What Induced Jews To Travel to North Africa's Libya?

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                   

In 70, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem. A large part of the Jewish population was either massacred or exiled. In Judea, the area near present day Israel, 25% of the Jewish population was exterminated and 10% enslaved. Jews became a minority in their own land.                                        

     Port of Ras el Hilal, Libya

Many Jews fled to Mesopotamia, which is modern Iraq, and the rest fled to lands around the Mediterranean, presently known as southeastern Spain, southern France, southern Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey. Later, the Jews began to head north (to present day northern France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Bosnia) and northern Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco).

                                                                    

                            Libyan coastline is beautiful.  

The North African Jews resided along the coast of North Africa for more than 2 millennia (2,000 years).  The Jewish population of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are descended from Israelite traders who colonized the coast along with Phoenician traders; exiles who left Judaea following the destruction of the Temples(in 597-586 BCE, and the other in 70 CE), and local converts, often from Berber tribes. Trading as been the motivation for all peoples who found that others had something of interest and they did also that could improve the quality of their life. This occupation has caused man to explore all the nooks and crannies of this planet.                                           

The Jewish chronicler, Josephus, reported the presence of 500,000 Jews in Cyrenaica alone in the 1st Century CE, although these communities did not thrive for much of their history under Arab and Ottoman rule. 

                                               

Cyrenaica was an administrative unit. It included all of eastern Libya from 1927 to 1963: Italian Cyrenaica from 1927 to 1937 and the Cyrenaica province until 1963.  

Libya was partitioned off into provinces much as our USA is divided into 50 states.  One of them was Cyrenaica where the capital, Cyrene lay. Cyrenaica is the eastern coastal region of Libya. Also known as Pentapolis in antiquity, it formed part of the Roman province of Crete and Cyrenaica, later divided into Libya Pentapolis and Libya Sicca. During the Islamic period, the area came to be known as Barqa, after the city of Barca.                                         

 It was colonized by Greeks from the 7th century BCE.  Under the Ptolemies (The Ptolemaic dynasty, the 33rd dynasty of Egypt, sometimes referred to as the Lagid dynasty, was a Macedonian Greek royal dynasty which ruled the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Ancient Egypt during the Hellenistic period. Ptolemy had been the companion of Alexander the Great.   Their rule lasted for 275 years, from 305 to 30 BCE.), Jews were present as soldiers and cultivators in the principal towns and also in the villages.  There was an uprising here in 73 CE, after Jerusalem had been destroyed 3 years earlier, possibly the cause of the uprising as it was headed by fugitives from Eretz Yisrael.                                                  

By 115 to 117, a Jewish revolt, connected with the simultaneous risings in Egypt, Cyprus, etc,...devastated the country.  Its  suppression led to the almost total  annihilation of the community.  The Jewish rebellions were finally crushed by the Roman legions, chiefly by the Roman general Lusius Quietus, whose nomen later gave the conflict its title, as Kitos is a later corruption of Quietus.  Some localities were left so utterly annihilated that Romans moved in to settle the areas to prevent their complete depopulation. The Jewish leader, Lukuas, fled to Judea. Marcius Turbo pursued him and sentenced to death the brothers Julian and Pappus, who had been key leaders in the rebellion.

                                                 

                    Berbers, the indigenous people of North Africa

Jews are again  found in Cyrenaica in the 4th Century when the Berber tribes of neighboring Tripolitania seem to have  included Jewish elements.  Jews were at Barca in the 9th century and new communities grew up in the 15th century at Benghazi, etc.  

                                                   

In 1908, the country was investigated by the Jewish Territorial Organization with a view to Jewish settlement.  The Jewish population in 1935, when the Nazis were flexing their muscles in Germany against the Jews, was 3,192, but from 1945, most of these migrated to Israel, and the last Jews left Cyrenaica in 1967 after the anti-Jewish demonstrations at the time of the Six-Day War.  

                                                 

     Tripoli, Libya  is the capital and largest city in Libya.  The Phoenicians and then the Jews were probably attracted to the site by its natural harbor, flanked on the western shore by the small, easily defensible peninsula, on which they established their colony.
                                                 

The Jewish community in Libya was cosmopolitan, prosperous and educated.  Many lived in Tripoli.  

                                          

                    Kusksu: Libyan Couscous with spicy beef

           What to eat in Libya? 10 Most Popular Libyan Foods

• Side Dish. Tajin mahshi. LIBYA. ...
• Lamb/Mutton Dish. Couscous bil-bosla. LIBYA. ...
• Pasta. Makaruna imbaukha. Al Wahat District. ...
• Rice Dish. Ruz hoot bil kusbur. LIBYA. ...
• Egg Dish. Shakshouka. LIBYA. ...
• Vegetable Soup. Hasa adas. LIBYA. ...
• Cake. Basbousa bil tamr. LIBYA. ...
• Herb/Spice. Za'atar. LIBYA.

