Robert and Pamela Jacobs 2026 Lecture in Jewish Culture

Content

Jewish Power and Jewish Vulnerability in the Middle East and North Africa
Lecture by Professor Jessica Marglin 

Historians often assume that Jews have lacked political power since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and that this only changed with the creation of the state of Israel. But this narrow understanding of political power—one that emanates from state sovereignty alone—represents a misunderstanding of Jewish history, and the history of minoritized communities more broadly. As David Biale argued forty years ago in Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, Jews have exercised power in various guises across time and space. Though Biale almost entirely ignored Jews in the Islamic world, this talk examines power and vulnerability among Jews in North Africa and the Middle East from the medieval period to the present. Jews both climbed to great heights of power ministers of finance, like Nissim Shamama in nineteenth-century Tunisia; and remained among the most vulnerable members of society, frequently the first to be attacked when sovereigns lost control of their Muslim subjects. The nature of Jewish power and vulnerability changed radically beginning in the nineteenth century, when European imperialism transformed the region. By using the framework of power and vulnerability, I propose a new approach to the history of Jews in the Islamic world that avoids the binaries of lachrymose or rose-tinted historiographies.