Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2009
As Libya is the smallest in population of the four Magẖreb countries, so Libyan Jewry was less numerous than those of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Jewish settlement in rural Tripolitania is quite old. A tombstone reportedly found near Tajura dating from the tenth century (Cazés 1890; Slouschz 1927: 11–12) and El-Bekri's eleventh century mention of the Jews of Jado in the Jebel Nefusa (El Bekri 1913: 25) are two of the earliest post-Islamic examples. The present discussion, however, focuses on the century before the mass migration of Tripolitanian Jewry to Israel, which began in 1949. At that time there were over 29,000 Jews living in Tripolitania (see Table 3), and somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 living in Cyrenaica.