Sephardic Genealogy in Libya: Tripoli, Benghazi and the Nationality Question Sephardic Genealogy in Libya: Tripoli, Benghazi and the Nationality Question

Libya’s Jews were not, for the most part, Sephardim.

They were one of the oldest Jewish populations in the world — present in Cyrenaica from the third century BCE, numerous enough under Rome to raise a revolt that nearly destroyed the province, and continuous in Tripolitania from antiquity to 1967. That is the base of the community, and it is Maghrebi and Arabic-speaking, not Iberian.

There is a genuine Sephardi thread, and this page sets out what we can and cannot say about it. But the honest headline is that Libya’s connection to the Western Sephardi world runs through Italy, not through Spain.

And the decisive fact for anyone researching a Libyan Jewish family is not ancestry at all. It is nationality — because between 1938 and 1951 nationality determined whether a family was deported to a camp in the Libyan mountains, trucked to Tunisia, interned in Europe, or granted refugee status in Italy. Different fates, different archives.

How much of Libyan Jewry was Iberian?

Our own page has carried the figure that around twenty per cent of Libya’s Jews were of Iberian Sephardi origin and eighty per cent indigenous Maghrebi. We can now say where that figure came from, and it is not a research finding.

It traces to a remark made in the chat of a Sephardic World meeting on the Jews of Libya, by the researcher Avraham Arbib, that “at least one-fifth of Libyan Jews came from Spain”. It was new to everyone present, including the chair. It may well be right. It has not, so far as we can establish, been published, sourced or tested, and we should stop repeating it as though it had been.

Here is what the evidence does support.

The base population is ancient and indigenous

Ptolemy I settled Jews in Cyrenaica in 312 BCE. Inscriptions from Benghazi in the second century BCE describe organised, wealthy communities; Jews held civic office at Cyrene under Rome.

The Diaspora Revolt of 115–117 CE devastated the province and led to the near-total expulsion of Jews from Cyrenaica, with a Jewish presence re-established only from the fourth century.

In Tripolitania the chronicler Mordechai HaCohen recorded a tradition that the community of Yafran began with captives sold to Bedouins after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Al-Bakri records Jews at Jadu in the tenth century.

Whatever arrived later was arriving into a community already two thousand years old.

Spanish rule in Tripoli drove Jews out — it did not bring them in

This is the point most often missed, and it reframes the whole question.

Spain took Tripoli in 1510. Rather than becoming a refuge for expelled Sephardim, Spanish Tripoli dispersed the Jews already there: some fled to the mountains of Gharyan and Tajura, some were imprisoned and tried under Inquisition procedure, and some were shipped to Naples and sold as slaves. Jewish life in Tripoli resumed properly only after the Ottoman conquest of 1551.

Libya was not a destination for the 1492 and 1497 exiles in the way Fez, Tetouan, Algiers and Tunis were. It was further, poorer, and for two critical decades under Spanish rule — precisely the decades when the other Maghrebi cities were absorbing the exiles.

The real Western thread is Italian, and it arrived later

Benghazi is the clearest case. The community was ruined by epidemic and poverty in 1745, reconstructed from about 1750, and then flourished with the arrival of Jewish families from Italy.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Benghazi’s four hundred Jewish families were divided into two groups — those of the town and region, and those born in Tripoli and Italy — who recognised one rabbi between them but each kept its own synagogue.

That is a real structural division, and it should be compared with Tunis. There the Livornese Grana split formally from the indigenous Twansa in 1710 and maintained a separate rabbinate, institutions and cemetery until the 1940s. Libya’s version of the same phenomenon was weaker: two synagogues, one rabbi, no formal separation. If you are looking for a Livornese community in Libya on the Tunisian model, it is not there.

Foreign-national Jews were counted separately

Ottoman statistics for 1911 record 14,283 Jews among the natives of Tripolitania exclusive of what the sources call the wealthier Dutch, Italian, Austrian and Spanish Jewish traders, who were treated as foreign immigrants.

This is precisely the pattern we describe on our Syria page as the Señores Francos — European-national Jewish merchants under consular protection, socially and legally distinct from the indigenous community. In Libya it was smaller, but it existed, and by the late nineteenth century a wealth gap between resident foreign Jews and poorer native Jews was a recognised source of tension.

So what should be said?

That Libyan Jewry is an ancient Maghrebi community with an Italian overlay; that a real but modest Iberian element exists, arriving mostly by way of Italy rather than directly from Spain; and that anyone claiming a firm percentage is guessing.

Rachel Simon’s study is titled Sephardic Jews in Libya: Searching for the Lost Tribe, and the title is itself an answer.

A note on surnames

Names such as Franco and Arbib point toward an Italian or Iberian origin; Calò is Italian-Jewish.

