The reception of Bialik and his work in North Africa

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Contemporary Jews comprise an aggregate of ethno-religious communities whose worldwide members identify with each other through various shared religious, historical and cultural traditions. Historical evidence suggests common origins in the Middle East, followed by migrations leading to the establishment of communities of Jews in Europe, Africa and Asia, in what is termed the Jewish Diaspora. This complex demographic history imposes special challenges in attempting to address the genetic structure of the Jewish people. Although many genetic studies have shed light on Jewish origins and on diseases prevalent among Jewish communities, including studies focusing on uniparentally and biparentally inherited markers, genome-wide patterns of variation across the vast geographic span of Jewish Diaspora communities and their respective neighbours have yet to be addressed. Here we use high-density bead arrays to genotype individuals from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities and compare these patterns of genome-wide diversity with those from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations, of which 25 have not previously been reported. These samples were carefully chosen to provide comprehensive comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish populations in the Diaspora, as well as with non-Jewish populations from the Middle East and north Africa. Principal component and structure-like analyses identify previously unrecognized genetic substructure within the Middle East. Most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired Diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini) cluster with neighbouring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant. These results cast light on the variegated genetic architecture of the Middle East, and trace the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant.

"We Are Next!": Listening to Jewish Voices in a Multicultural Country

Before widescale emigration in the early 1960s, North Africa's Jewish communities were among the largest in the world. Without Jewish emigrants from North Africa, Israel's dynamic growth would simply not have occured. North African Jews, also called Maghribi, strengthed the new Israeli state through their settlements, often becoming the victims of Arab-Israeli conflicts and terrorist attacks. Their contribution and struggles are, in many ways, akin to the challenges emigrants from the former Soviet Union are currently encountering in Israel. Today, these North African Jewish communities are a vital force in Israeli society and politics as well as in France and Quebec. In the first major political history of North African Jewry, Michael Laskier paints a compelling picture of three Third World Jewish communities, tracing their exposure to modernization and their relations with the Muslims and the European settlers. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this volume is its astonishing array of primary sources. Laskier draws on a wide range of archives in Israel, Europe, and the United States and on personal interviews with former community leaders, Maghribi Zionists, and Jewish outsiders who lived and worked among North Africa's Jews to recreate the experiences and development of these communities.Among the subjects covered: --Jewish conditions before and during colonial penetration by the French and Spanish; --anti-Semitism in North Africa, as promoted both by European settlers and Maghribi nationalists; --the precarious position of Jews amidst the struggle between colonized Muslims and European colonialists; --the impact of pogroms in the 1930s and 1940s and the Vichy/Nazi menace; --internal Jewish communal struggles due to the conflict between the proponents of integration, and of emigration to other lands, and, later, the communal self-liquidiation process;--the role of clandestine organizations, such as the Mossad, in organizing for self-defense and illegal immigration;--and, more generally, the history of the North African 'aliyaand Zionist activity from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. A unique and unprecedented study, Michael Laskier's work will stand as the definitive account of North African Jewry for some time.

Before widescale emigration in the early 1960s, North Africa's Jewish communities were among the largest in the world. Without Jewish emigrants from North Africa, Israel's dynamic growth would simply not have occured. North African Jews, also called Maghribi, strengthed the new Israeli state through their settlements, often becoming the victims of Arab-Israeli conflicts and terrorist attacks. Their contribution and struggles are, in many ways, akin to the challenges emigrants from the former Soviet Union are currently encountering in Israel. Today, these North African Jewish communities are a vital force in Israeli society and politics as well as in France and Quebec. In the first major political history of North African Jewry, Michael Laskier paints a compelling picture of three Third World Jewish communities, tracing their exposure to modernization and their relations with the Muslims and the European settlers. Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this volume is its astonishing array of primary sources. Laskier draws on a wide range of archives in Israel, Europe, and the United States and on personal interviews with former community leaders, Maghribi Zionists, and Jewish outsiders who lived and worked among North Africa's Jews to recreate the experiences and development of these communities.Among the subjects covered: --Jewish conditions before and during colonial penetration by the French and Spanish; --anti-Semitism in North Africa, as promoted both by European settlers and Maghribi nationalists; --the precarious position of Jews amidst the struggle between colonized Muslims and European colonialists; --the impact of pogroms in the 1930s and 1940s and the Vichy/Nazi menace; --internal Jewish communal struggles due to the conflict between the proponents of integration, and of emigration to other lands, and, later, the communal self-liquidiation process;—the role of clandestine organizations, such as the Mossad, in organizing for self-defense and illegal immigration;—and, more generally, the history of the North African `aliyaand Zionist activity from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. A unique and unprecedented study, Michael Laskier's work will stand as the definitive account of North African Jewry for some time.

