July 21: Jews of Libya

Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi nationalized the property of the remaining hundred Jews in Libya on this date in 1970, his second year in power. The Jewish community of Libya (Cyrene) dated back to the Greco-Roman period. By the time Italy’s fascist government implemented anti-Semitic laws in its colony in the early 1930s, Jews numbered 21,000 out of a total population of 550,000 (Libya’s total population now stands at 6.5 million). In 1942, German troops fighting in North Africa plundered the Jewish district of Benghazi and deported more than 2,000 Jews to labor camps. In a 1945 pogrom that followed the country’s liberation by Allied forces, 140 Jews were killed as rioters looted nearly all of Tripoli’s forty-four synagogues, along with hundreds of homes and businesses. The majority of Libyan Jews emigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951, and all but a handful of the remaining few thousand left for Israel, Italy, or the United States after the Six-Day War. Rumors have circulated for years that Qaddafi himself has a Jewish mother and/or other ancestors, and NBC has reported from Libya that one in five rebels in the current civil war considers Qaddafi to be Jewish.

“Freedom of expression is the right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to behave irrationally to express his or her insanity.” --Muammar al-Qaddafi