Since July 2022, our website has been operational and regularly updated, keeping you informed of our Society’s activities.
The events organised during the last quarter of 2022 were very well attended and greatly appreciated. They began with a friendly reception marking the 25th anniversary of our Society. On that occasion, we presented a bibliography of the work of the last 25 years on the history of the Jews of Tunisia, compiled by our vice-president Jérémy Guedj with the help of other members of the board of directors and intended to become a valuable tool for researchers and students. Two lectures for the general public were given, respectively, by Professor Colette Zytnicki and our friend Albert Maarek. The ceremony commemorating the round-up of the Jews of Tunis on 9 December 1942 took place at the Mémorial de la Shoah and was marked by its sobriety and the intensity of its emotional charge. That same afternoon, following the screening of a documentary film, a round table made it possible to grasp the content of the Italian and German archives still to be discovered. The proceedings of the December 2019 conference on the Jews of the Maghreb Protectorates and France are being published in the prestigious Classiques Garnier collection and will be presented to you in the coming months. We have renewed neglected contacts with university laboratories and research centres interested in the history of the Jews of Tunisia; our expertise is sought after, and we thus affirm the academic credibility that has been recognised to us.
Two further lectures for the general public will be given on 22 February (Martino Oppizzi) and 16 May (Hervé Kabla). Please refer to the year’s programme for times and topics. The first session of the research seminar « Des parcours individuels aux trajectoires collectives : L’histoire des Juifs de Tunisie saisie par la biographie » (From individual paths to collective trajectories: the history of the Jews of Tunisia through biography) took place on Wednesday 25 January by videoconference. 25 people attended throughout, including almost all the members of the scientific council, many university professors and several students. The two papers presented by Jérémy Guedj and Claude Nataf gave rise to substantial discussions on methodology and archival science as well as on new fields of study in the history of the Jews of Tunisia. The next session will take place on Wednesday 22 February and will be devoted to a methodological contribution by Abdelhamid Larguèche and a biographical presentation by Martino Oppizzi. The following sessions will take place on the last Wednesday of each month.
Above all, save the dates of 16, 17 and 18 April 2023. Over these three days, an international conference will also be held at the Town Hall of the 9th arrondissement on the theme « Les Juifs et le droit en Tunisie du Protectorat à l’Indépendance. Entre progrès historique et résilience religieuse. » (The Jews and the law in Tunisia from the Protectorate to Independence: between historical progress and religious resilience). The first day will be an opportunity to present the work of young researchers, either recently awarded or still in progress. The following two days will be devoted to the theme of the conference. Israeli, Tunisian, North American and French researchers, including specialists in legal history, will take part, and we hope that this conference will renew our cultural approach – in the broadest sense – to Tunisian Judaism, through the fertile yet still too little explored prism of its legal status, and will make it possible to measure how the religious and legal dimensions were shaped by the Western model. During the conference, the Paul Sebag Prize created by our Society will be awarded to a research work relating to the Jews of Tunisia, following selection by a jury chaired by Professor Mireille Hadas-Lebel, president of our scientific council.
The various directors and presidents who, over the past 25 years, have succeeded one another at the head of the SHJT have always been committed to advancing the knowledge and transmission of the history of the Jews of Tunisia. In this spirit, we must, with your help, support the development of research and disseminate it, not by wiping the slate clean of past actions but, on the contrary, by drawing inspiration from them in order to progress and carry out genuine scientific work.
Claude Nataf