But a great many Libyan Jewish surnames are toponymic Maghrebi — Gerbi from Djerba, Tajouri from Tajura, and similar formations from Msallata, Zuara and Zliten — or straightforwardly Arabic.

Surname is a weak test here and should never be used alone. Several families have obtained Spanish or Portuguese nationality on the strength of a name-based determination; that is an administrative finding, not a genealogical one.

Where were the communities?

The Jewish population was overwhelmingly coastal and western. In 1903 the Alliance Israélite Universelle recorded 14,000 Jews at Tripoli, 2,000 at Benghazi and 4,480 in the surrounding towns. By 1931 there were some 21,000 in the country; by the late 1940s about 36,000 to 40,000.

Tripoli — the centre, with the hara (Jewish quarter), forty-four synagogues still functioning in 1941, and a quarter of the city’s population Jewish. The Dar Bishi synagogue, visited by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1928, is the emblematic building.

Benghazi — the Cyrenaican community, roughly 3,650 people in June 1939, with the Italian-origin group described above. It was also the most Italianised: in 1931, 67 per cent of Jewish men and 41 per cent of Jewish women in Benghazi spoke Italian.

The Jebel Nafusa — Gharyan, Yafran, Tigrinna and the mountain villages, including the remarkable cave-dwelling Jewish communities. Genuinely distinctive and almost entirely undocumented genealogically.

The smaller towns — Amrus, Derna, Khoms, Mesallata, Misrata, Sirte, Tajura, Zanzur, Zawiya, Zliten and Zuara all held communities and all appear as burial localities in the JewishGen listings. Zliten’s Slat Abn Shaif synagogue was a pilgrimage site.

The community spoke Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic, with Italian spreading fast in the colonial period.

Ottoman Libya, and why the community grew

Ottoman rule returned to Tripoli in 1835 and brought real improvement. Under the Tanzimat reforms the Jewish community was courted; an Imperial Decree of 1865 granted it autonomy and gave local rabbis the right to represent it independently; and the appointment of Eliyahu Bekhor Hazzan as Hakham Bashi (1872–1886) came with substantial funding. The population grew sharply.

Libyan Jews were established along the trade routes and dominated credit — lending and the deferral of payments — and were trusted enough that Arab women would receive Jewish commercial agents in their homes when other men could not enter.

That trust coexisted with resentment: the standard interest rate on pledged money ran at sixty per cent a year and could reach ninety on the small sums that hinterland borrowers needed, and usury was the principal named cause of hostility.

The later nineteenth century saw that hostility turn violent with some regularity, and the incidents are documented well enough to date a family’s departure: synagogues sacked at Misrata in 1864 and 1897, an arson attack at Zliten in 1867, plundering at Az-Zawiyah in 1880, the murder of the notable Saul Raccah in 1870 — his killer sentenced to fifteen years and then amnestied — and a further murder in 1880.

Local officials frequently failed to apply the protections the central government had decreed. Where redress did occur, as at Amrus in 1901, it was because a particular governor chose to act.

Italian Libya, 1911–1943

Italy took Libya in 1911. For twenty-five years the Jewish position was reasonable and in some respects good; Zionist organisation began early and was extensive by regional standards, with correspondence between Benghazi and Tripoli from 1900, a Hebrew-language society in Tripoli, and a Ben-Yehuda chapter at Benghazi in 1934 that began as a football team.

From 1936 Fascist legislation began to bite, and the racial laws of late 1938 were decisive. Jews were removed from municipal councils, public offices and state schools; and their papers were stamped “Jewish race”.

Crucially, Italian citizenship was stripped from those Libyan Jews who had acquired it — a bureaucratic act with enormous consequences, because it left the community’s legal status unresolved for the next thirteen years.

Why nationality decided everything

In 1942 the Italian authorities sorted Libya’s Jews by passport and sent them to four different fates. Establish which one applied to your family and you have established which archive holds them.

Libyan nationality — about 2,500 Cyrenaican Jews, together with some fifty Italian Jews, were trucked five days across the desert from Benghazi to Giado (Jadu), a former military camp in the mountains 200 kilometres south-west of Tripoli. Roughly forty families to a barrack, separated by hung blankets; no beds; water for a few hours a day. Typhus killed something in the order of 550 to 600 people — close to a quarter of those interned. Another 400 were sent to villages in the Tripolitanian mountains. The British liberated Giado on 24 January 1943 and evacuated it between the spring and summer, with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee financing the return to Cyrenaica.

French or Tunisian nationality — transported by truck to Tunisia or Algeria. Some were subsequently taken by the Germans for forced labour; thirty Libyan Jews were killed when a camp near Tunis was bombed.

British passports — from January 1942 interned with other British subjects in camps in Italy, and after the fall of Mussolini some were moved on to camps in Germany and Austria, including Bergen-Belsen.