The 2011 Libyan Civil War started in Cyrenaica, which came largely under the control of the National Transitional Council (headquartered in Benghazi) for most of the war.  The First Libyan Civil War was an armed conflict in 2011 in the North African country of Libya which was fought between forces which were loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and rebel groups that were seeking to oust his government. It erupted with the Libyan Revolution, also known as the 17 February Revolution.

 In 2012, a body known as the Cyrenaica Transitional Council unilaterally declared Cyrenaica to be an autonomous region of Libya.  

Gaddafi also became a strong supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which ultimately harmed Libya's relations with Egypt when in 1979 Egypt pursued a peace agreement with Israel. As Libya's relations with Egypt worsened, Gaddafi sought closer relations with the Soviet Union. Libya became the first country outside the Soviet bloc to receive the supersonic MiG-25 combat fighters, but Soviet-Libyan relations remained relatively distant. Gaddafi also sought to increase Libyan influence, especially in states with an Islamic population, by calling for the creation of a Saharan Islamic state and supporting anti-government forces in sub-Saharan Africa.

As far as the Jewish DNA can be then traced, here's what is important to the population geneticists in this 2001 report.   After a lengthy, severe, and poorly documented bottleneck in population size, Libyan Jews engaged in cultural interactions with Berber tribes that lasted through the 6th century CE. During this time, the population absorbed Berber converts, although the proportion of Berber genetic contribution to the Libyan Jews is not known. Berbers are the indigenous people of Morocco and Algeria and to a lesser extent Libya and Tunisia. They are descendants of an ancient race that has inhabited Morocco and much of northern Africa since Neolithic times.

 A small number of additional Jewish immigrants may have entered the region from Spain in the 6th century , and others may have arrived from Arabia and Syria with the Moslem conquest of Libya in the 7th century . The Jewish population seems to have been significant by the 11th century , but after persecution and emigration under the Spanish and the Knights of Malta, from 1510 to 1551, it may have been small and mostly rural by the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1551 .

 Unlike other parts of North Africa, Libya did not serve as a major destination of Iberian Jews seeking refuge after their 1492 expulsion from Spain. Although occasional Jewish immigrants arrived in Libya from Jewish communities in Italy and elsewhere, over the last 400 years the Libyan Jews were mostly isolated from all other Jewish populations . 

                                 

Libya's revolution represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring back the Jewish community into my homeland's social fabric. As I discovered firsthand, however, when a mob prevented my efforts to rebuild Tripoli's synagogue by shouting anti-Semitic slogans, the hateful attitudes that Muammar al-Qaddafi was only too happy to encourage will not disappear overnight. In this post-Qaddafi era, I hope that Libya's new leaders will embrace needed change and that stories like mine will help make that happen. (David Gerbi is a psychotherapist in private practice in Rome and the executive director of the World Organization of Libyan Jews. 2012)  It was very hard for him to leave.  He also wrote:  Although my family and I were forced to flee Libya for Rome after the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, I still consider myself to be a proud Jew, a proud Libyan, and a proud Italian. I have been back four times since 1967, but have been forced to leave each time. Although much time has passed, I still feel the freshness of Tripoli's air and its special light: hot, but not blinding. I want to feel that light again — but in a stable Libya, a country that affirms freedom, justice, and the rule of law, protects freedom of religion for all its people, and honors its Jewish heritage.

The Libyan Jews eventually numbered more than 30,000 before the emigration of 1949–1951, when most members of the group moved to Israel.  At least they escaped from the days of Gaddafi.  

So a Libyan Jew might have been carrying a few segments from non-Jews;  Berbers, Spanish, Arabian, Syrian, Italian, Christian knights of Malta, or even none of those.  It will all show up in a good DNA test.  The Knights of Malta still exist. The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta is a Roman Catholic organization based in Rome with around 13,000 members worldwide. The group was founded in 1048 by Amalfian (Italian) merchants in Jerusalem as a monastic order that ran a hospital to tend to Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land.

Resource:

Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People by Harry Ostrer

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopoedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrenaica

https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/people/displace.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitos_War

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC14674/

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-forgotten-memories-of-libya-s-vibrant-jewish-community-1.6386744

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Libyan_Civil_War

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/muammar-gaddafi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalfi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripoli