europe. Indeed, the settlers’ right-wing virulence continued on into the l930s, when hatred of Léon Blum’s Popular Front government erupted into riots, the vandalization of synagogues and Jewish shops in Algiers, the murder of a score of Jews in Constantine. The facts bear repeating: it was not the Algerian Berbers who launched this violence. Their relations with the Jews were indifferent at worst, equable at best.

As in other countries in the French Maghreb, the circumstances of Algerian Jewry became authentically precarious only after the surrender of France in June l940. With the French Empire reserved by Nazi dispensation to the new Vichy regime, Algerian Jews were immediately drummed out of the French army. The entire Jewish population of Algeria was stripped of its French citizenship. Jewish functionaries were purged from the Algerian administration, their children expelled from French schools. Jewish businessmen and professionals were barred from Algeria’s European economy. The ordeal lasted two and a half years, until November l942, when American troops liberated French North Africa. It was indicative of the colons’ pro-Vichy sympathies, however, that virtually the only local inhabitants to coooperate in the Allied liberation were Jews. Even after the Allied landings, a year passed before Jewish political rights were restored in French Algeria, and then mainly as a result of intense pressure from American Jewish organizations.

For Algerian Jewry, the period of restored “normalcy” and security endured barely a decade. By the mid-l950s, Berber resentment of French rule had burgeoned into a full-scale insurrection. The Jewish reaction to the ensuing slaughter and counterslaughter was confused. Younger Jews, most of the Socialists, sympathized with the FLN–-Berber nationalist-–demands for self-determination. After all, not a single major act of Berber terrorism thus far had been committed against Jews. Indeed, the nationalist leadership repeatedly assured the Jewish community of its safety and equality in a future Algerian state. On the other hand, it was known that much of the FLN’s military equipment was coming from Egypt’s President Nasser, and the prospect of being governed by a regime beholden to one of Israel’s most implacable enemies was unsettling. As a result, the majority of Algleria’s Jews remained in the background, publicly neutral, privately still hoping for a last-minute reprieve from a French departure.

The reprieved was not to be realized. Once Charles de Gaulle consolidated his presidential power in France, in l959, he made clear his intention to phase out the colons’ privileged status in Algeria. Worse yet, during the ensuring transitional period of French withdrawal, Berber xenophobia unexpectedly burst out against the Jews. In the last week of l960, widespread anti-Jewish riots culminated in the pillaging of the Great Synagogue of Algiers. Although the violence was immediately repudiated by the FLN leadership, the Jewish community was deeply unnerved. Nor was it reassured by the French government’s decision in July l962 to withdraw its army and to accord full sovereignty to Algeria by the end of the year. It was then that the totality of the European settlement--950,000 colons--embarked on a vast collective exodus to France. Their homes, farms, estates, businesses, and public institutions—-the legacy of more than a century and a quarter of French rule–-all were left behind. The l35,000 Jews of Algeria shared in the departure. With the exception of 5,000 among them, who migrated to Israel, they shared too in the collective European transmigration and resettlement in France.