The Tayar Family

The inquiry into a lineage begins with its name. In the case of the Tayar, the Arabic origin is unanimously recognized by onomastic authorities. The name derives from the Arabic tayyâr, meaning "one who flies," from which tayyâra, "airplane," also derives. This base, drawn from the Semitic root Ṭ-Y-R relating to flight and aerial movement, has generated across the Arabic-speaking world a cluster of nicknames: the swift, the light one, the bird-catcher, or even one who practiced falconry.

Contemporary genealogical records confirm the North African rootedness of the surname. Tayar is an Arabic name borne in North Africa, sometimes by Tunisian Jews, and most current bearers of the name come from North Africa. This wide diffusion — Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Algeria — is nothing unusual: Maghrebi Jewish families experienced, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, intense mobility along the caravan and maritime routes connecting the ports of the Regency of Tripoli, Tunis, and the inland towns. Joseph Toledano's work on the surnames of the Jews of North Africa situates these descriptive Arabic patronyms precisely within the long history of the linguistic acculturation of the communities [Toledano, Les Noms de famille des Juifs d'Afrique du Nord, 2003].

It should be noted, in the interest of methodological honesty, that the surname Tayar also exists outside the Jewish and Maghrebi sphere. European onomastic dictionaries record the existence of homonyms bearing no relation to the lineage under consideration here — for example as a variant of Flemish or Romance forms. This polygenesis demands vigilance: not every bearer of the name Tayar belongs to the Jewish diaspora, and only communal documentation can establish a reliable connection. For the branch that is the subject of this book, the inscription within Maghrebi and Libyan Judaism is, for its part, solidly attested by communal sources and the Israelite press of the twentieth century.

To understand the Tayar of Libya, one must first grasp the exceptional antiquity of Tripolitanian Judaism. The Jewish presence in Libya — in Tripolitania as in Cyrenaica — ranks among the oldest in the entire Mediterranean. It stretches back to Antiquity, long before Islam, and constitutes what historians call a mizrahi community of Eastern origin. The Jewish exodus from Libya in 1967 marks the dispersion of one of the oldest mizrahim communities in the Mediterranean. This historical depth, attested from the Hellenistic and Roman periods onward, gives families such as the Tayar a horizon of several millennia of local rootedness.

Over the centuries, the community of Tripoli was enriched by successive contributions: indigenous Berber-Judaized nuclei, Séfarade refugees after 1492, merchants from Livorno — the famous Grana, inclined toward Italian culture — and families from the neighboring Maghreb. This mosaic made Tripolitania a crossroads. The privileged witness to this Mediterranean circulation, the writer of Jewish origin from Tripoli, described a communal life deeply connected to the rest of the basin: her family lived in a small community that had ties with the entire Mediterranean basin, in Italy, in France, in Libya, and in Egypt. The Tayar of Tripoli belong to this plural community, speaking Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, reading liturgical Hebrew, and increasingly oriented, in the colonial period, toward Italian.

The social structure of this Judaism rested on a dense network of institutions: neighborhood synagogues, study confraternities, rabbinical courts, and charitable works. The breadth of this heritage is measurable by what the community was forced to leave behind upon its departure. A witness to the exodus recalls the extent of the collective property left behind: in addition to private property, the community left in Libya fifty-one synagogues and numerous cemeteries. It is within this tightly woven fabric of institutions that a man such as Victor Tayar would be able to exercise positions of leadership.

The 20th century profoundly reshaped Libyan Judaism, and with it the way of life of families such as the Tayar. From 1911 onward, Tripolitania came under Italian domination, inaugurating a period of accelerated Europeanization. The Jews of Tripoli, many of whom adopted the Italian language and culture, saw new prospects for education and social advancement open before them. The European Jewish press echoed this integration: bearers of the name Tayar appear as early as the interwar period in the communal chronicles of the French-speaking Jewish world. The Archives israélites de France of 1927 mention a Victor Tayar, while L'Univers israélite of 1920 cites an Elie Tayar — testimonies to the presence and mobility of the lineage within the Mediterranean and European Jewish space.

This period of integration was, however, brutally interrupted. The spread of fascism and, from the late 1930s onward, the promulgation of Italian racial laws struck hard a population that, only moments before, had felt itself fully part of European modernity. If before the war the Jews felt Italian, after fascism they decided to leave. The Second World War, the deportations, the internment of Libyan Jews, and the precariousness of the postwar years left a community shaken but still alive.

At the close of the colonial period and in the aftermath of Libyan independence in 1951, the community of Tripoli, though numerically reduced by a first wave of emigration to Israel, still retained a structured internal organization. In 1951, some 8,000 Jews remained in Libya. It was this residual yet cohesive community — endowed with its notables and its leaders — that men such as Victor Tayar presided over on the eve of the final catastrophe. Leading such a community required at once deep familial roots, a capital of respectability, and an ability to mediate with the authorities — qualities that tradition attributes to this tutelary figure of the lineage.

At the heart of family and communal memory stands the figure of Victor Tayar, presented by tradition as one of the leaders of the Jewish community of Tripoli before the exodus of 1967. This status places him in the lineage of notables who, during the final decades of Jewish presence in Libya, ensured the institutional continuity of a threatened Judaism. To lead the community of Tripoli in those years meant bearing responsibility for worship, charity, education, and above all the safety of a population increasingly exposed to the surrounding hostility.