‘How to admit and transmit the unity of that which was blown apart?’, asks Valérie Zenatti, a French writer of Algerian-Jewish descent, in her afterword. The volume’s contributors answer by examining facets of ‘Jewish–Muslim interactions’, defined by the editors as Maghribi, multilingual, and ‘encompassing creative practice, stimulus, and collaboration between Jewish and Muslim artists and performers’ (p. 5). The first section, focused on relationality, illuminates the contributions of Jewish artists: Tunisian filmmaker Albert Samama, who filmed North African populations during the Italo-Turkish War (Morgan Corriou); singers Habiba Messika, from Tunisia, and Lili Labassi and Salim Halali, from Algeria, whose records were distributed and fed nationalism in Morocco (Christopher Silver); Algerian singer Marie Soussan, who overcame gender barriers and became a pioneer in popular theatre (the late Hadj Miliani with Samuel Sami Everett); Tunisian singer-composer Cheikh El Afrit, who played a major role in collecting, rendering, and diffusing folksongs (Ruth F. Davis); the co-founders of L’École de Tunis in Tunisia, and Jean-Michel Atlan in Algeria, who promoted avant-garde art and aesthetic innovation (Fanny Gillet). From a broader anthropological perspective, Jonathan Glasser scrutinizes the main approaches, and their limitations, to studying Muslim–Jewish musical relationships and suggests an alternative model based on affinity. The second section, devoted to elision (as both omission and merging), starts with a study of the ‘pattern of neglecting’ Jewish communities’ presence and contributions in Algerian comics (Elizabeth Perego, p. 156). In Morocco, Cristina Moreno Almeida argues that the ‘narrative of coexistence’ developed in traditional rap music serves official discourses of unity and discourages criticism (p. 162), while Aomar Boum contends that Jewish sounds, promoted on radio and in festivals, ‘are increasingly becoming integral to the state project of Jewish cultural revival’ (p. 183). Turning to Moroccan cinema, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz probes the role of diegetic music in offering ‘alternate patterns of coexistence’ (p. 219). Jamal Bahmad and Miléna Kartowski-Aïach discuss the work of Moroccan filmmaker Kamal Hachkar; the former analyses his ‘affective use of silence’ to address trauma (p. 224), while the latter explores his position as an ‘orphan of otherness’ mobilizing music to connect with and resuscitate Jewish presence (p. 240). The deconstruction of stereotypes is then explored in the work of Paris-based street artist Combo, who subverts normative models through hybridity and irony (Nadia Kiwan), and in the dialogic performance of Younes and Bambi, a Jewish–Muslim stand-up comedy duo who ‘neutralize the divisive power of these stereotypes’ and promote a model of ‘rire ensemble’ in France (Adi Saleem Bharat, pp. 282, 287). The volume features numerous illustrations, including splendid plates by graphic artist Iris Miské. The editors’ choice to focus on non-conflictual interactions is refreshing, but sometimes generates depoliticized readings. Some aspects could have been incorporated (literary interactions, Amazigh connections), fleshed out (Muslim artists, interactions in France), addressed more directly (the question of Palestine and Israel), or nuanced (Moroccan rap is diverse and not all narratives of coexistence are politically manipulated). Despite these ­reservations, the book is an erudite and much-needed account of often-neglected individual ­trajectories and broader dialogues (re)connecting Jews and Muslims, with an invigorating interdisciplinary focus on idioms and concepts.

