The Jews of North Africa

Why this Chapter exists

Some of the oldest Jewish communities on earth.

North Africa is the broad sweep of land across the top of the African continent. For centuries, some of the largest and oldest Jewish communities on earth lived there, across the region the Arabs called the Maghreb, “the west”: today’s Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

These communities had their own languages, music, cooking, dress, and centuries-old traditions. They produced great scholars, traded across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, and lived in the region’s cities and in many of its villages. Like the Jews of Iraq, they were almost entirely uprooted in a single generation in the middle of the twentieth century.

An ancient presence

Older than the Roman ruins around them.

Jewish communities reached North Africa in antiquity. Jews lived in Cyrene, in today’s Libya, by the 200s BCE, before Rome ruled that coast. There were Jews across the region in Roman times, and written accounts and the archaeological record both place them in cities across the coast more than two thousand years ago. When Rome destroyed the Second Temple, the central sanctuary of Jewish worship in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, more Jews were dispersed westward along the Mediterranean. By late antiquity, Jewish communities were established across what are now Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya. Most people in the region were Berbers, the native peoples of North Africa, who call themselves Amazigh. Under Roman rule many Berbers had become Christian.

Two later changes reshaped the community. The Arab conquests of the 600s and 700s CE brought Islam to North Africa and made the region part of a vast Islamic world. Jews there lived as dhimmis, a protected but second-class minority that paid a special tax and lived under legal restrictions (described further in the Dhimma Chapter). Within those limits, Jewish life could be full and productive. In the 1030s the Jews of Fez sided with the Maghrawa against the Banu Ifran, rival Berber tribes, and when a Banu Ifran ruler captured the city, some 6,000 Jews were massacred. Then Jews from Spain crossed the sea. Many refugees from the Spanish massacres of 1391 settled in Algeria, and after Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, many of the exiles followed, adding a Spanish-Jewish layer to the older communities already there.

The mellah and the school, 1438–1912

What the exiles found, and what they built.

The exiles who reached Fez found its Jews already living behind a wall. In 1438 the city had confined them to a walled quarter of their own, the first mellah (the Dhimma Chapter tells how it began). Later, Sultan Abd al-Haqq made a Jew of Fez, Harun, his chief minister. In 1465 the town rose in revolt. The sultan and his minister were assassinated, and most of the Jews were massacred. Inside the mellah, the community that rebuilt had its synagogues, its rabbinic judges, and from the early 1500s a nagid, a recognized head of the community. Scholars wrote their books there. One family, the Ibn Danans, supplied the city’s judges for generations, and Jews across Morocco accepted their rulings.

Moroccan Jewish chroniclers record that Morocco’s sultan welcomed the Spanish exiles in 1492, and that thousands died of hunger and disease in the fields outside Fez before they found homes. The newcomers called themselves megorashim, “the exiles.” The Jews already there were the toshavim, “the residents.” From 1492 they were led by Hayyim Gagin, a Fez-born scholar who had studied in Spain and headed their rabbinic court. Each kept its own synagogues. The exiles’ rabbis issued their own ordinances, the takkanot of the exiles of Castile, which governed marriage, divorce, and inheritance by Spanish custom. In time the exiles’ customs prevailed in the communities where they settled, and in Tetouan and Tangier the two populations blended into one Spanish-speaking community. Where else the exiles went is told in The Expulsions and The Jews of Spain and the Sephardic World.

Tripoli came under Ottoman rule in 1551 and Tunis in 1574. In Tripoli, Simeon Labi, a scholar among the exiles, stopped in 1549 on his way to the Land of Israel, stayed thirty years, and rebuilt the city’s Jewish learning in the Sephardi tradition. In Tunis the Jews lived in the Hara, a quarter whose gates closed at night. By the mid-1600s the city had two congregations, each with its own synagogue and rabbis: the Tunsi, the old community, and the Grana, descended from the exiles and from Jews of Livorno in Italy. Ottoman rule guaranteed their worship and self-government. It also prescribed their dress and barred them from riding with a saddle.

In 1808 Morocco’s sultan, Suleiman, ordered the Jews of Tetouan, Rabat, Salé, and Mogador behind walls of their own. In 1860, Jews in Paris founded the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the first modern international Jewish organization, to defend Jews abroad and to school them. Its first school opened in Tetouan in 1862, and by 1890 others had opened in Tangier, Tunisia, and Tripoli. The schools taught in French and trained children for trades and offices. In 1912, the year Morocco came under French control, almost 5,500 Moroccan Jewish children were learning French in fourteen Alliance schools.

