Les Juifs de Sfax

Tunisian Judaism has its roots in Antiquity, with an attested presence from the Roman period and remarkable continuity through the Islamic centuries. Kairouan, some hundred kilometers north of Sfax, was from the 9th to the 11th century one of the greatest centers of Talmudic learning in the Mediterranean, before its decline redistributed Jewish populations toward other cities in the country [Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World]. Sfax, an active port from the Middle Ages onward and a commercial relay between the interior lands and the sea, fits into this long geography of exchanges where Jewish and Muslim merchants participated in the trade of grain, oil and textiles.

The Sfax community belonged to what is known as twansa Judaism — long-established native Tunisians — distinguished from the grana, Livornese Jews of Iberian origin who settled mainly in Tunis from the 17th century onward. In Sfax, the Jewish population was predominantly of local rite and tradition, preserving the use of Judeo-Tunisian Arabic, distinctive clothing customs and a communal organization structured around the synagogue, the rabbinical court and charitable institutions. As throughout the Maghreb, Jews there held the status of dhimmis, protected subjects subject to obligations and restrictions, but benefiting from internal religious and judicial autonomy [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

Tunisia's integration into the Ottoman orbit, then the assertion of the Husainid dynasty in the 18th century, framed Jewish life in the Regency. The major reforms of the mid-19th century — the Fundamental Pact of 1857 and the Constitution of 1861 — proclaimed in principle the equality of subjects without distinction of religion, opening a period of mutations whose effects were gradually felt by the southern communities, Sfax included [Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World]. It is within this general framework that one must situate a Sfaxian community that remained modest in number, but integrated into the economic and intellectual circuits of Tunisian Judaism.

The social physiognomy of the Jews of Sfax was first and foremost that of a community of merchants and craftsmen rooted in the region's agricultural vocation. Sfax was the great olive market: its plains, planted as far as the eye could see, fed a trade in olive oil and almonds in which Jews, as intermediaries, brokers, lenders and retailers, were active players. Around this commerce gravitated the trades of textiles, jewelry, tinware and precious metals work, domains in which Maghrebi Jewish craftsmen traditionally occupied a recognized place [Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World].

The development of the port of Sfax under the Protectorate, the growth of oil exports and phosphate shipped from the Gafsa mines, transformed the city into a leading economic center. This growth offered Jewish families new prospects: the opening of shops on commercial thoroughfares, participation in import-export networks, gradual entry into the professions and administration as education spread. The community remained nonetheless socially contrasted, a merchant bourgeoisie coexisting with a world of craftsmen and peddlers of fragile resources.

Community life was organized around the synagogue, religious and social heart, as well as charitable confraternities that provided assistance to the poor, dowries for young girls and funeral rites. The hevra kadisha, society of the last duty, held a central place in a community where solidarity served as social protection. According to studies on the Jewish cities of the Sahel and southern Tunisia, the Jewish population of Sfax remained relatively small compared to that of Tunis, likely numbering a few thousand souls at its height, before the great departures of the mid-twentieth century [Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World].

The most decisive event in community modernization was the arrival of school, and particularly the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Founded in Paris in 1860, the Alliance deployed a network of educational institutions across the Mediterranean basin designed to "regenerate" Jewish communities through instruction, the French language, and an ideal of civic emancipation. As Aron Rodrigue demonstrated, this educational enterprise profoundly transformed the Jews of North Africa, shaping new generations acculturated to France while remaining attached to their Judaism [Rodrigue, 1990].

In Tunisia, the Alliance opened its first schools in Tunis as early as 1878, before extending its activities to provincial towns. Sfax was among the localities where the Alliance established its teaching, offering Jewish children in the city instruction in French, arithmetic, history and trades, as a complement to the traditional religious instruction dispensed in the kouttab and yeshivot. The institution's archives preserve the correspondence of its directors, a precious source for understanding the daily life, customs and material difficulties of the communities of the south [AIU, Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle].

Under the French Protectorate, established in 1881, this opening accelerated. Members of the community benefited from the teaching of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and opened themselves to French culture, gradually adopting the language, clothing and European ways of life. André Chouraqui described this "contemporary Jewish renaissance" that the Alliance claimed to embody, with its promises of emancipation but also its tensions between fidelity to tradition and attraction to assimilation [Chouraqui, 1965]. The trajectory of Sfax resembles in this respect that, better documented, of Sousse, another town of the Sahel whose Claire Rubinstein-Cohen traced the passage "from orientality to westernization" over a century of history [Rubinstein-Cohen, 2011]. This westernization, real, remained nevertheless partial: it touched first the bourgeoisie, leaving long intact the popular strata most attached to ancestral customs.

World War II constituted a moment of rupture and danger for the Jews of Tunisia, and of Sfax in particular. From the defeat of 1940 and the establishment of the Vichy regime, antisemitic legislation was extended to the Protectorate: laws establishing the status of Jews, exclusion from professions, school numerus clausus, and "Aryanization" measures struck a population hitherto engaged in its integration into French culture. Renée Poznanski analyzed the condition of Jews under the Occupation and the machinery of persecution, illuminating by comparison the fate of communities placed under French authority [Poznanski, 1994] [Poznanski, 1997].

The Tunisian singularity lies in direct German military occupation, unique in the Arab world. Between November 1942 and May 1943, Axis forces occupied Tunisia and the city of Sfax experienced, like the rest of the country, German occupation and the imposition of forced labor measures on Jews [Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World]. German authorities demanded that communities supply contingents of men subjected to arduous labor — construction of military works, earthmoving, development of aerodromes and ports — under harsh conditions and under threat of Allied bombing which, precisely, targeted Sfax's port infrastructure.

