Volume 32, Number 3 · February 28, 1985
The Ultimate Ghetto
By Clifford Geertz
The Last Arab Jews: The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia
by Abraham L. Udovitch, by Lucette Valensi
Harwood Academic Publishers, 178 pp., $36.00
At the close of World War II there were about a half-million Jews living in North Africa; today there are about 20,000, and those are submerged, partially and uneasily, in the anonymizing mercantilism of the largest cities. (Of Morocco's perhaps 15,000, more than half are in Casablanca, and virtually all of the rest in Marrakech, Rabat, Meknes, Fès, and Tangier; of Tunisia's 3,500 or so, about two-thirds are in Tunis.) Where once there were scores of integral Jewish communities long in place, socially self-enclosed, and culturally self-regulating, only two remain: Hara Kebira, 'The Big Village' (pop. 804), and Hara Sghira, 'The Little Village' (pop. 280), on the small offshore island of Jerba in southern Tunisia, fifty miles from the Libyan border.
Review, 2890 words
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