Tunisia’s Jews: The road to Djerba
By E.B.
The Economist
May 1st, 2013
FOR centuries, the tiny Tunisian island of Djerba played host to thousands of Jews on an annual pilgrimage to the Ghriba synagogue in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Lag Ba’omer. Muslims, eager to share the festivities, joined in too. Pilgrims sang songs as they made their way through the streets towards the synagogue, the oldest in Africa. Locals sold almonds and deep-fried savoury pastries called brik.
Tunisia’s two-thousand-year-old Jewish community, which numbered 100,000 when the country gained independence from France in 1956, has now dwindled to around 1,600. Years of emigration, and a suicide bomb attack on the synagogue in 2002 which killed 21 people, have dampened the annual affair. In 2011 it was cancelled for security reasons, following the jasmine revolution which ousted the then-president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The occasion drew a few hundred foreign pilgrims last year; but this time the organizers, and Tunisia’s tourism ministry, were determined to stage a revival.
In fact, attendance was only slightly up on last year. Most of those on the three-day pilgrimage, which concluded on April 28th, were locals—Jews (and some Muslims) from Djerba or nearby Zarzis on the mainland. Jewish émigrés, nostalgic for the home country, came mainly from France, but also Canada and Israel. The French ambassador, François Gouyette, made a surprise visit. Surrounded by twitchy bodyguards, he joined the pilgrims’ procession and declared that French tourists should not hesitate to visit the country.
Amid a struggling economy, Tunisia’s government, led by the Islamist Nahda party, was especially keen to show tourists, as well as friendly foreign governments with oil interests in the region, that it has the security situation under control—particularly in the wake of last week’s car bomb attack on the French embassy in Tripoli, the capital of neighboring Libya.
The daunting level of security provided by the government for what in the event were just a few hundred pilgrims, was designed to demonstrate its commitment to defending Tunisian Jews’ rights to operate as a community, despite the fact that the country’s proposed new constitution makes no reference to minority rights. The pilgrims, meanwhile, proudly displayed their Tunisian patriotism, waving flags and singing the national anthem.
Most Tunisian Jews say they continue to feel at home here. Yet they remain, to some extent, hostage to international relations. Though the proposed constitution does not mention minority rights, it does refer to Tunisia’s opposition to all forms of racial discrimination “especially Zionism”. Graffiti scrawled on the wall of the tourism ministry in Tunis, the capital, in reaction to the Jewish pilgrims’ arrival, reminded passers-by that Palestinians are still waiting for their “right of return”. Djerbans, proud of their island’s historical diversity, are well aware that their Mediterranean-style convivencia, is, like jasmine, a fragile bloom.