Ethnicities around the world (beta)

The North African Sephardic Jews are part of the broad “Mizrahi” Jewish population, and include those known collectively as “Maghrebi Jews,” acknowledging the “western” locale of their heritage, from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. Jews first made their way to northern Africa either as traders for the ancient Israelite kingdom, or during the upheaval following the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. They settled among the Berbers, and their descendants are today’s “Moroccan Jews.” Jews were settled in Algeria since the late Roman period, and its subsequent influx of immigrants followed the Visigothic persecution in Europe. The Jews of both Libya and Tunisia arrived several hundred years earlier than the Algerians, in the 3rd century BCE, under Greek rule. More than a thousand years after Jews first arrived in North Africa, the Spanish Inquisition (and expulsion of Jews) in 1492 CE introduced a second massive migration from the Iberian peninsula to North Africa. With the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the vast majority of North African Jewry made its way to Israel from then until the 1970s, in a series of small-scale and the large-scale exoduses from Arab lands. A significant portion of North Africa’s Jews relocated to France, and, outside of a community of a couple thousand strong in Morocco, very few Jews remain in North Africa.