Change within Tradition among Jewish Women in Libya.

• Author: Anderson, Lisa

In the 1940s the Jewish population of Libya was probably about 36,000. (In the book under review, Rachel Simon suggests only 20,000 but that is considerably lower than other reliable estimates.) In the late forties, this number began to drop, as Libya's Jews left the country, mostly for Israel, and soon after the 1967 war virtually the entire remaining Jewish population had emigrated, extinguishing a community that had been as old as Herodotus.

Rachel Simon sets herself the task of examining the changes experienced by the women of this community in the decades preceding its disappearance. For all Libyans, this era was a time of enormous upheaval, as the Ottoman reformers of the nineteenth century and the Italian colonialists of the twentieth tried to refashion the province. For the Jewish community, Ottoman legal reforms enhanced their status as equal subjects of the Sultan, just as the economic reorientation of the province toward trade with Europe increased the wealth of at least the elite of the community. The Italian period deepened divisions within the community, as the wealthy and wellconnected became virtually indistinguishable from their Italian co-religionists while the poor continued to have more in common with their Muslim neighbors.

The opportunities and dilemmas afforded by these changes were magnified for women. The very distinct mores and traditions that ruled the lives of women in Italy and Libya at the beginning of the twentieth century provided strikingly different, often contradictory, models of virtuous behavior for the women of the Libyan Jewish community. To these were added, in the 1930s and 1940s, the novel conceptions of women's roles associated with socialist Zionism.

Unfortunately, Simon's approach to this small but fascinating comer of North African history is a narrow rehearsal of documentary evidence about the lives of Jewish women in Libya. Much of what she tells us makes sense only in a context-in comparison, for example, to the Muslim women of Libya, or to women of other Mediterranean or Middle Eastern Jewish communities, or perhaps in light of feminist theory about women in such partially literate societies - but the reader must supply that context, Thus do we read of numerous kidnappings of Jewish girls, without being told whether...