There was a time when Jews living throughout North Africa numbered in the hundreds of thousands. This period is not so distant: it dates back to the first half of the 20th century. Then we witnessed a rapid and massive migration of this population, drawn by the Zionist project towards the State of Israel and pushed by the worsening of their living conditions and security threats in the newly independent countries, particularly due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that cast its tragic shadow over the entire Mediterranean.
This article is part of the series dedicated to the upcoming exhibition Shared Holy Places which will open at the Villa Medici next October.
By Dionigi Albera
Over the decades, departures gradually intensified. Entire neighborhoods and villages were emptied of their populations. Hundreds of synagogues closed their doors, abandoned forever by all their faithful. The Jewish population has completely disappeared in Egypt, Libya, and Algeria, and now only counts a few thousand individuals in Morocco and Tunisia.
Fragments of History
There was a time when North Africa counted hundreds of sacred places shared by Jews and Muslims. In a book published in 1948, Louis Voinot documented the existence of about a hundred sanctuaries subject to dual worship for Morocco alone. His work was later supplemented and clarified by Issachar Ben-Ami, who identified an even greater number of occurrences (around 140 cases). Even though knowledge for other countries is less precise and exhaustive, the data available shows that Judeo-Muslim worship was present in the vast territory along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The catalysts for these devotional confluences were holy figures recognized by both, whose catalog was rich and varied: biblical characters, holy men belonging to one tradition or the other, even local figures that were almost indeterminate, with evanescent traits and a summary hagiography. These devotional manifestations combined influences from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Kabbalah with others from the cultural environment characterized by the predominance of Islam. The worship of saints thus constituted a kind of "conceptual bridge" between Jews and Muslims. The erasure of the Jewish presence from the map of North Africa ended these ancient forms of contiguity and intertwining.
A Jewish Presence in Tunisia
From this perspective, Djerba appears as an exception. Certainly, this island has experienced a significant decrease in its Jewish population, yet it has not undergone a true collapse, as has happened elsewhere. The numbers have been divided by four: more than 4,000 in the 1930s, the Jews of Djerba today number around a thousand. But they alone represent two-thirds of the entire Jewish presence in Tunisia. Furthermore, Djerba hosts the only case of religious mixing between Jews and Muslims that has survived continuously in North Africa.
The epicenter of this phenomenon is the synagogue of La Ghriba, located near Hara Sghira, one of the two ancient Jewish villages on the island. A local tradition claims the highest antiquity of this building. It is said to have been built by Israelite priests fleeing Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE. However, these accounts clash with the lack of historical sources for ancient times. Moreover, the architecture of La Ghriba reveals no clues of a very distant past. Several additions and renovations rather suggest an expansion of the sanctuary from the second half of the 19th century, when it became an important regional pilgrimage center, attracting pilgrims from southern Tunisia and Libya, as well as from more distant lands (Morocco, Egypt, Greece).
Generally taking place in May, in correspondence with the festival of Lag Ba'Omer, the pilgrimage thus gathered a vast conglomerate of Jewish communities dispersed across various Mediterranean regions.
A Shared Pilgrimage Under Tension
However, Jews were not the only "clients" of the sanctuary. At the beginning of the 20th century, a scholar who visited it compared the synagogue of Djerba to one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Europe. In his eyes, La Ghriba was "a kind of Jewish Lourdes, not without its Muslim and even Christian faithful." This plural attendance has continued to this day, especially from Muslim women, who, like their Jewish counterparts, seek the help of the saint associated with this sanctuary, particularly for issues related to fertility. According to a local legend, alternative to the historically oriented foundation narratives, the synagogue was built on the site where a mysterious and solitary foreign young woman lived under a hut of branches – the term ghriba in Arabic precisely means "foreigner," "solitary," "mysterious." Even her religious identity appears uncertain. Was she Jewish or Muslim? We will never know, for one day the hut burned down. The inhabitants found the young girl's body intact. They then understood that she was a saint and built the religious edifice on this site. This indeterminacy reflects the open character of the sanctuary synagogue.
The recent history of the pilgrimage testifies to an ability to adapt to historical changes: as Jewish communities in North Africa disappeared, pilgrims have increasingly been recruited from among Tunisian Jews who emigrated to Europe or Israel. This history also speaks of a stubborn resistance in the face of a legacy of crises that have been overcome each time.
Indeed, the upheavals of Mediterranean geopolitics have frequently intruded into the synagogue of Djerba. The sanctuary has been tragically affected several times by the tensions of a political environment exacerbated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of Islamist terrorism. In 1985, a Tunisian military officer in charge of the security of La Ghriba opened fire in the sanctuary, killing five people, in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike targeting the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Tunis. After a period of difficulties, the annual festival of La Ghriba regained momentum, when another tragic turning point occurred. On April 11, 2002, a few weeks before the festival of Lag Ba'Omer, a suicide bombing attributed to the Al-Qaeda organization resulted in the deaths of 19 people, including 14 German tourists, just in front of the entrance to the synagogue. The pilgrimage then experienced a decline for a few years, before regaining some success, while now evolving under strict police protection.
Over the past fifteen years, crises have repeated with increased frequency (uncertainty during the transition phase after the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, shock following the attacks at the Bardo Museum in Tunis and in Sousse in 2015). The latest blow came in 2023: an attack during the pilgrimage, resulting in the deaths of five people. In May 2024, the organizers decided to cancel the festivities of the pilgrimage, maintaining only the religious rituals inside the synagogue, due to the international context related to the war waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
What will happen this year? Will there be people at La Ghriba to celebrate the festival of Lag Ba'Omer on May 16? Will this ancient pilgrimage once again demonstrate resilience in the coming years? Or will this last trace of a long Judeo-Muslim symbiosis in North Africa be erased by the shock of the Israeli occupation of Gaza?
Dionigi Albera, anthropologist, honorary research director at CNRS, he is the originator of the research program on “Shared Holy Places” and Curator of the exhibition of the same name, a new version of which will be presented in Rome, at the Villa Medici in autumn 2025
Photo of the Day: Lag Ba'Omer festival at La Ghriba © Manoel Pénicaud