The notion of "Libyan Jewry" and its cultural-historical complexity

As is well known, immigration more than doubled the Jewish population of Israel within three-and-a-half years of its founding. About half of the approximately 650,000 newcomers arrived from countries across North Africa and the Middle East, where in three cases, close to the total Jewish population migrated within a short time: Yemen, Iraq, and Libya. Each of these countries, however, and the Jewish communities within them, experienced different patterns of history and contact with Europe, in the first half of the twentieth century. For example, Jews in Iraq were formally citizens of an independent state from the 1930s, while the status of dhimmi remained intact in Yemen until the large-scale exodus of Jews from there beginning in 1949 (Goldberg 1996).