Tunisia is home to one of the world's oldest diaspora Jewish communities. However, Tunisian Jews are still among the most understudied Jewish minority groups especially in the Anglophone academic world. This paper attempts to fill in this gap. It is a part of a larger project that studies primary Hebrew and Judeo-Tunisian Arabic resources and French autobiographic accounts to trace an intellectual history of Tunisian Jews from 1910 to 1956, and to analyze their role in the Tunisian independence movement. It argues that during that period, Tunisian Jews had adopted different ideologies that shaped their involvement in the political and social scenes: Tunisian nationalism, Zionism, Socialism and Communism, with the last two being the main focus of this paper. This paper studies French autobiographic accounts of Tunisian Jews in order to shed light on the socialist and communist ideologies that defined their political and social orientations from 1910 until the Tunisian independence in 1956. Like many other intellectuals of that period, Tunisian Jews had been influenced by the trending socialist and communist ideologies; socialist Jews called for universal equality between the Tunisian and the French peoples under the umbrella of the protectorate while communist Jews believed in the right to freedom and self-determination. Many socialist Tunisian Jews were highly active unionists who criticized the unjust French policies and called for equal treatment between Tunisian and French workers without necessarily calling for independence. For Tunisian Jewish communists, the condemnation of colonial expeditions was part of the condemnation of capitalist exploitation. They called for Tunisia’s independence and directed their efforts accordingly.

Throughout Israel’s history, Mizra?im, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) origins, were intensely involved in formal politics, from electoral movements to political parties to protests and demonstrations. Yet recently, Mizra?im have engaged in a number of cultural, linguistic and social efforts that, while nonetheless firmly entrenched in the broad map of Israeli political life, are at best tangentially related to formal political contestation. Why might this be the case? What can explain the “Mizra?i retreat” from the formal political sphere? This paper contends that the current era of Mizra?i politics is formally depoliticized. In previous decades, Mizra?im had organized behind specific political parties and non-governmental organizations that advocated for specific policy solutions to perceived and actual endemic problems in Israeli society and political culture. Examining Mizra?im in formal politics today, however, shows a markedly different picture: they have no formal ethnic political party (the closest, SHAS, bases itself on religious adherence), are dispersed in the Knesset along the spectrum of political ideologies and are fractured on policy solutions and on the possibility of formal political redress. Mizra?im find political relevance not in the tools of Israeli formal politics, but through cultural engagement and critique, utilizing the tools of Israeli media to heighten the salience of Mizra?i claims of discrimination and racism against Ashkenazi-dominated political life. For instance, Mizra?im have formed a poetic movement aimed at destabilizing the Israeli poetry establishment, sing pop music – popular among all Israelis – in various dialects of Judeo-Arabic, and have written complex works of fiction designed to highlight the ambivalence of Mizra?i collective identity. This paper will explore contemporary Mizra?i politics against the backdrop of previous generations of Mizra?i political action. It will highlight as its main case study, along with interviews with several young radical Mizra?im, the poetic movement ?Ars Poetika and its celebratory and critical airing of Mizra?i politics. In ?Ars Poetika poetry, concepts like the core-periphery divide, the future of Israeli, Israeli collective identity and anti-Mizra?i racism are juxtaposed with traditional Ashkenazi answers to Mizra?i political frustration. Moreover, new cultural-political movements, like Tor Ha-Zahav and Mizra?it Meshutefet, intersperse political calls to action with cultural calls for change and renewal. This paper contends, then, that while Mizra?im have retreated from the formal political space of party competition and Knesset lawmaking, their critique is nonetheless both highly visible and deeply politicized.

Since 2014, the State of Israel celebrates every 30 November the 'Exit and Expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands and Iran Day'. This newly-established memorial day commemorates the migration and/or expulsion of the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa after 1948 and in the 1950s/1960s. But how is this being done? And why just now? Basing upon my own fieldwork at Mizrahi Israeli heritage associations involved in the implementation of the law, as well as through an analysis of legal sources and educational material destined to Israeli schoolteachers and of articles appeared on the press, my paper interprets this memorial day as an event that - even though rightly aiming at expanding the public knowledge of the history of the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa - does so in rather problematic ways. In fact, the law itself and the events that relate to the memorial day, focus primarily on issues of property claims, Arab anti-Semitism, on the definition of the whole of the Jewish migrants as ‘refugees’ and only secondarily deal with the Sephardic and Mizrahi identities and cultures. By contextualizing the memorial day and the activities related to it within today's Israeli social and political context and following seminal studies by Rothberg, Sanyal and others on memory and heritage in the postcolonial Mediterranean and in Jewish history, I will try to show the problematicity not of the 'Exit and Expulsion Day' itself, but rather of the historical and ethno-national memory that comes out of it. It is in fact a memory that focuses largely on the negative and most violent aspects of the Sephardic and Mizrahi past and of the relations between Jews and Muslims before the 1950s to the detriment of the rest. Secondly, the memorial day contradictorily presents the Mizrahim as both passive refugees and as active Zionists who contributed to the building of Israel, proposing a comparison with the Palestinian refugees on the one hand and with European anti-Semitism and the Shoah on the other. Yet, considering the fact that the memorial day was established only two years ago, is it still possible to propose a more historically-grounded version of the Sephardic and Mizrahi past that, without denying the traumas that the migrants faced and their legal claims against the Arab states, also acknowledges the long history of cohabitation that Jews and Muslims shared? And if so, how can this be done?