Abstract
This chapter deals with the early evolution of Jewish internationalism from the perspective of one of North Africa’s most important Jewish communities – Tunis. Through its history we shall encounter the key centres of the Jewish International, and explore the motivation behind transcommunal action. Western Jewry led the new course in Jewish history, but subsequently new forms of Jewish internationalism sprang up in Eastern Europe: the demographic centre of the Jewish diaspora. How did these initial developments spread to communities in Asia and Africa? How did non-European Jews react to them? And to what extent did they develop their own preferences in modern Jewish transcommunal relations? The story of Tunis’s Jewish community does not provide a general answer to these questions, but it does open a window onto the effect exerted by early Jewish internationalism in non-European communities during the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, in this formative period, Tunisia became an arena for Western competition – followed by competition within the Jewish community between the different nationalist orientations of European Jews and their developing intercommunal tools. As a result, a glance at Tunis’s Jewish community illuminates the broader contours of the Jewish International.
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Notes
David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (London: Picador, 1997).
Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair. ‘Ritual Murder’, Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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On the Moroccan Jewish communities during the Spanish occupation, see: Juan Bta. Vilar Ramirez Tetuán en el resurgimiento judío contemporáneo (1850–1862) (Caracas: Ediciones de la Asóciation israelita de Venezuela y del Centro de Estudios Sefaradíes de Caracas, 1985);
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Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), chapter 15.
Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, pp. 108–9; Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco. 1862–1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), pp. 61–2; Leibovici, Chronique des Juifs de Tétouan (1860–1896), pp. 47–54.
Meanwhile see: Chouraqui, L’Alliance israélite universelle, pp. 187–200; Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition. The Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1939 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993), pp. 25–67; idem, French Jews, Turkish Jews. The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 47–95; Kaspi, ed., Histoire de l’Alliance Israélite, pp. 227–61.
For further discussion of the reformist models and their application in Islamic countries, see: Yaron Tsur, Kehilah keru’ah: Yehudei maroko vehale’umiyut 1943–1954 (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 2001), pp. 46–56; idem, Yehudim bein muslemim bereshit tekufat hareformot (Tel Aviv: Open University Press, 2004 [temporary edition]), pp. 193–218.
Yaron Tsur, ‘Réformistes musulmans et juifs en Tunisie à la veille de l’occupation française’, in Sonia Fellouse, ed., Juifs et Musulmans en Tunisie. Fraternité et déchirement (Paris: Somoji Editions d’Art, 2003), pp. 163–4.
Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1789–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 67–102;
G. S. Van Krieken, Kahyr al-Din et la Tunisie (Leiden: Brill, 1976).
Haim Z. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), pp. 97–100;
Paul Sebag, Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie des origines à nos jours (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991), pp. 95–8.
On di Castelnouvo, see Lionel Lévy, La nation juive portugaise. Livourne Amsterdam, Tunis, 1591–1951 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), pp. 99–104.
On the local and regional committees, see Kaspi, ed., Histoire de l’Alliance Israélite, pp. 94–100. One may easily follow the creation of the committees in various countries and their composition via the above-mentioned digitized collection of Alliance Israélite publications in the Historical Jewish Press website (http://jpress.org.il); for di Castelnouvo’s Alliance career, see Lévy, La nation juive portugaise, pp.105–9; more details in Yaron Tsur, ‘Tsarfat veyehudei tunisyah. Hamediniyut hatsarfatit kelapei yehudei hamedinah ufe’ilut ha’elitot hayehudiyot bama’avar meshilton muslemi leshilton kolo-niali 1873–1888’, PhD dissertation, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1988, pp. 105–14.
On the beginnings of Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy, see Jacob Katz, A House Divided. Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European Jewry (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, Published by University Press of New England, 1998); On later East European evolution, see
Yosef Salmon, ‘Orthodox Judaism in Eastern Europe’, in Izraelis Lempertas, ed., The Gaon of Vilnius and the Annals of Jewish Culture (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 1998), pp. 104–15.
(Shalom Flak) Haro’eh, Tsedek veshalom (Justice and Peace) (Tunis, 1897).
On the evolution of the Jewish Enlightenment including Hebrew Haskala, see: Moshe Pelli, The Age of Haskalah. Studies in Hebrew Literature of the Enlightenment in Germany (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979);
Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin, eds, New Perspectives on the Haskalah (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001);
Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004);
Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 90–101.
Ibid.; Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
Yosef Salmon, ‘David Gordon and “Ha-Maggid”. Changing Attitudes toward Jewish Nationalism, 1860–1882’, Modern Judaism, 17.2 (1997), 109–24.
Yaron Tsur, ‘Hamafyah shel ka’id yehudah’, Zemanim, 34–35 (Summer 1990), 142–51; Hamagid (27 January and 3 February 1874), supplements.
Abraham Chemla, ‘Tunis’, Hamagid (5 May 1879).
Tsur, ‘Tsarfat veyehudei tunisyah’, pp. 204–5; on the Italian colony, see Janice Alberti Russell, ‘The Italian Community in Tunisia, 1861–1961. A Viable Minority’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1977.
Yaron Tsur, ‘Haskala in a Sectional Colonial Society. Mahdia (Tunisia) 1884’, in H. Goldberg, ed., Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries. History and Culture in the Modern Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 146–67.
Yaron Tsur, ‘Takrit halevayot. Yehudei tunis bama’avar leshilton koloniali’, Zion, 66.1 (2001), 73–102; on Flak, see also
Yoseph Chetrit, ‘Moderniyut le’umit ivrit mul moderniyut tsarfatit’, Mikedem Umiyam, 3 (1990), 11–66.
Eusébe Vassel, La litérature populaire des Israélites tunisiens (Paris, 1904–7);
Daniel Hagège, Intishar al-Kataib al-Yahudiya al-Barbariya al-Tunisiya (Souse, 1939); Yosef Tobi, ‘The Flowering of Judeo-Arabic Literature in North Africa, 1850–1950’, in Goldberg, ed., The Sepharadi and Middle Eastern Jewries, pp. 213–25.
Yoseph Chetrit, ‘Temurot basiaḥ uvalashon shel yehudei tsefon afrikah besof hame’ah ha-19’, Pe’amim, 53 (1993), 90–123.
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Tsur, Y. (2012). Religious Internationalism in the Jewish Diaspora – Tunis at the Dawn of the Colonial Period. In: Green, A., Viaene, V. (eds) Religious Internationals in the Modern World. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031716_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031716_8
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