History of The Jews in Tunisia - History

History

A tradition among the descendants of the first Jewish settlers was that their ancestors settled in that part of North Africa long before the destruction of the First Temple in the 6th century BCE. The ruins of an ancient synagogue dating back to the 3rd-5th century CE was discovered by the French captain Ernest De Prudhomme in his Hammam-Lif residence in 1883 called in Latin as sancta synagoga naronitana ( "holy synagogue of Naro" ). After the fall of the Jewish Commonwealth, many exiled Jews settled in Tunis and engaged in agriculture, cattle-raising, and trade. They were divided into clans governed by their respective heads (Mokdem), and had to pay the Romans a capitation tax of 2 shekels. Under the dominion of the Romans and (after 429) of the fairly tolerant Vandals, the Jews of Tunis increased and prospered to such a degree that African Church councils deemed it necessary to enact restrictive laws against them. After the overthrow of the Vandals by Belisarius in 534, Justinian I issued his edict of persecution in which the Jews were classed with the Arians and the Pagans. Like else where in the Roman Empire, Jews of Roman Africa are romanized for a more or less long period and would have bear Latinized names, wear the toga and spoke Latin even if they kept knowledge of Greek, language of the Jewish diaspora at that time.

In the 7th century, the Jewish population was largely augmented by Spanish immigrants, who, fleeing from the persecutions of the Visigothic king Sisebut and his successors, escaped to Mauritania and settled in the Byzantine cities. Al-Ḳairuwani relates that at the time of the conquest of Hippo Zaritus (Bizerta) by Ḥasan in 698 the governor of that district was a Jew. When Tunis came under the dominion of the Arabs, or of the Arabian caliphate of Baghdad, another influx of Arab Jews from the Levant into Tunis took place.