The prolific and well-known Tunisian architect of Jewish-Italian background, Victor Valensi (1883-1977), ranged from residential villas to civic buildings to a prominent synagogue in downtown Tunis. His work throughout Tunisia at the turn of the twentieth century is not only a testament to the cultural pluralities of North Africa but his oeuvre serves to demonstrate broader questions of how this heterogeneity transfers to the urban environment, with regionalist architectural forms in particular focus. This paper is an exploration beyond the biographical, and instead examines the complexities of not only of Sephardic identity in Tunisia, but what it meant to live and work as a Jewish professional and producer of culture in the height of the French protectorate. With particular attention to buildings produced by Valensi himself, photographed in his L’Habitation Tunisienne (1928), this paper will reveal the richly textured debates on identity, vernacular architecture and ethnicity in early twentieth-century Tunisia.

The particularly rich legacy of Tunisia’s ancient history has played a vital role in the articulation of its identity and its architectural and urban development throughout the modern era. Punctuated as they are with omnipresent relics of Punic, Roman, and Byzantine pasts, Tunisian built environments incorporate and reflect these accumulated histories; their managers have actively drawn on subjectively retold stories, repackaged pasts and remade images in the legitimization of rule, the socializing of locals and the solicitation of foreign visitors and capital. The aqueducts, temples, mosaics, and tombs that so captivated colonial administrators during the Protectorate period (1881–1956) became in many ways the aesthetic models, political instruments, and socio-cultural references deployed by Tunisia’s leaders after independence. The country’s relatively open relationship with its colonial experience, and the West, today put it in a unique position where the continuous exploitation of antiquity, subtly adjusted to suit changing circumstances, retains a compelling potency. Like his French predecessors, first president Bourguiba recognized the importance of his country’s ancient history as link to European cultural identity and tourists, balancing those interests with post-independence Arabization. President Ben Ali, ousted during the first wave of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011, strategically rearticulated the status of the past, further projecting a highly controlled image of cosmopolitan sophistication for both domestic and international audiences. Nearby Carthage’s iconic Hannibal was pressed into state service as an indigenous cultural ambassador of sorts, his recast identity reinforced through frequent ephemeral and architectural references. Highly publicized sites, including the recent US$12.7m expansion of Tunis’ world-famous Bardo Museum and the cartoonish ‘Carthageland’ themepark, represent the gamut of newer antiquities-inspired sites. Based on over eight years of archival and on-site research, this essay introduces the place of antiquity in colonial Tunis’ built environments, but focuses primarily on the postcolonial era through the presentation of several architectural, vernacular, and ephemeral projects. In so doing, it explores the function of pre-Arab conquest heritage’s role in the articulation of internal and external identities rooted in Tunisian territory, while engaging the complex relationships between antiquity and its imagery, postcolonial socio-political processes, and the design and use of urban built environments. The essay concludes with speculation concerning the future, by considering the devastating 2014 attack on the Bardo Museum by terrorists whose intent was to not only inspire fear, but to challenge secularization and to undermine Tunisia’s destabilized tourism industry at the country’s premier antiquities museum.