After World War I, ringworm reached epidemic proportions among children in Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and North Africa, blocking the possibility of immigrating to the West and to Israel. To fight this epidemic, between 1921 and 1938 the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe organized a ringworm eradication campaign by establishing irradiation centers and training nurses and doctors to treat the disease. In the course of the campaign 27,000 children were treated for ringworm with irradiation. In a similar campaign in North Africa between the years 1947 and 1960, some 22,000 Jewish children with ringworm were treated. Because most of the ringworm children from Eastern Europe perished in the Holocaust, discovery of the latent health risks of irradiation in childhood were never known; the remaining remnant immigrated to Israel and the United States. Most of the North African children immigrated to Israel.

ABSTRACT: The article describes Jewish communities’ stances in relation to Zionist movements in France and in territories administered by France that were primarily populated by Muslims. It considers the actions of North Africa Jews in the Zionist movement, particularly during the Second World War, and how the war influenced Zionism. The Jewish communities in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia had different statuses influenced by and mirrored in the various colonial administrations, local authorities, and populations. Besides, those differences related to their degree of involvement with Zionism, which was anything but homogeneous and ranged from strong support to a lack of interest. Based on material collected from various archives (mainly Yad Vashem and the Central Zionist Archives), the article uses a selection of testimonies that describe the diversity of North African Jewish communities and their different levels of engagement with Zionist activities. In this way, the stories of these actors and witnesses will directly reveal the heterogeneous worlds of Judaism and Zionism in North Africa. The article also confirms the diversity of the French Empire despite the shared concept of assimilation and the impact of the colonial administration, that was organized in different ways depending on the local situation and on social relations in North African societies.

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.

Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song

Despite the numerous references to slaves that we have found in the notarial documents of 14th-15th century Cervera, only one slave is identified as a Jew. This information is contained in two documents dating from 1450. The first is the signed acknowledgement of a debt, dated 26th July, 1450, according to which Gentou Camic states that he owes Guillem Marc, of Valmoll, one hundred florins, the sum agreed for the freeing of a Jewish slave by the name of Abraham Abenalbac, property of the said Guillem Marc. Payment of the 100 florins was to be made in September of that year, subject to the following conditions: if the slave died before payment was made, Gentou Camic would only pay the slave’s owner the sum resulting from donations made by the aljamas, or Jewish communities. In the event of Gentou Camic’s death, his heirs would likewise pay only that sum collected by the deceased in the form of donations. We therefore deduce that Gentou Camic had taken responsibility for the Jewish slave so that he or the slave himself might request financial assistance from those Jewish communities that thought fit, in order to raise the sum that had been fixed on the slave’s freedom. The same document includes an amendment dated 3rd November, 1450, to the effect that Guillem Marc had cancelled the debt as a result of a new document. In fact, on that very day a text had been drawn up granting Abraham Abenalbac his freedom in exchange for seventy florins. Abraham Abenalbac came from the North African town of Fez, which had a sizeable and ancient Jewish community, and had been bought from Dionis Aimeric, a resident of Cervera. We also know that it was Abenalbac who had obtained the seventy florins from the Jewish communities of Catalonia and Aragon. In this case, the evident solidarity among the Jews of the kingdom of Catalonia-Aragon enabled one of their brethren, notwithstanding his North-African origins, to gather together the considerable sum of seventy florins necessary to buy his freedom. The article contains a transcript of the two Latin documents in question.

Present-day anti-Semitism in Alsace could be the outcome of a conflict between an 'established' Jewish community and a 'Muslim community' endeavouring to find its niche. This community has been taken over by a palpable fear. One theme prevails: hatred of the Jews is a part of a historical continuity, possibly even a Jewish destiny, which makes it difficult to think in terms of what is specific to the here and now or of the variety of sources and manifestations, and may even lead to an outright refusal to analyse the situation. Alsace has recently taken in considerable numbers of immigrants or populations of immigrant origin from North Africa and Turkey. The 'global' (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and the local (the way in which this conflict is interpreted on the ground) become confused, the reference points are blurred and perhaps the ability of the Alsatian Jews to analyse the situation also suffers.Keywords: Alsace; anti-Semitism; Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Jewish community; Muslim community

