The text below reports excerpts from the paper presented by the author at the Symposium organized in Paris by the Embassy of Tunisia at UNESCO, in June 1993, and entitled “Tunisia in the mirror of its Jewish community.”
It will be a matter of the Jews, who have been part of the social fabric since Antiquity and in a continuous manner. They have doubtless never represented more than 2% of the country’s population, but for the period that will occupy me here, between the 19th and 20th centuries, their proportion is much higher in the capital, Tunis, and they occupy a strategic social and cultural position, out of all proportion to their small demographic numbers.
It will be a matter of the Jews, but I would like to grasp them in their relations with the majority population, the Tunisian Muslims, in order to evoke, in three successive moments, the shared spaces and experiences, on the one hand, and the divergent evolutions, on the other. These three moments will correspond, broadly, to the first half of the 19th century, to the period situated between 1850 and 1950 (which includes the crucial changes of the colonial era), and finally to that which follows Independence. Things will have to be said briefly, and so one will have to excuse the schematic and impressionistic character of the remarks that follow.
1. In the 19th century: closure, hierarchical disparities, proximity.
In the 19th century, before the upheavals that precede and accompany colonial penetration, the paradox is that the different segments of society are much more clearly separated from one another than they will be subsequently, and that nevertheless the cultural homology between Muslims and Jews is at its strongest.
The situation can be described under three headings: closure, proximity, hierarchical disparities.
1.1. Closure:
Closure of each group within its communal framework — clan, village, tribe for the one, the neighborhood of the hara [the Jewish quarter] for the other — for there is no public sphere, no place where convergent or contradictory aspirations could be expressed, negotiated, debated. Public affairs are at the Bardo, at a distance from the capital, in the hands of the Bey and his agents, the greater number of whom are recruited from among men originating from the Ottoman Empire. If he associates with the management of public affairs members of the indigenous population — Muslims, and sometimes Jews, and for certain specialized services — it is by cooptation or by the sale of administrative offices.
Closure, for the still general adherence to religious prescriptions means that one shares with the members of one’s religious group the most important moments of existence, and that one cannot share them with those of the other religious group. The Jews cannot eat at the Muslims’ nor receive cooked food from them, on account of the obligation of cashrût [kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws]. The Muslims may, legally, take a wife from among the Jews; the reverse is impossible. One cannot exchange letters or documents, for the Muslims write in Arabic while the Jews use Hebrew characters. The Jews follow their calendar and their rituals from birth to death, from sundown to the following maghreb [the evening prayer / nightfall], from Saturday to Saturday, from Rosh ha-shannah [the Jewish New Year] to the following autumn. The Muslims obey the lunar calendar and follow the rites of Islam.
The shared space is above all that of the market. At the souk, the men at least exchange words, products, and services. Whether Muslim or Jewish, they obey the same codes of conduct, use the same instruments of weights and measures, of accounting and credit, the same methods of partnership, the same techniques of sale, advertising, or bargaining, and they end up thinking and classifying within the same categories.
1.2. Proximity, homology, overlaps:
The paradox is that this homology between Jews and Muslims existed despite the social compartmentalization, and bears on the most legible markers of identity. How, indeed, does one identify a person? How does one identify oneself as a member of a group? By a name, a first name, a costume, ways of doing things, a language, a set of signs recognizable to members of the group as to others. Now, within the palette of possible choices, the Jews have at their disposal, on the one hand, a reservoir specific to them, but on the other, a fund they share with the rest of society. Thus with costume, which, for men as for women, is the Jewish variant of the local, Tunisian costume. Thus with language, for if the men learn Hebrew for religious ends, and use Hebrew letters in written communication, orally it is in dialectal Arabic — in its Jewish tonality — that everyone communicates. The patronyms are not only Arab (Chemla, Saada, Maarak, to cite those present), but sometimes shared with Muslims: Memmi, Tayeb, Trabelsi, etc. The men, for the most part, receive a biblical first name, and even in case of ambiguity the difference in pronunciation allows one to distinguish a Braham from a Brahim, a Yushef from a Yusef, etc. But confusion sets in with Khlifa, Mas’ud, Khmais. The girls especially receive, more often than their brothers, first names with no biblical reference — Arab ones, shared with those of the Muslim population, often prophylactic. And to promise a royal destiny to a girl, one will readily call her Beya or Sultana. One could not display an indigenous identity more clearly.
