El Kef—Jews’ Market
El Kef—Jews’ Market. Published by B. Groux. Posted on 20 or 28 August 1913.
For many centuries, Jewish travellers (Bahutzim) regularly passed through El Kef, located 150 km southwest of Tunis and 35 km east of the Algerian border, but Jews only began to settle there in earnest in the nineteenth century. The Bahutzim were semi-nomadic Jews whom, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, the French diplomat, historian and travel writer Edmond Pellissier de Reynaud described as “a rather considerable number of Israelites living exactly the same life as the Arabs, armed and dressed like them, riding horseback like them, and making, when necessary, war like them. These Jews have so melted into the rest of the population that it is impossible to distinguish them.” On the eve of the First World War, an estimated 150 Bahutzi families lived in Tunisia. The new Jewish population in El Kef quickly trebled from 200 in 1830 to 600 in 1861. It reached its peak (897) in 1931, but then steadily declined—and the last Jew left El Kef in 1984. The so-called Jews’ Market was in fact simply a street where Jewish vendors offered their wares for sale.
Postcard from the book: Jews in Old Postcards and Prints. Support us by buying one of our books.