Jewish communities throughout the world have undergone major transformations in the decades since 1945. These changes include population shifts in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, the end of most Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East outside of Israel, major waves of emigration from the former Soviet Union, and the ascendancy of North America as a powerful center of Jewish demography, culture, and institutions. During the last sixty-five years, Jews have also responded to a broad range of social, cultural, and technological innovations as they have become increasingly integrated into the societies in which they reside. In addition to their conspicuous educational and occupational achievements, Jews have experienced new forms of acculturation, family patterns, and religious practice. These processes have raised questions about the future of Jews as an ethnic and religious minority in an open pluralistic society where individualism and freedom to choose and shape one's own identity are salient features. This chapter explores these themes and discusses the challenges that are likely to face Jewish communities in North America (the United States and Canada), Europe, Latin America, and Israel in the course of the twenty-first century. THE DECADES TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY In forecasting the future, Jewish communal leaders and scholars have constructed three portrayals of the Jewish past and present.

More information and sample text and photos available on the companion web site http://www.nyupress.org/jewishlife Winner of the 2001-2002 National Jewish Book Award, Reference Winner, Best Reference Resource, 2001, Library Journal Winner, Editor's Choice Award, Reference, 2001, Booklist Winner, Best Reference Book, 2001, Association of Jewish Libraries New York University Press announces with pride the publication of a remarkable project, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust. Edited by Dr. Shmuel Spector and the late Dr. Geoffrey Wigoder and published in conjunction with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Authority of Israel, the Encyclopedia represents the fruit of more than three decades of labor and stands as one of the most important and ambitious projects the Press has published. Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel contributed the foreword. Today throughout much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, only fragmentary remnants of once thriving Jewish communities can be found as evidence of more than two thousand years of vibrant Jewish presence among the nations of the world. These communities, many of them ancient, were systematically destroyed by Hitler's forces during the Holocaust. Yet each of their stories-from small village enclaves to large urban centers-is unique in its details and represents one of the countless intertwined threads that comprise the rich tapestry of Jewish history. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust captures these lost images. In three volumes, it chronicles the people, habits and customs of more than 6,500 Jewish communities that thrived during the early part of the twentieth century only to be changed irrevocably by the war. It clarifies precise locations of settlements based on documents and maps found in recently opened archives; it traces their development through history; it shares small details of everyday life-the culture, the politics, and the faith that inspired the people; and its photographs put faces on the immeasurable loss. Based on decades of research at Yad Vashem, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust tells the story of thousands of Jewish communities in concise prose, illustrated with maps and poignant images of a world that can no longer be visited. The Encyclopedia is a rich source of information for students, teachers, genealogists and anyone interested in the pageant of Jewish life through the ages. From the Foreword But the enemy did not only annihilate individuals; his aim was also to destroy our social structures, our economic foundations, religious and secular, our schools, our institutions, our libraries, our workshops, our synagogues, our cultural centers-in a word: our communities...In the Jewish world one knew a town by its Jewish life. Belz and Munkacs, Bialystok and Amsterdam, Kiev and Lille and Zablotow-offering families and individuals a sense of security and countless opportunities for fulfillment, each community had its own particular characteristics and problems, its roots, its challenges, and its ambitions...To understand the extent of the unprecedented crimes committed against the Jewish people in Europe is not enough; one must also seek to understand the life of this people before the catastrophe. --Elie Wiesel Features -Three volumes -1,824 pages -81/2 x 11 -More than 6,500 communities profiled -600 b&w photographs and illustrations -17 pages of maps -21-page glossary -Complete bibliography -Index of communities including alternate spellings and pronunciations -Index of personalities Go to companion web site

In the late nineteenth century the French–Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) established and administered primary schools for Jewish communities throughout the Muslim world, with a focus on North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. The AIU’s actions in the territories that later became Iraq have been seldom studied compared to the schools in other geographic areas and have been almost totally ignored with regard to Basra. This article utilizes the letters of the Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AAIU) and other select primary sources to explore the AIU’s, and to a lesser extent its sister organization’s, the Anglo-Jewish Association’s (AJA), relationship with the Jewish community in Basra in the 1890s and early 1900s leading to the AIU’s takeover of the Basra Jewish School in 1903. In doing so it provides a foundation for future scholars to more fully examine both the AIU’s subsequent work in the city and also the history of Basra’s Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century.