The Jewish Diaspora

Flight from persecution

Exodus from Libya

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1948–1967 CELibya (Tripoli) → Rome & Central Italy

Why it happened

Escalating anti-Jewish violence — the November 1945 Tripoli and June 1948 riots, inflamed by the Palestine conflict and rising Arab nationalism — shattered a centuries-old coexistence,1 making Jewish life untenable and driving near-total emigration once Israel opened its gates in 1949.2

The migration

Libya's roughly 38,000 Jews, concentrated in Tripoli and Benghazi,3 were engulfed by : in November 1945 rioters killed well over a hundred Jews and burned synagogues across Tripolitania,32 and June 1948 riots killed roughly a dozen more, though organized Jewish self-defense limited the toll.2 After the British administration permitted emigration in early 1949, some 30,000 Jews — the great majority of the community — left for the new State of Israel by the end of 1951.31 Fewer than 8,000 remained through Libyan independence and into the 1960s.3 During the June 1967 Six-Day War, fresh riots killed about 17 Jews, and the Italian government evacuated more than 6,000 survivors by ship and airlift to Rome, whence roughly 1,300 continued to Israel and others onward.31 Qaddafi's post-1969 regime confiscated all remaining Jewish property; by 1972 fewer than 40 remained, ending a presence of over two millennia.11

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomalGenome-wide analysis grouped sampled Libyan and Djerban Jews in a highly endogamous cluster within a broader – grouping.4 The result describes population affinity and isolation, not the causes or individual composition of the post-1948 exodus.

Sources

  1. BRoumani MM. 2008. The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement. Sussex Academic Press
  2. BDe Felice R. 1985. Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970. University of Texas Press
  3. C2000. Libya Virtual Jewish History Tour. Jewish Virtual Library link
  4. ACampbell CL, Palamara PF, Dubrovsky M, et al.. 2012. North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 13865–13870. doi:10.1073/pnas.1204840109