Jewish-Muslim Relations in Libya · 195Moreover, Libyan Jews had contacts with Italy and Zionism long before
Arab nationalism spread in Libya and consequently Jewish contribution
to the latter was minimal.
Conclusion
Jews and Muslims lived in close proximity in Libya. They were economi-
cally interdependent and had social and cultural ties on the popular
level, but there were also differences between the status, conditions, and
aspirations of the two communities. One difference was in their legal
status: from being a “protected people” among the Muslims in the Otto-
man state, the status of the Jews deteriorated under independence, when
they could hardly become Libyan citizens. Jews were rarely part of the
security forces, which were basically a Muslim domain. This had at times
severe repercussions on Jewish life, which the Jews tried to remedy by
establishing various organizations of self-defense and contacts with pow-
erful chiefs. Jews were also hardly part of the administration, and to the
degree that they were, it was still proportionally less than their share
in the population. As for the social-cultural sphere, Jews and Muslims
had shared customs, beliefs, and practices on the popular level, but Jews
used a special Jewish dialect of Arabic, different from that of the Muslim
majority, and their interests regarding higher culture were different from
those of the Muslims. Once Jews started to become interested in cultural
issues outside their own community, these were directed to Europe, not
to the Arab and Muslim worlds. Until the late Ottoman period, national-
ity was not a dividing issue, but in the early twentieth century, Zionism
started to take root among the Jews. Local Libyan and Arab nationalism
was slower to develop, and only since the mid-1940s the national issue
started to be a dividing factor, with hardly any Jews becoming members
of Arab national groups. Thus, although on the popular and economic
levels there were close contacts between Jews and Muslims, they were
apart on the legal, administrative, cultural, and national levels.
Notes
- Rachel Simon, “The Jews of Libya and Their Gentile Environment in the
Late Ottoman Period” (Hebrew), Pe ̔amim 3 (1979): 20–21. - Ibid., 12–20; Mordecai Hacohen, Higgid Mordecai (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Insti-
tute, 1978), 45, 145, 284, 288, 292.