Berber Jews

Antiquity

Jews have settled in North Africa since Roman times and a Jewish community existed in the Roman province of Africa, which is modern Tunisia. Ifriqia was the name chosen for what we know today as Tunisia. The acceptance by the Berbers of Judaism as a religion, and its embrace by a number of tribes, may have occurred over time. French historian, Eugène Albertini dates the judaization of certain Berber tribes and their expansion from Tripolitania to the Saharan oases, to the end of the 1st century. Marcel Simon for his part, sees the first point of contact between the western Berbers and Judaism in the great Jewish Rebellion of 66-70. Historians believe, based on the writings of Ibn Khaldoun and other evidences, that some or all of the ancient Judaized Berber tribes later adopted Christianity and afterwards Islam, and it is not clear if they are a part of the ancestry of contemporary Berber-speaking Jews.

Islamic period

Besides old settlements of Jews in the Atlas mountains and the interior Berber lands of Morocco, strong periodic persecutions by the Almohades most probably augmented the Jewish presence there. This hypothesis is reinforced by the pogroms which happened in Fes, Meknes and Taza in the late 15th century and which would have brought another wave of Jews, including amongst them Spanish Jewish-descended families such as the Peretz, and this wave would have even reach the Sahara with Figuig and Errachidia.

Some claim the female Berber military leader, Dihya, was a Berber Jew, though she is remembered in the oral tradition of some North-African communities as oppressive leader for the Jews, and other sources claim her to be Christian. She is said to have aroused the Berbers in the Aures (Chaoui territory) in the eastern spurs of the Atlas Mountains in modern-day Algeria to a last, although fruitless, resistance to the Arab general Hasan ibn Nu'man.

After the Arab–Israeli War

Following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the tensions between the indigenous Jewish communities and the indigenous Muslim communities increased. Jews in the Maghreb were compelled to leave due to these increased tensions. Today, the indigenous Berber Jewish community no longer exists in Morocco. The Moroccan Jewish population rests at about 8,000 persons with most residing in Casablanca, some of whom might still be Berber speakers.

Origin

In the past, it would have been very difficult to decide whether these Jewish Berber clans were originally of Israelite descent and had become assimilated with the Berbers in language and some cultural habits or whether they were indigenous Berbers who in the course of centuries had become Jewish through conversion by Jewish settlers. The second theory was developed mainly in the first half of the 20th century, as part of the quest of French colonial authorities to discover and emphasize pre-Islamic customs among the Berber-Muslim population since such customs and ways of life were believed to be more amenable and assimilable to French rule, legitimizing the policy that the Berbers would be governed by their own "customary" law rather than Islamic law.

Consequently, the main proponents of this theory were scholars such as Nahum Slouschz who worked closely with French authorities. Other scholars such as André Goldenberg and Simon Lévy also favoured it.

Franz Boas wrote in 1923 that a comparison of the Jews of North Africa with those of Western Europe and those of Russia "shows very clearly that in every single instance we have a marked assimilation between the Jews and the people among whom they live" and that "the Jews of North Africa are, in essential traits, North Africans".

Haim Hirshberg, a major historian of North-African Jewry, questioned the theory of massive Judaization of the Berbers in an article named "The Problem of the Judaized Berbers". One of the points that Hirshberg raised in his article was that Ibn Khaldoun, the source of the Judaized Berbers theory, wrote only that few tribes "might" have been Judaized in ancient times and stated that in the Roman period the same tribes were Christianized.

The theory of a massive Judaization of the Berber population was also called into question by a recent study on the mtDNA (transmitted from mother to children). The study carried out by Behar et al. that analysed small samples of North African Jews (Libya (83); Morocco (149); Tunisia (37)) indicates that Jews from North Africa lack typically North African Hg M1 and U6 mtDNAs. Hence, according to the authors, the lack of U6 and M1 chromosomes among the North Africans renders the possibility of significant admixture, as between the local Arab and Berber populations with Jews, unlikely. However these conclusions must be strongly moderated by the fact that Hg M1 and U6 are not found in every Berber ethnic groups. For example, a study by Fadhlaoui-Zid et al. (2004) found no M1 and U6 in Tunisian Berbers from Chenini-Douiret, and another one by Loueslati et al. 2006 found no M1 and U6 in Tunisian Berbers from Jerba. Moreover, according to this same study by Behar et al. "in view of the historical records claiming the establishment of the North African Jewish communities from the Near Eastern Jewish communities, it is noteworthy that the communities do not share their respective major founding lineages".