A world across the Maghreb

Four countries, four different Jewish worlds.

“North African Jewry” is really a family of distinct communities, each shaped by its own country.

• Morocco: by far the largest, with roughly 250,000 to 265,000 Jews in the late 1940s. A community that stretched from the great cities (Fez, Marrakesh, Casablanca, Tetouan) to remote villages high in the Atlas Mountains. Morocco’s Jewish history is documented from Roman times to today. In the twelfth century the Almohads, a strict Muslim dynasty that ruled Morocco and Spain, gave Jews the choice of conversion, exile, or death.
• Tunisia: around 105,000 Jews in 1948, centered on the capital Tunis and on the island of Djerba (its own section below).
• Algeria: some 140,000 Jews, with a distinct history: in 1870, France, which had conquered Algeria in 1830, granted Algerian Jews French citizenship in the Crémieux Decree. The decree tied their fate closely to France and, eventually, to the wrenching end of French Algeria.
• Libya: about 38,000 Jews in 1948, mainly in Tripoli and Benghazi, an ancient community that suffered deadly riots in 1945 and 1948.

Across all four, most Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic, the local Arabic woven through with Hebrew. In Morocco’s Berber-speaking mountains many spoke Judeo-Berber, and in northern Morocco many spoke Haketia, a Judeo-Spanish language. French spread through colonial schools and the Alliance schools. In Algeria after 1870 French gradually replaced Judeo-Arabic. North Africa’s Jews worked as merchants, craftsmen, jewelers, scholars, peddlers, and physicians.

One of those scholars, Isaac Alfasi (1013–1103), took his name from Fez. He wrote his digest of Talmudic law in North Africa, and more than four centuries later Joseph Karo made it one of the three authorities behind the Shulchan Aruch, the standard code of Jewish law.

A living culture

Traditions that are still alive today.

The depth of North African Jewish life is easiest to see in what people still do. Take the Mimouna, a celebration held the night the weeklong spring festival of Passover ends, born among the Jews of Morocco. Families open their homes, set out tables piled with sweets, pastries, dried fruit, and nuts, and welcome neighbors in for a night of hospitality that crosses between communities.

The same depth shows up everywhere you look: in the distinctive music of Andalusian-Jewish singers, in elaborate embroidered wedding costumes, in the pilgrimage traditions to the tombs of revered rabbis, in cooking that varied from town to town. It was also a world that lived with danger. In April 1912, weeks after the Treaty of Fez put Morocco under French control, Moroccan soldiers in revolt, joined by crowds, sacked the Jewish quarter of Fez for three days. More than forty Jews were killed, and some 12,000 took shelter on the grounds of the sultan’s palace. The community remembered the pogrom in its own word: the Tritel, “the pillaging.”

Object Spotlight

The Mimouna table, a tradition that outlived the place it came from.

Look again at the table in the photograph above. Plates of almond cookies and marzipan, dates and figs and dried apricots sit on an embroidered cloth around a centerpiece shaped like a hamsa. The open hand is a symbol of protection and blessing, used by Jews and Muslims alike across North Africa. Almost all the food is sweet, and there is far more than any one family could eat. The table is set for whoever comes through the door.

This is a Mimouna spread, set out on the night the Jewish holiday of Passover ends. Passover is a week of strict dietary rules, and the Mimouna closes it with sweets, open doors, and visiting. It began among the Jews of Morocco and spread across the wider Maghrebi Jewish world. For generations it was a neighborhood event. Jewish families opened their homes, and Muslim neighbors would often take part, bringing the first flour or honey of the post-Passover season.

When the Jews of Morocco left, and almost all of them did, they left their houses, their cities, and their mountain villages. They carried the Mimouna with them to Israel and France. In Israel it has become a near-national celebration that fills public parks and town squares with hundreds of thousands of people, and Moroccan-Jewish communities in France keep it as well. The places the tradition came from have few Jews left, but the tradition itself is more widely celebrated now than at any point in its history.

The island of Djerba

One of the oldest Jewish communities on earth.

Off the coast of Tunisia lies the island of Djerba, home to a Jewish community of great age. Its tradition traces it back more than two and a half thousand years, to refugees said to have arrived after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. Whatever its exact beginning, Djerba’s Jewish community is ancient, and it is one of the few places in North Africa where a Jewish community remains today.

