Tunisian Jews Resist Pressure From Israel to Emigrate (Pictured:
Fathers of Tunisian independence Mohammed Masmoudi, Mongi Slim,
and Albert Bessis.) Writing in his journal on June 7, 1967, in
the aftermath of anti-Jewish vandalism in Tunis following the
outbreak of the Arab-Israeli Middle East War, Albert Bessis, a
Jewish community leader and collaborator with Habib Bourguiba in
Tunisia's anti-colonial pro-independence movement, wondered,
"What is the future of Tunisia's Jewish Community? The old ones
are dying off, our youth is leaving."1, 2 When Bessis was
writing in his diary, the Jewish population of Tunisia had
already plummeted from perhaps 120,000 on the eve of
independence in 1956 to a modest 5,000.3 Today it has shrunk to
1,500, among an overall population of 10.5 million. Despite the
drop in Jewish numbers, the historically relaxed nature of
Jewish-Muslim- relations that has characterized Tunisian society
before the outbreak of the 1967 war comes through vividly in
Ferid Boughedir's film A Summer In