Mad to go back to Manouba?

Nothing better illustrates the ambivalence with which Jews from Arab countries view their past than this heated debate on Guysen News.

Writing about the antisemitic incident at the Tunisian university of Manouba described below, (when students hurled antisemitic insults at visitors attending the opening of a library bequeathed by the late Tunisian-Jewish sociologist Paul Sebag), Albert Bellaiche tries to playdown the episode as an aberration. "Tunisia has never shown anything but tolerance towards the Jews,"he states.

Several angry readers comment that Sebag's legacy should have gone to an Israeli university, and that Bellaiche had a short memory. How could Bellaiche say that Bourguiba (Tunisia's first president) was tolerant towards the Jews when 97 percent had left?

Maurice Amar berates Bellaiche: "You forget the insiduous ways in which Jews were forced to sell their businesses to the lowest bidder.. for every Jew heading a company or service there was an Arab 'shadowing' him....Anyone who has lived through the 1960s cannot claim that the Tunisians were tolerant. You forget the Bizerte affair (war between France and Tunisia over the town's naval base): it made scapegoats of the Jews and caused the first wave to leave with one suitcase and a dinar, leaving behind all our property to the Arabs. You forget our suitcases were broken into, tubes of toothpaste squirted (on our clothes), and men, women and children subject to humiliating searches in case they were hiding anything of value. In the 1960s any Arab could denounce a Jew to the police for 'insulting Bourguiba'. We knew we could only speak in whispers or be arrested and have all our goods confiscated. The Arabs used to say at the time: "You will be gone soon and we will have your homes and shops."

Amar declares that he could write a book about the humiliations and violations to which Jews were subject. Yes, the Jews had been welcomed back to Tunisia but it was only because they brought their hard currency with them and no hard feelings, while the Tunisians had taken what the Jews owned. He himself had been back to show his family, but only once - you would have had to be a masochist or mad to go back again, he writes.

Amar points out that Manouba was indeed synonymous with madness, as the largest mental home in the country was in that town. To say someone was mad you simply called him 'Manouba'.