The Jews of North Africa (1980)

Abstract

The Jewish communities in North Africa are indigenous; the earliest among them predate the arrival of Islam in the region, and some go back to Roman times. Written for a compendium of world minorities, and based on the situation in the late 1970s, this short chapter provides basic demographic information and an outline of the historical trajectory of North Africa’s Jewish communities, including not only the Jewish communities in Tunisia and Morocco but also the Jewish community in Algeria. The chapter also very briefly reports on topics discussed in more detail in this volume’s other chapters on the Jews of North Africa. Among these topics are the communal, educational, and other institutions that structured the lives of these communities and the timing and circumstances of the large-scale Jewish migrations from North Africa, in some cases beginning after the establishment of Israel in 1948.