Jewish Life in Muslim Libya: Rivals and Relatives (review)

174 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 and offers the student of Jewish history a critical model for analyzing trends of acculturation and integration in the nineteenth century. Jonathan Helfand Professor ofModern Jewish History Brooklyn College ofthe City University ofNewYork Jewish life in Muslim Libya: Rivals and Relatives, by Harvey E. Goldberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. 181 pp. $39.95. This is a pleasant and intelligent account of the day-to-day realities of Jewish life in the Tripolitanian region of Libya, during the century 18501950 . Professor Goldberg has published extensively on the topic in the last twenty-five years, and this work is a summation and extension of that dedicated effort. He concentrates on what is known of the ordinary interaction ofJews among themselves and with other Libyans. The earlier chapters sketch the place of Jews in Qaramanli Tripoli and indicates their occasional importance to the rulers as administrators, entertainers, and court servants. He complements this account of high-life usefulness with stories of low-life prejudice and hostility. The second chapter gathers together evidence for the Ottoman period (1835-1911) and discusses the attempted conscription ofJews into the Ottoman army in 1902-03 and their enlistment in 1911. This was emblematic because it was an attempt to treat Jews as ordinary citizens, and because they resisted what was in fact payment of an exemption tax. Goldberg then devotes successive chapters to Jewish weddings, peddlers, and religious rivalries, and ends with an account of the years preceding the anti-Jewish riots of 1945 and their aftermath-the flight into Israel. The book is not a comprehensive account of Libyan Jewry: the vastly important network of tradinghouses linking Ghadames, Tripoli, Valletta, Malta, and Livorno is only hinted at, as are other aspects of the polished internationalism and urbanity of some members of the Tripolitanian community. This is partly because his chief sources of information are the oral histories recounted by Libyan Jews in Israel, although he makes interesting use of his edition of the work of Mordechai Ha-Cohen. Anthropologists and others will welcome the homeliness of the result: he documents the food, the pastimes and rituals of ordinary people clinging to a distinctive law and faith in a specific (and in many respects Book Reviews 175 idiosyncratic) Muslim world. Goldberg also claims that their life has to be understood in the context of "the text"-the Torah. Tripolitanian Jews were literate and religious, some of them learned: they interpreted their lives in scripture. In this respect his work has more than ethnographic interest: the people's routines and day-to-day rituals were linked by them to an ancient and universalistic Text and drew meaning and significance from that. The book has a further general interest. When post-modernists criticize anthropologists for constituting an "other," they often take as their example those European or American anthropologists who worked in Mrica or Papua New Guinea. They might achieve more nuanced analyses if they considered also what is by now the recognizable genre of studies ofJewish communities byJewish anthropologists: the corpus is sometimes pietistic, and there are undoubtedly bridges to build between Ashkenazim and others. But the imperatives of homecoming and shared Jewishness seem to explain why some anthropologists are more liable to constitute "others," and some arc less so. John Davis Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology Oxford University Modern British Jewry, by Geoffrey Alderman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 397 pp. $89.00. Geoffrey Alderman, a political scientist doubling as a historian, has produced an interesting and highly literate survey of the evolution, or perhaps one should say devolution, of modern British Jewry. No general historynas resynthesized the considerable body of monographic material since the days of V. D. Lipman and Cecil Roth, so such an enterprise is welcome. Unfortunately, Modern British Jewry, in spite of many virtues, falls short of our needs. Alderman's is an oddly old-fashioned history, although cast from an intriguing perspective growing out of his strong congregational commitments. No friend of the United Synagogue, his roots lie in the East End world of the Federation of Synagogues, and he speaks for the highly observant Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations. Alderman's...