At its heart is the El Ghriba synagogue, by tradition one of the oldest synagogues in the world and the site of an annual pilgrimage that still draws Jewish visitors from around the globe. In 2002 a suicide bombing by al-Qaeda, the Islamist terrorist network, killed 21 people at the synagogue, and in 2023 a gunman killed two Jewish pilgrims and three security officers during the pilgrimage. Djerba kept a distinct, deeply traditional Jewish life (its own religious scholars, its own customs) long after many mainland communities had modernized.

The war years

The Holocaust reached North Africa too.

During the Second World War, North African Jews came under the reach of Nazi Germany and its allies. Vichy France, the French government that collaborated with the Nazis, controlled Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Libya, which Italy had invaded in 1911, was a colony of Fascist Italy. In these areas Jews were stripped of rights. In Algeria, Vichy abolished the Crémieux Decree in October 1940, and the Jews lost their French citizenship until October 1943. Forced-labor and internment camps were built across the region, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. In Libya the harshest was Giado, a former military post 150 miles south of Tripoli. In 1942 Italy deported 2,600 Jews from Cyrenaica, in the east of the country, and sent most of them there. More than 500 died of hunger and typhus, about one in five of those held there. In Tunisia, which came under direct German occupation for six months in 1942–1943, Jews faced forced labor, collective fines, hostage-taking, and killings, and some were deported to camps in Europe.

What the Holocaust meant for the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East is told in Unit 4 · Ch. 06 · The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa. Communities already shaken by the war years would, within a decade, face the pressures that ended almost all of their presence.

The departure

Half a million people, gone in a generation.

After the Second World War, and especially after the founding of Israel in 1948, the position of Jews across North Africa grew steadily harder. Rising national independence movements, the Arab-Israeli conflict, outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence, and growing insecurity all pushed in the same direction. Many were also drawn by hope in the new State of Israel and by family already abroad, and pushed by economic need. Community by community, the Jews of the Maghreb left. Violence marked several turning points. In Libya, in November 1945, rioters in Tripoli and the towns around it killed between 121 and 187 Jews, by different counts, wounded many more, and burned nine synagogues, five of them in Tripoli. Rioting returned in June 1948, when at least 12 Jews were killed and 280 Jewish homes destroyed. After mobs killed at least 17 more in June 1967, nearly all of the remaining community left, most for Italy and Israel. In Morocco, on June 7 and 8, 1948, mobs killed more than forty Jews in the towns of Oujda and Jerada, most of them in Jerada. Scores of the attackers were tried, and two were sentenced to death.

The patterns differed by country. Most of Morocco’s Jews emigrated between 1948 and the early 1970s, the majority to Israel, many to France and Canada. Independent Morocco barred emigration to Israel from 1956 until 1961. The ban was lifted after a smuggling boat, the Egoz, sank in January 1961 and more than forty Jewish emigrants drowned. Algeria’s Jews, who held French citizenship, left almost entirely for France in 1962 when Algeria won independence: about 130,000 people in a single year. Tunisia’s community emigrated steadily to Israel and France. Libya’s Jews left in large numbers between 1949 and 1951, and almost all of the rest fled after the riots of 1967. By 1970 about 90 remained.

A Jewish presence that had lasted more than two thousand years was reduced, across the whole region, to a tiny remnant, with the largest remaining communities in Casablanca and on the island of Djerba.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History & Belief Systems: North African Jewry adapting across many centuries and rulers.
• World History, Human Rights: the end of North African Jewry, tied to decolonization and postwar Middle Eastern and North African politics, and the uprooting of its communities as a documented case of a minority pressed to leave.
• World History, WWII & the Holocaust: the war reached North Africa: Vichy rule in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and the forced-labor and internment camps across the region.
• Historical Thinking & Cultural Continuity: the survival of the Mimouna after the community’s uprooting: culture outliving displacement.
• Source Analysis & Archives Education: photographs, oral histories, and community records.
• Geography: the four distinct Jewish worlds of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.2 (Belief Systems), 10.5 (the global conflicts of 1914–1945: the war in North Africa) and 10.10 (human rights: the departure).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.7 (integrating multiple sources): photographs, oral histories, and community records.
• C3 Framework: Dimension 2 (continuity and change, comparing communities and the survival of culture after displacement).

Further Teaching Resources

• The Museum of Moroccan Judaism, Casablanca, one of the few Jewish museums in the Arab world (consult its current visiting and exhibition information).
• JIMENA, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa: recorded oral histories of Jews who grew up across the region, Casablanca and Tripoli among them, describing family life, faith, and the journey out. JIMENA oral histories →