Tripolitanian men — around 3,000 were sent in September 1942 to a labour camp near Homs for road work, and 350 to Bukbuk in western Egypt, a camp abandoned in October in the face of the British advance, leaving the men to make their own way back across Libya.

Libya is the only North African Jewish community to have been interned in a camp on this scale, and Giado is the reason Libyan Jewry is counted within Holocaust history.

The pogroms of 1945 and 1948

Some of the worst violence came after liberation, not during the war.

4–6 November 1945, Tripolitania: rioters killed around 130 to 140 Jews, looted nearly every synagogue in Tripoli and destroyed five of them along with hundreds of homes and businesses. It is described in the scholarship as among the most violent anti-Jewish riots in modern North African history.

British assurances and some arrests persuaded many to stay — but the economic damage was decisive. The tax records of the community are the clearest measure: 2,700 individuals paid community tax in 1943; only 600 could pay in 1947.

June 1948: twelve Jews killed and 280 homes destroyed. This time Jewish self-defence units fought back and limited the deaths — and this time the community decided to leave. A contemporary reporter recorded that the slogan of every Jew without exception had become “to go away, irrespective of destination”.

Benghazi was largely spared both, with only small-scale incidents.

Lists of the victims of both pogroms exist — reportedly on the walls of the Libyan Jewish museum, in a document in London with an English translation, and in another in Paris. None of them appears to be online. If you can help with this, please see below.

“Not within the mandate”: the Italian DP camps, 1948–1951

This episode is little known and it matters, because it generated files.

Between 1948 and 1951 nearly 3,000 of Libya’s Jews left, but the British administration refused exit permits until 2 February 1949, so many went clandestinely — paying smugglers, crossing in fishing boats and motor launches. Perhaps three to five thousand travelled through the Italian displaced persons camps on their way to Israel.

There they hit a wall. The International Refugee Organisation classified European Jews as refugees and displaced persons, eligible for assistance; North African Jews were almost all denied that status.

Two questions defeated them. First, citizenship: after 1938 nobody knew what Libyan Jews legally were, and with Libya under British administration until 1951 there was no authority to re-designate them. Applicants variously claimed Ottoman, Libyan and former Italian citizenship. Second, motivation: the IRO and the British military administration argued that the movement was economic rather than a flight from persecution, the British reporting that they “could obtain no information that life for Jews in Arab countries was intolerable”. The JDC argued the opposite, that these were displaced persons differing from the Europeans “by the mere fact that they have become displaced only at a later stage”.

By May 1949 the applications were being restamped “not within the mandate of the IRO”. The organisation’s private reasoning was that granting eligibility would set a decolonisation precedent, and that conferring it on Jews leaving North Africa would require conferring it on Arabs leaving Israel. In the end an informal exception was made: papers stamped ineligible, but housing and some food aid continued through the JDC until people could reach Israel.

Two genealogical points follow, and the second is a warning.

First, there are files — IRO application and care-and-maintenance forms, naming individuals, birthplaces, parents and claimed citizenship, with the stamps and reclassifications recorded on them.

Second, some of the information in them is deliberately false. The documented case of a thirteen-year-old boy from Tripoli, whose group leader confiscated his papers on arrival and instructed him to say he was from Sofia, Bulgaria, is not likely to be unique. He was classified eligible as a Bulgarian, discovered to be Libyan, reclassified ineligible, and sent to a children’s centre at Salerno.

Treat a stated European origin in a 1948–51 Italian DP file with real caution if the family is otherwise North African.

The end, 1951–2003

Libya became independent in 1951 and joined the Arab League. Between 1948 and 1951, and especially after emigration became legal in 1949, 30,972 Jews went to Israel.

For those who stayed the position closed steadily. The Jewish Community Council was dissolved by law on 31 December 1958. A law of 1961 required a special permit to prove Libyan citizenship, and it was granted to all but six Jews in the country — a denationalisation of the community by administrative means. Further laws allowed seizure of the property of those who had gone to Israel.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, riots killed eighteen people. The community’s leaders asked King Idris to allow a “temporary” departure; he agreed and urged them to go. The Italian Navy evacuated over 6,000 Jews to Rome within a month, by air and sea, leaving homes, businesses and possessions behind. About 1,300 went on to Israel, 2,200 stayed in Italy and most of the rest went to the United States.

Under Gaddafi from 1969, Jewish men were arrested, all Jewish property confiscated and all debts to Jews cancelled. By 1972 fewer than forty Jews remained. Esmeralda Meghnagi, thought to be the last, died in 2002; Rina Debach, aged eighty, born and raised in Tripoli and believed dead by her family in Rome, was then found living in a nursing home, and left in 2003.