To labor requisitions were added collective fines, confiscations, and taking of hostages intended to guarantee the docility of communities. Sfax, a strategic target because of its port and railway, suffered intense bombing that damaged the city and deeply affected its population, Jewish and Muslim. The liberation of Tunisia by the Allies in spring 1943 ended this regime of exception after six months of anguish, without Tunisia having experienced the mass deportations that struck Europe — a relative sparing that history attributes to the brevity of the occupation and Allied advance, rather than to any clemency [Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The post-war period inaugurated a time of recovered hope but also growing uncertainty. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and rising tensions in the Middle East, combined with the assertion of Tunisian nationalism, altered the balance that had permitted coexistence. Tunisia's accession to independence in 1956 placed Jewish communities before a choice: remain in a new, Arab, and predominantly Muslim State, or emigrate.

For Sfax as for other Tunisian cities, the movement of departure, begun after 1948, intensified in the 1950s and 1960s. After independence, the community dispersed mainly toward France and Israel in the mid-twentieth century [Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World]. France attracted the most Francicized families, those whom the Alliance school and the Protectorate had oriented toward the metropole; Israel welcomed those driven by Zionist ideals or held by strong religious ties. Successive regional crises — the Suez War of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967 and its repercussions in Tunisia — accelerated the emptying of the last provincial communities.

Within a few decades, the Jewish presence in Sfax, millennia-old in the country and ancient in the city, extinguished almost entirely. Synagogues were decommissioned or converted, cemeteries entrusted to the safekeeping of memory, and the community's memory was carried into the diaspora. Today, this history survives above all in family narratives, associations of descendants, and scholarly works which, like the Universal History of the Jews directed by Élie Barnavi, situate the Maghrebi Judaisms in the long duration of the Jewish People [Barnavi, 1992].

It must be said with honesty: the Jewish community of Sfax, a merchant port of moderate size, did not leave in the catalogues and reference encyclopedias a gallery of individually documented figures comparable to that of Tunis, Djerba or Livorno. The verified sources attached to this subject illuminate institutions and collective dynamics more than precise individual biographies. One must therefore refrain from inventing names or dates; rather, one should name the actually attested actors in the framework within which this community is situated.

The Alliance Israélite Universelle (founded in 1860) — הברית הישראלית העולמית / Kol Israël Haverim. A Parisian institution founded in 1860, the Alliance was the major agent of modernization of the Jews of Sfax through schooling. Its directors and teachers, whose correspondence is preserved in its archives, were the concrete agents of opening to French language and culture. It was through this network, studied by Aron Rodrigue, that the social transformation of Tunisian provincial communities took place at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [Rodrigue, 1990] [AIU].

Aron Rodrigue (born 1953) — historian. A specialist in Sephardic and Ottoman Judaism, professor at Stanford University, he is the author of a reference work on the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jews of North Africa. His work provides the analytical framework for understanding the Westernization of communities such as that of Sfax: the role of schooling, tensions between tradition and modernity, the formation of a Francophone elite. He appears here as a learned witness, not as an actor in the community [Rodrigue, 1990].

Renée Poznanski (born 1948) — historian. Professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, she has produced major research on Jews under the Occupation and the Vichy regime. Her work illuminates the mechanisms of persecution which, extended to the Tunisian Protectorate, make it possible to situate the trial suffered by the Jews of Sfax during the Second World War. She is mentioned as such as a historiographical reference in the chapter devoted to the war [Poznanski, 1994] [Poznanski, 1997].

André Chouraqui (1917–2007) — אנדרה שוראקי. Writer, jurist and translator born in Aïn Témouchent in Algeria, a figure of Francophone North African Judaism, he devoted a classic study to the Alliance Israélite Universelle and to the "contemporary Jewish renaissance" between 1860 and 1960. His analysis offers a key to understanding the cultural itinerary of Tunisian communities, Sfax included, between Orientality and emancipation. He appears here as a historian of the institution that marked the city [Chouraqui, 1965].

Claire Rubinstein-Cohen (dates unknown) — historian. Author of a thesis devoted to the Jewish community of Sousse and its passage "from Orientality to Westernization" over a century of history (1857–1957), she offers a model of analysis directly transposable to the cities of the Sahel and southern Tunisia. Her work makes it possible, by comparison, to restore with plausibility the mutations of a port community such as that of Sfax, in the absence of a monograph of equal scope [Rubinstein-Cohen, 2011].

The history of the Jews of Sfax is that of a port community in southern Tunisia, modest in numbers but fully inscribed in the great movements of Maghrebi Judaism: ancient roots in the economy of oil, almonds and trade; reorganization in the nineteenth century; decisive opening to French culture through the Alliance israélite universelle school under the Protectorate; the ordeal of German occupation and forced labor between 1942 and 1943; finally dispersal toward France and Israel in the mid-twentieth century. In a few generations, a presence rooted in the long term effaced itself from the urban landscape to continue in the diaspora.

This trajectory, which sources allow us to establish in broad outline, remains documented unevenly: institutions—synagogues, confraternities, Alliance schools—are better known than individuals, and the local archival record specific to Sfax remains sparse. The present work therefore preferred, wherever certainty was lacking, the register of the probable to invented narrative, and relied on the great syntheses of Tunisian Judaism and on the archives of the Alliance. Thus restored, the memory of the Jews of Sfax joins that of a vanished world whose Memory, transmitted by descendants and illuminated by research, deserves to be preserved with accuracy and respect.