Diaspora communities

Jews of Syria: From the 1st Century BCE to 1910

Syrian Jews are part of the epic of the extinction of Jewish communities in the Arab world. Their history is long and complex, and their main communities – Aleppo and Damascus – were once important and prosperous Jewish centers.

April 2025

126 Edition

Jews of Iran in the 20th and 21st Centuries: Rise and Fall

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the wheel of fortune of the Jews of Iran has turned several times. From a poor and despised community, it became one of the richest in the Jewish world with the rise to power of the Pahlavi dynasty. But its golden age would come

December 2024

125 Edition

Jews of Iran from Antiquity to the 19th Century

The first Jews arrived at the beginning of the 8th century BCE – before the Common Era – to the Iranian plateau, a region already inhabited by Indo-European Aryan tribes (Medes, to the north; Persians, to the south, and Parthians to the east). They were taken to

125 Edition

Jews in Lebanon

The history of the Lebanese Jewish community differs from that of the rest of the Middle East. In 1920, it became the only Jewish community to have its rights protected by the country's laws, and Jews felt as Lebanese as their fellow Jews.

September 2024

124 Edition

Persecution and exodus of Jews from Tunisia and Algeria

Jews lived for more than 2.500 years in countries in the Middle East and North Africa. From the arrival of Islam, in the 7th century AD, Jews could live in Islamic domains as dhimmis, a legal and social condition of

July 2024

123 Edition

The El Ghriba synagogue

Center of Jewish life on the island of Djerba, a few kilometers off the coast of Tunisia, El Ghriba is the oldest synagogue in that country and probably in all of Africa. Today, the 1.100 Jews who live in the area are practically all

123 Edition