That is the end of a community of well over two thousand years.

Where they are now. Israel first, and then Rome, which holds the second-largest concentration. The Libyan arrivals substantially revitalised Roman Jewry, which had been assimilating: they brought kosher butchers, restaurants and observance, and they are now an influential part of that community. There are also communities in the United States.

Where are the records?

The great difficulty, stated plainly: much of the community’s own documentation was lost or destroyed, and nothing is accessible in Libya today. Nearly everything usable is in Rome, London, New York, Jerusalem or Paris.

Italian records — the largest body

Archivio del Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, Rome — the colonial ministry’s archive. Note that the Italians took their colonial archives with them, incorporating them into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; copies of many documents are at Princeton University Library, which is a considerably easier point of access for anyone in North America.

Ministero dell’Interno and the Italian consular archives.

Italian military archives, Rome, for the colonial period.

Trade, post office and professional directories in Italian, and the Italian-language press of the colony. Jews appear throughout, and these are under-used.

British records

The National Archives (UK) — the British Military Administration governed Libya from 1943 to 1951, investigated the 1945 and 1948 pogroms, and controlled exit permits. Its files, and Foreign Office correspondence on the Jews of Libya, are substantial and fully accessible.

Refugee, camp and Holocaust records

Arolsen Archives (formerly the International Tracing Service) — for Giado, for the labour camps, and for those deported to Europe.

JDC Archives (New York and Jerusalem) — the Joint had offices in Tripoli and across Italy, financed the Giado evacuation, and sustained the Libyans in the DP camps when the IRO would not. This is probably the single richest holding for 1943–51.

IRO papers, Archives Nationales, Paris — the eligibility files described above.

Wiener Library, London.

Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.

Jewish and Ottoman

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem — holds Libyan material.

Ottoman State Archives, Istanbul — Libya was Ottoman from 1551 to 1911, under direct rule from 1835, and nüfus population registers and tax material should exist for the vilayet of Tripoli.

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris — school and community reports, including the 1903 population figures and detailed and often unflattering descriptions of conditions in the hara.

National Library of Israel — the Libyan Jewish newspapers Degel Tsiyon, ha-Mevaser ha-Ivri and Kol ha-Moreh.

Cemeteries and communities

The International Jewish Cemetery Project lists fourteen Jewish cemeteries in Libya; JewishGen carries burial localities for Amrus, Benghazi, Derna, the Jebel Nafusa, Khoms, Mesallata, Misrata, Sirte, Tajura, Tripoli, Zanzur, Zawiya, Zliten and Zuara. How much actual data sits behind those localities should be checked.

Museum of Libyan Jewry, Or Yehuda, Israel — holds the pogrom victim lists among much else.

Vivienne Roumani-Denn’s oral histories, at the Library of Congress and the National Library of Israel, and her website, created in 1998. Her films The Last Jews of Libya (2007) and Out of Print (2013) are the accessible entry point.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Iberian question has never been settled. Rachel Simon has asked it in print; nobody has answered it with a method. A surname study of the Italian-origin families of Tripoli and Benghazi against Livornese records would go a long way, and would be a genuine contribution.

The Benghazi two-synagogue structure deserves proper work. If the Italian-origin group kept separate records, even informally, they would be the closest thing Libya has to a Grana archive.

The Jebel Nafusa communities are essentially undocumented genealogically, including the cave-dwelling villages.

The Ottoman nüfus registers for Tripoli have not been looked at from this angle, as far as we know.

The pogrom victim lists are not online and should be.

The IRO files are a defined, listable body of material naming several thousand people, and nobody has indexed them.

Be careful with the category itself. Harvey Goldberg’s essay on “the notion of Libyan Jewry and its cultural-historical complexity” is a warning that Tripoli, Benghazi and the Jebel were three different worlds, and that treating them as one community flattens real differences.

Help us find records

Libya is the weakest community on this site and we would like to fix that. We are looking for:

The victim lists for the 1945 and 1948 pogroms — copies are said to exist in London, Paris and Or Yehuda, and none is online
Anything documenting the Italian-origin families of Benghazi and Tripoli and their Livornese connections — this is the question the page cannot currently answer
Community registers, ketubot, or synagogue records carried out in 1967 or before
Giado camp lists, and the names of those who died there
IRO, JDC or British Military Administration documents naming individuals
Photographs or transcriptions from any of the fourteen cemeteries
Family papers showing Italian, British, French or Ottoman nationality documents

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Libyan Jewish research is done in Rome, London, New York, Jerusalem and Paris, not in Libya.

The first question is always what nationality the family held, because between 1938 and 1951 that determined everything — and the second is whether the family was from Tripoli, Benghazi or the mountains, because those were three different communities. We will tell you honestly what can and cannot be established. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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