One ought to evoke the cuisine, which presents many specifically Jewish dishes and practices, but which also forms, for the most part, the Jewish variant of a larger regional ensemble.
This cultural kinship — some have gone so far as to speak of “symbiosis” — results from the very long contiguity between the various elements of the population. This centuries-old proximity means that Tunisian Jews of the 19th century must have been much closer to their Muslim neighbors than to their coreligionists of Alsace or Poland.
1.3. Hierarchical disparities:
Compartmentalizations, resemblances. I will not evoke, within the Jewish population itself, the regular classifications that place the Jews of Tunis above those of the bled [the countryside / hinterland], the mercanti above the indigenous, the Grâna [Jews of Livornese origin] above the Tuânsa [native Tunisian Jews]. I will rather underscore the inferior legal status that is that of the Jews until 1857, until the promulgation of the Fundamental Pact.
Their rights and duties, indeed, remain governed by the status that Islam reserves, in general, for the faithful of the monotheistic religions, the Christians and the Jews. Freedom of worship, hence freedom to have and maintain synagogues, schools, ritual baths, cemeteries, and kosher butcheries.
Freedom to form and maintain their masters, their rabbis, and their judges, to arbitrate conflicts within the community. This lawfulness of worship and of its institutions is coupled with the duty not to display ostentation and not to rise above the Muslims. Hence, for example, the modesty of the old synagogues, or the fact that they were built below the level of the roadway.
The Jews are subject to a poll tax, the jezyiah [jizya, the tax levied on non-Muslims], which the Muslims do not pay. But, on the one hand, the Jews of Tunisia do not pay other taxes to which the Muslims are bound. Their poll tax, moreover, is collected and remitted to the government by the Jews themselves; now this levy is based on an approximate evaluation of the poor, the middling, and the rich, without any census of individuals and fortunes ever having specified the basis of the taxes. Finally, from 1856, the Muslim subjects are in their turn struck by a poll tax — a highly unpopular one.
Another discriminatory rule: the Jews had to wear clothing and headdress of a distinct color. They had to step aside before a Muslim. The bearing of arms was forbidden to them, as was the use of noble mounts — thus the camel and the horse — so that the Jews could not defend their own life and honor. These differences placed the Jews symbolically in an inferior position, comparable to that of women. In their relations with the Muslims, they had to live with eyes lowered, not raise their voice, not be aggressive, not defend themselves otherwise than by words in case of aggression. Now numerous testimonies indicate that in the public space of the port, the street, the market, the insult “dog without a banner” (in other words, an inferior being, protected by the flag of no State) is frequently uttered. In the domestic space and within the walls of his quarter, the Jew is master of himself and of his own; on Saturday he is king, awaiting the messianic redemption. But it is certain that the state of inferiority is ill borne and appears more and more anachronistic when the economic and social rise of Jewish merchants, especially in Tunis, appears incompatible with their status as dhimmi [a protected non-Muslim subject]; or when the reception of European ideas modifies the scale of values and aspirations. Everything indicates the impatience that is gaining among certain Jews of Tunis to obtain equality of rights and to free themselves from practices henceforth endured as degrading.
2. 1857-1956: opening, differentiation, bifurcations.
There then opens our second phase, of the opening of Tunisian society (an opening in part spontaneous, in part induced and even imposed by the foreign powers and then by the colonial regime); a phase of social differentiation and of inversion of the traditional hierarchies; a phase finally where the development of various spaces of encounter and dialogue goes, ultimately, hand in hand with a bifurcation between the Muslim part and the Jewish part of society. Without presenting all the facets of these changes, which will be the subject of Annie Goldmann’s paper, I will simply select a few symptomatic facts.
From the legal point of view, the opening, the de-compartmentalization of society, the calling into question of the old hierarchies begin in 1857 with the Fundamental Pact, which ensures equality of rights and duties for all subjects, Muslim or not; equality of access to all employments; freedom of property, including of real estate. That the Jews welcomed the end of the discriminatory measures with satisfaction, we have multiple proofs of it. For example, the men abandoned the dark and stigmatizing colors, to proudly don the red chéchia [the felt cap]. Or again this: the first non-religious book published in the Arabic language and in Hebrew characters is, in 1862, the Qanûn al-dawla al-tunsiya (The Law of the Tunisian State), a translation of the Fundamental Pact by Mardochée Tapia, Moïse Chemama, and Elie El Malik.