The nature of the sources must be underscored here. Victor Tayar's leadership role belongs primarily to transmitted Memory and family record; it has not been corroborated, within the scope of the present inquiry, by any archival document specifically detailing his mandate. Historical prudence therefore requires that it be presented as a fact received from tradition — plausible and coherent with the context — rather than as a datum fully established by the archive. It should be noted, however, that the given name Victor, in its Frenchified or Italianized form, and the surname Tayar did indeed circulate in the documented Mediterranean Jewish milieu of the period, as attested by the Israelite press already cited.

The weight of this responsibility takes on its full meaning in light of the events of 1967. On the eve of the Six-Day War, the community of Tripoli was living under extreme tension. Historians recall that, despite the continuous deterioration of their situation since independence, the Jews of Libya were caught off guard by the swiftness of events; the inflammatory speeches broadcast throughout the region were fanning a hostility ready to explode. For communal leaders, those weeks were ones of unrelenting anguish: protecting families, maintaining calm, and soon organizing the impossible — the departure of an entire people from its millennial homeland. The Memory of the Tayar family thus preserves the recollection of a man placed, by virtue of his position, at the tipping point between a long past and a permanent exile.

The year 1967 marks the irreversible rupture. The Israeli victory in the Six-Day War triggered in Libya an explosion of anti-Jewish violence that sealed the community's fate. Historians speak of this as the pogrom of Tripoli, which constituted the final point of more than two millennia of presence. The pogrom was the coup de grâce for the history of the Jews in Libya: 4,100 Jews managed to flee the country for Italy, of whom 2,500 arrived in Rome via Alitalia. It was within this flow of refugees that the Libyan branch of the Tayar left Tripoli for Italy, in keeping with the family record that places the family's exodus to the Italian peninsula in 1967.

Here, Memory and archive answer one another. Family tradition affirms a departure for Italy; documented History confirms that it was precisely toward Italy, and singularly toward Rome, that the majority of the fugitives made their way. The arrival in Rome of thousands of Jewish refugees from the former Libyan colony revived in Italians the repressed memory of their colonial past. The choice of Italy was in no way arbitrary: the cultural, linguistic, and family ties woven during the colonial period made the peninsula the natural refuge for Tripolitanian Jews. The coherence between the Tayar family narrative and the historical data renders this chapter of their history both transmitted and plausibly established.

Exile was not the end of persecution for those who remained. After Mouammar Kadhafi's seizure of power in the coup of 1969, he ordered a campaign of persecution against the Jewish minority, which led the last hundred Jews to flee the country. Property was confiscated and funerary heritage desecrated: Colonel Kadhafi's revolution in September 1969 brought very harsh laws, all property was "returned to the people," and the great Jewish cemetery of Tripoli, of approximately five hectares, was destroyed in 1973. For the Tayar as for all their coreligionists, return became impossible and Libyan rootedness survived only in Memory.

The last chapter of this story is that of reconstruction in exile. Settled in Italy, and notably within the Jewish community of Rome which took in the bulk of the Libyan refugees, the Tayar participated in the remarkable phenomenon of an entire community reconstituting itself outside its land of origin. The Jews of Libya, far from dissolving, maintained in Italy their own liturgical traditions, their rite, their cuisine and their networks of solidarity, giving rise to what has been called a "Roman Tripoli." Oral history scholarship devoted to this community emphasizes the vitality of private memories — those family narratives which have made of the exodus a heritage transmitted from generation to generation.

This process of transmission explains precisely the nature of the sources available to us on families such as the Tayar: more than in notarial deeds or civil registry records, it is in family memory, testimonies and communal notices that their history has been preserved. Recent scholarly research on Libyan Jews has indeed rested largely on such materials, as the literature devoted to the fate of this Mediterranean community and its private memories makes clear. The historian must therefore work with a body of documentation in which the voices of descendants hold an essential place.

At the close of this journey, the Tayar lineage emerges as a condensed expression of the Mediterranean Jewish fate of the twentieth century: an ancient Arabic name attesting to a deep Maghrebi rootedness, a community of multimillennial stock in Tripolitania, a period of Italian integration shattered first by fascism and then by decolonization, and finally the exodus of 1967 which transplanted the family to Italy. From Tripoli to Rome, the Tayar carried with them the Memory of an engulfed world, which they succeeded in bringing back to life in the diaspora. It is this fidelity to Memory which, in the absence of complete archives, remains today the surest thread of their History.

The Great Book of the Tayar closes on a certainty and a humility. The certainty is that of this lineage's inscription within the long history of North African and Tripolitanian Judaism: a patronym of transparent Arabic origin — from the Arabic tayyâr, "one who flies" —, a Libyan community among the oldest in the Mediterranean, and an exodus of 1967 whose every stage is solidly documented by historical research. The humility is that imposed by the scarcity of the nominative archive: if tradition places Victor Tayar among the leaders of the community of Tripoli on the eve of exile, this role remains principally transmitted through family memory, plausible but not fully corroborated by any contemporary document.

It is in this fertile tension between Memory and History that the value of this narrative resides. The Tayar of Libya did not merely endure history; they embodied and transmitted it. Their trajectory, from ancient Tripolitania to the banks of the Tiber, bears witness to the resilience of a diaspora capable of surviving the destruction of its world by making Memory itself a homeland. May this Great Book, grounded in established sources as much as in received accounts, help preserve the memory of this lineage and invite its descendants to enrich, through their own archives, the history here sketched.