Search

see Abū Qārā (Boccara) - FamilyHaim Saadoun

The Abū Qārā (Boccara) family was one of the Portuguese-Jewish families that emigrated from Italy to Tunisia during the seventeenth century. In Tunis, they belonged to the Grana community, as Jews from Livorno (Leghorn) who settled in Tunisia were known. The family was especially renowned for its rabbis. Samson Abū Qārā (d. 1769) was the first family member to serve as a judge in the Tunis rabbinical court (Heb. bet din). This was before the Twansa (Arabic-speaking indigenous Jews) and the Grana separated into separate synagogues in 1741. Abraham Abū Qārā I (d. 1817) was the first …

Sousse (Ar. Sūsa) is port city on the central Tunisian coast, located 140 kilometers (87 miles) south of Tunis and 50 kilometers (31 miles) east of Qayrawān. One of Tunisia’s most ancient cities—founded by the Phoenicians as Hadrumentum in the eleventh century B.C.E.—Sousse has long been a port of strategic importance.       Although there is evidence in the Cairo Geniza documentsof a Jewish community in Sousse in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the record is limited. It is known that Nissim ben Jacob ibn Shāhīn (d. 1062) lived in Sousse for a while. Some members of the …

The Morinaud Law (Loi Morinaud) was a French law promulgated in 1923 that enabled Tunisian Jews, who under the agreement establishing the French protectorate were subjects of the bey, to become French citizens. The law was the result of consistent pressure exerted by Tunisian Jews both before and after the First World War. French policy toward the naturalization of Tunisians up to this point had been conflicted. On the one hand, the French tried to assimilate them into French culture, but on the other hand, they did not want to make all of them French citizens, as were the Jews of Algeria und…

Ben Gardane (Ar. Ben Qardān) is a small coastal town in the southeast of Tunisia, situated on the main road from Tripoli to Tunis near the Libyan frontier. The modern development of the town commenced just after the establishment of the French protectorate in 1881, when the French built two military posts there to protect the Libyan border.            The modernization of the town attracted Jews, who came there for economic reasons, mainly from the island of Jerba in Tunisia and from Zuara in Libya. The Jewish population grew from about 234 in 1906 to…

Mathilde Ghez (Guez) was born in 1918 in Sousse, Tunisia. Her father was a clerk in the town court. In 1936 she married Maurice Ghez, the brother of Victor Ghez, the leader of the Jewish community of Sfax and a successful olive oil merchant. She then moved to Sfax, where her two children were born. During the Nazi occupation of Sfax from November 1942 to April 1943, Ghez assisted Dr. Sperber, a Hungarian Jewish physician who had immigrated to Tunisia in the 1930s. She was the translator to the Germans during this period and had the responsibility of preparing the Yellow Star …

Alfred Valensi, the founder of the first Zionist organization in Tunisia,was born in 1878 in Tunis. He studied law at the University of Montpellier in France, writing his thesis on French divorce law. Influenced while in school by Jeshua Bouchmil, he became a follower of Max Nordau, who worked with Theodor Herzl. After graduating from the university in 1905, Valensi returned to Tunis, where he founded Agudat Ṣion, the first Zionist organization in Tunisia. He wrote an incisive defense of the Zionist movement in response to the criticisms of the French social reformer Alfred Naquetin  La …

Founded in 1914,Yoshevet Ṣiyyon (Isaiah 12:6) was a Zionist organization that was active in Tunis. Jules Bonan, one of its founders, explained that its aims were to spread Hebrew studies by modern methods. The founders considered Yoshevet Ṣiyyon to be ideologically affiliated to Mizrachi, the Religious Zionist party. They founded it after splitting off from the Agudat Ṣiyyon society, the first Zionist organization in Tunis, founded three years earlier. The main difference between the two organizations had to do with religion. In the view of the found…

Victor Perez was a Jewish boxer who won the world flyweight championship in 1931 at the age of twenty-one, becoming the first Jewish fighter from North Africa to win a world title. Born in 1911 in Tunis, where he boxed as an amateur, he moved to France and became a professional boxer under the name “Young Perez,” to distinguish him from his brother Benjamin, also a boxer, who was known as “Kid Perez.” He fought his first professional match on February 4, 1928, against an Italian fighter whom he beat by only a few points. His first title win was the French…

Matmata (Ar.-Berb. Māṭmāṭa), is the name of a Berber tribe and a mountainous region in southeastern Tunisia. It is also the name of a mountain town in the region that is distinguished by its underground (troglodyte) dwelling caves. The architecture of each house is the same: a large sunken courtyard in the center, surrounded by rooms opening into it (a Matmatan hotel of this type in nearby Tataouine was made famous as Luke Skywalker’s home in the motion picture Star Wars). The village of Matmata is situated in the hills at the eastern edge of the Sahara desert. After they o…

Monastir (Ar. al-Munastīr) is a small coastal town on the Gulf of Hammamet about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) south of Sousse. Known in antiquity as Ruspina, Monastir, like many of the port towns on the Tunisian coast, was originally a Punic–Roman city upon whose ruins the medieval and modern cities were built.The Romanian Jewish traveler Benjamin II (J. J. Benjamin), who visited Tunisia in 1853 to 1854, mentioned Monastir as a having a Jewish community, but he did not visit the town. Under the French protectorate (1881–1956), Monastir remained a …

The riots in Tunis at the beginning of June 1967 were a reaction to the Six-Day War in the Middle East. They were a turning point in the history of the Tunisian Jewish community. A major consequence of the unrest was that most of the Jews who had remained after Tunisian independence in 1956 left the country.Just before noon, on June 5, 1967, a Muslim mob set the British Library in Tunis afire. That afternoon the mob moved on to the American Library, the offices of Trans World Airlines (TWA), and the American embassy. After that, the mob began to attack Jewish property, mainly automobil…

The Comité de Recrutement de la Main-d’Oeuvre Juive (Committee for the Recruitment of Jewish Manpower) was established by the Jewish leadership in Tunisia during the German occupation (November 1942–May 1943). Since it was responsible for all aspects of recruiting and organizing a labor force in accordance with German demands, its function was somewhat parallel to that of the Judenrat in Central and Eastern Europe. The members of the committee were Paul Ghez, Léon Moatti, George Krief, and Victor Bismut. The committee had a secretariat, a recruiting office (which…

Tunisia, located on the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, lies between the modern-day nations of Algeria and Libya. The northern part of the country, between the Atlas Mountains to the west, which rise to nearly 800 meters (2,625 feet), and the sea to the north and east, is semi-arid, but rather fertile. The northern region boasts important agricultural areas, such as Cap Bon and the Medjerda Valley, famed for its grain and olive oil. The southern part of Tunisia is more arid and dominate…