These changes accelerate, for Tunisian society as a whole, after the establishment of the protectorate. Urban growth, the development of the suburbs, the greater urbanization of the country’s interior, affect the entire population. The old closed quarters open, people spill out into spaces less differentiated along religious lines. The introduction of new forms of education, and of all the infrastructure of primary and secondary schools that this presupposes, not only opens the way to new ideas, independent of religious traditions, but creates new spaces of sociability.
Do these new spaces break the old partitions? Within each community, yes: they permit a certain social escape, a greater mobility, a certain emancipation of individuals with regard to the religious one — from one to the other? Only up to a certain point, for these new spaces still reproduce, to a large extent, the inherited cleavages. The holiday resorts, for example, by a sort of tacit agreement, will be mostly Italian here, Jewish a little further on, and Muslim at the next station of the TGM [the Tunis-Goulette-Marsa railway]. The new places of leisure likewise.
Let us add that, essentially, once the spaces of encounter between members of different religious communities are left, each rejoins their group of origin. The segregation is therefore maintained, while permitting easier passages from one milieu to another. But in the colonial era, this redistribution is accompanied by a stronger and more visible social hierarchization. Access to new activities and new positions exacerbates competition and provokes reclassifications in which the Jews find themselves situated between the French, who occupy the highest positions, and the Muslims, the greater number of whom occupy the lower rungs of the social ladder and find themselves in fact barred from access to the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
The period corresponds, finally, to the birth of the public sphere. A modest one, certainly, controlled, curbed. The freedom of association and of the press is intermittent under the protectorate, political expression under close surveillance. But against all odds, the press develops and diversifies. Trade unions and parties come into being, circles and associations serve as a forum for the debate of ideas.
For the Tunisian Muslims, the choices they made, the struggles they led, are known: their history is known, it culminates in the independence of Tunisia. Let us recall only that the Jews drawn to politics did not join the nationalist parties. Only a small minority adhered to political Zionism, and between the two wars, after the Balfour Declaration, the central Zionist organizations took an interest, quite naturally, in the Jews of Europe and would not seek to make the Jews of North Africa emigrate. The Jews were no more seduced by the French nationalist press and currents, all too readily antisemitic. What fascinated the Jews in the most durable way was French political culture in its republican and increasingly secular modality. The Jews of Tunisia wanted to believe in the universal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity; they believed in the French model of the emancipation of the Jews. They embraced the France of republican education, of open, rational, cumulative knowledge. I borrow here a few figures from a text by the late Dr. Cohen-Hadria: in 1914, there were 90 who passed the baccalauréat; of this number, 5 were Muslim, 27 Jewish. 21 of them were to become doctors or lawyers, and almost all became French. In this context, becoming French — which about 7,000 Jews did between the beginning of the protectorate and the Second World War — was part of the movement of emancipation and social advancement. It no longer appeared either as an apostasy in religious terms or as a betrayal in political terms.
Here intervenes the bifurcation between the Jewish and Muslim elites or intelligentsias of Tunisia. A bifurcation that will lead half of the Jews of Tunisia toward emigration to France after independence. But let us not forget the relays: the press again, for example. I said that the Jews had not joined the nationalist parties. That did not prevent them from supporting them sometimes, or from defending their leaders. Thus L’Avenir social (The Social Future) and Tunis socialiste (Socialist Tunis), in the 1930s, welcome articles by Bourguiba. Let us not forget the spaces of encounter.
Let us not forget, finally, the ordeals endured together or simultaneously: communists or trade unionists deported to the same camps of the south in the 1930s, anticolonialist militants expelled from Tunisia; lycée students driven out of the Lycée Carnot for their stance in favor of independence. The dangers and the exaltation of the semi-clandestine struggle within the student movement.
3. Since 1956
It makes no difference. The end of the protectorate seals the divorce between Muslims and Jews and sets off the massive emigration of the latter. To say divorce is to speak of tensions and conflicts. Are we ready to expose them in broad daylight? We admitted the possibility of it in coming here. Let us try to do so calmly, bi-swâb wa siâsa [with measure and good sense].
