I recognize this corner of Hara Kbira, the Jewish quarter of Oumt Souk, for the restaurant Brik Ishak, although my visit, the day before, was early evening and for dinner one of the famous Tunisian savory pancakes. Now, very early in the morning, not a single sign in the streets of children playing with yarmulkes on their heads. But a figure in the distance, cellphone in hand, waves to the jeep where I’m traveling with a Tunisian translator. It is Haim Bittan, the great rabbi of Tunisia, and I remember the long gray beard from the photographs I have seen in various reports I have read about him. “Up, up,” says this 74-year-old man, who since 2004 heads the last major Jewish community in the Arab world, as the 1,500 Jews in Casablanca, the Moroccan megacity alone, outnumber the 1,100 here in Djerba. almost all of whom live in this Oumt Souk district, not far from the mythical Ghriba Synagogue, said to be 2600 years old.
An external staircase gives access to a small synagogue in the middle of the white and blue houses, typical of the island of Djerba, whether the inhabitants are Jews or Muslims. And next to the prayer room there is a library, with a table that serves for meetings. “When they ask me where I studied abroad to become a rabbi, I tell them to look around,” and he spreads his arms to draw attention to the many books on the shelves, including on the table, some piled up on an open ladder. “We have always had many scholars in Djerba, scholars of Judaism. I didn’t have to go abroad,” he adds, speaking in Arabic, the language of the community in everyday life, not least because they live side by side with the Muslim Tunisians, although they know Hebrew, for religious purposes. The Jewish children, like the ones I saw playing at the Brik Ishak, all go to the Tunisian public school and then receive extra religion lessons at the yeshiva, the religious school, and in this case with separated boys and girls.
According to the Grand Rabbi, there are 1,500 Jews in Tunisia today, a small number outside Djerba, mainly in Tunis, and the rest here, divided between Hara Kbira and the village of Hara Seghira (also known as er-Riadh). where it is located. to Ghriba. “It was built from a stone from the Temple of Jerusalem brought by Jews who escaped the invasion of the Babylonians,” reports Haim Bittan, with Islem Jerbi, director of marketing at DMO de Jerba, an organization that promotes tourism. , in a meeting that was difficult to arrange and which was helped by phone calls with René Trabelsi, a businessman born in Djerba who was Minister of Tourism between 2018 and 2020, also a symbol of integration.
We talked about the threat posed by the temptation of young people to emigrate to France (a former colonizer, home to 700,000 Jews and which even had the Tunisian Joseph Sitrouk as its grand rabbi) or to Israel, but Haim Bittan is devaluing it, he says that the worst times are over: “there are people who go to Europe to become a kosher cook, which is a very well paid job because few people know how to do it the way we do here. But after they make money, they come them back”. The community’s high birth rate also explains the optimism about the future of Jewry on the island. “Every family has at least six children, and sometimes more than ten,” says the great rabbi, himself a father of eight children, between his laughs.
More than 100,000 in 1948, when the creation of modern Israel sent shockwaves through the Arab world, today Jews are a small minority of Tunisia’s 12 million people, but a source of pride for the country, as a symbol of a national identity that since independence in 1956, proclaimed by Habib Bourguiba, is meant to be above religious belief.
For post-2011 democratic Tunisia, the vitality of the Jewish community is also a matter of honor, which always tries to separate the issue of Judaism from Israel, as Tunis traditionally defends the Palestinian national cause with fire and is even the seat of the PLO been. . Just a year ago, after rumors of blaming the Jews for unrest in the country, President Kaïs Saïed made it a point to call on the Grand Rabbi to contradict and reaffirm that Tunisian Jews are full citizens and that they “enjoy the same protection from the State as all other Tunisian citizens”.
The Ghriba Synagogue has cement blocks (painted white to soften them) next to the main entrance, a defense against possible terrorist attacks like the one in April 2002, which left 20 dead, mostly German tourists. It was one of the first jihadist attacks in the aftermath of 9/11 and was also claimed by al-Qaeda. Moncef Marzouki, president already in democracy, organized a tribute to the victims on the tenth anniversary in 2012, denouncing acts of terrorism in the name of Tunisian society. At the time of the attack, still in the Ben Ali era, even the hypothesis of an accidental explosion was put forward, but this would be ruled out by German researchers.
“We are Jews living among Muslims, but above all we are all Tunisians. This is our country,” says Haïm Bittan, recalling the ancient times of Ghriba and the pilgrimage that takes place in May. “At that time, hotels and restaurants offered kosher food and it was possible to enter Tunisia with an Israeli passport,” he added.
I visited Ghriba before meeting the great rabbi. Again, the blue colors on the whitewashed walls, as in the island’s myriad mosques, show how Judaism is a part of Djerba’s history. An old caravanserai, where most of the pilgrimage festivities are held today, appears on the right as you enter. And on the left is the synagogue itself, with the prayer hall with Moorish architecture. Putting on a newly purchased black yarmulke, I walk in silence through a house of worship so old it coexisted with the Berber, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal (ephemeral), Byzantine, Arab, Spanish (also ephemeral, but the one in Djerba the so-called Fort Spanish), Turkish and French. There are foreign tourists who visit it and unlike what happened until 2014, now they also venture into er-Riadh as the village has become an open-air street art museum. The Belgian Gérard Gridelet, from Dar-Bibine, the small hotel where I first stayed in Djerba, is passionate about the island and the tradition of religious tolerance it maintains. He was the one who took me to the Brik Ishak, and he was also the one who made the first attempt to arrange a meeting with the great rabbi. Your hotel is the sum of two Jewish houses, which retain much of the original design. It is not a unique case of Europeans feeling so comfortable on Djerba that they decide to settle on the island. Enthusiastically, he shows me a mural depicting a Jew and two vases side by side, one written in Arabic and the other in Hebrew, symbolizing the coexistence that was the rule for centuries but that every Arab-Israeli war increasingly disappeared. and more.
To understand how rare the Tunisian Jewish community is today, I remember the September news of the death of the leader of the Jewish community in Syria, Albert Kamoo, who lived in Damascus. Only four Syrian Jews remain, all over the age of 60. The community, not only in Damascus but also in cities like Aleppo, reached 200,000, and it was 250 people when the war in Syria started in 2011. The great Tunisian rabbi knows the stories of the disappearance of communities, but believes that in Tunisia be different.
Houcine Tobji, founder of the Museum of Guellala, has a historical explanation for the strength of Judaism’s implantation in Djerba, and not only because of antiquity. “The Ibadites, a minority in Islam but a majority in Djerba, traditionally associated the Jews with their resistance to those who attacked them from outside. Both have their origins in the Berbers who were the first inhabitants of the island. The Ibadites were thus true to the saying not to do to others what you would not want others to do to you. And this religious coexistence made the Jews help them, and the Jews were very good gunsmiths, also very good masons to help with the fortifications” , emphasizes the Tunisian historian.
DN traveled at the invitation of the Tunisian Embassy
Source: DN
