Memorials of the Borgel Cemetery

Abstract

The article of the leading Tunisian historian, specialist in the national liberation movement and the fate of the Jewish community of Tunisia, Habib Kazdaghli analyses the three monuments dedicated to the victims of world wars, erected at the Borgel cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in the city of Tunisia. The article looks into the place of the monuments in the architectural complex of the cemetery, the circumstances of their construction, examines how their architecture reflected the specificity of the ethno-political development of the Jewish community and the peculiarities of the modernization processes. The author uses extensive material from the Tunisian Jewish press, which previously rarely presented the subject of academic research, as well as epigraphic materials. In the analysis of the monument dedicated to the Jews who died during the First World War, the author notes that its construction testified to the formation in the Jewish community of a non-religious cult of honouring the memory of the dead. At the same time, analysis of the monuments to victims of forced labour camps and deportations shows that their very erection placed the Jewish community of Tunisia in a broader historical and political context, making its tragedy a part of the global tragedy of the Jewish people and all humanity as a whole. It also linked the fate of Tunisian Jewry with the fate of European Jewry and, first of all, French Jewry, which acquired a special political meaning in the context of the national liberation movement and the processes of decolonization that unfolded after World War II.