- Independence is won, Bourguiba returns from exile. The exhilaration of the vast majority of Tunisian Muslims and, for them, the opening of new positions, access to functions of decision and responsibility, liberation. The certainty of the majority of the French or the Italians as to the imminence and the inevitable necessity of their departure. The uncertainty of the Jews, some of whom would like to participate fully in that immense undertaking that is the new Tunisia: to create more democratic institutions, to ensure a more equitable policy in matters of education, housing, access to modern medicine. And some, indeed, have the chance to roll up their sleeves and put their competencies at the service of this work of edification: in the courts, the hospitals, the University, or the civil service. But on the whole, the establishment of the institutions, the rise of Tunisian cadres, takes place not according to the rules of meritocracy, nor even to reward services rendered during the national struggle, but according to belonging to the Muslim majority. The building of the new State and the forced modernization of the economy translate, for the Jews, into a loss of their symbolic and material capital, the risk of déclassement, and in any case the interruption of the movement of ascent and emancipation they had known.
To this internal dimension, let us add two international dimensions. The first concerns relations between Tunisia and France. Each crisis in the relations between these two countries digs still deeper the gulf between Jews and Muslims. The second concerns, obviously, the Middle East conflict, the war — now latent, now open — between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries. Each acute crisis provokes a new wave of departures. The Muslims identifying more and more with the Arab countries and the Palestinians, the Jews with the Israelis, the latter appear as the local substitutes for the distant enemies, and one takes revenge upon them for the defeats suffered by the Arab armies or by the Palestinian resistance. I will not here give the chronicle of the manifestations of hostility, from 1967 to more recent times: they are still present to mind.
The Jews, then, have left. It must be observed, however, that this divorce between majority and minorities is not peculiar to Tunisia. Everywhere the nationalists and the young nation-states have not spared their ethnic and confessional minorities. The Turkish Republic, which has been the most secular of the recent political formations, and which arose long before the creation of the State of Israel created an abscess in the Middle East, did not know how to keep its Armenians, its Greeks, or its Jews, and it is still slow to find an acceptable solution for the Kurds. The Greeks of Egypt, as old as the history of that country, were unable to keep their place, and the Copts themselves see their existence threatened. When all the nations, small and great, have finished having their right to a State recognized, political scientists and politicians will doubtless have to bend over the fate of the minorities before they are extinguished, and to invent a new law for the increasingly varied diasporic populations of the world today. In the meantime, to return to Tunisia, which, by comparison with other parts of the Mediterranean, offers a case of rupture without violence or cruelty, the Jews have left.
We left en masse, family after family, by individual decision, without undergoing a massive and deliberate expulsion, but with the certainty that we had no other choice. We left, carrying in our baggage a fragment of this Tunisia, which we transformed — some into literary work: that is Albert Memmi, Nina Moatti, or Marc Koskas; some into theatrical creation and into films: that is Michel Bouinah, Serge Moatti, or Ariel Zeitoun; some into historical or sociological knowledge: that is what Paul Sebag, Claude Tapia, Jacques Taïeb, Annie Goldmann, or I myself have done; and some, finally, into a suburb of Tel Aviv or a neighborhood of Paris: today, in Netanya, in Belleville, or Montmartre, one can hear the same sounds, the same music as in Tunis, smell the same odors, taste the same flavors. These metaphors of Tunis doubtless concern only a small proportion of the Jews originating from Tunisia, they represent only a part of our life, they will perhaps fade in the space of a generation. But they will at least have served to attenuate the wahch wa-l’ghorba [the loneliness and estrangement of exile] that accompanied our exile. Paradoxically again, as regards the academic works or the literary and artistic creations founded on the Tunisian part of our identity, they allowed us to be recognized in French society and to run there the cursus honorum [the course of honors / career ladder] without meeting resistance, whereas they were long ignored in Tunisia, where we, one or another of us, were suspected sometimes of being linked to the French services, sometimes of being Zionist agents, when we were not judged guilty of usurping a heritage that did not belong to us. These are setbacks of which we do not like to speak, and it took all the persuasive force of Mr. Hermassi to convince us to look back upon our experience. We shall be grateful to him for having exerted this friendly pressure: it will have allowed the renewal of a dialogue between interlocutors who still have many things to say to one another.
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris