Brian Zhang, Contributing Photographer

After feeling a looming dread for weeks, 16-year-old Giulietta Boukhobza watched her hometown in Libya erupt into riots, as family friends were murdered and Arabian officers stormed her own house. In 1967, she, her parents and her eight siblings — and many other Jewish Libyans — were forced to either leave their homes or go to an internment camp. In July of that year, they arrived in Italy. 

This story of her expulsion is one that Boukhobza has only started sharing recently. Her decision to talk at a Nov. 16 roundtable conversation at the Slifka Center was a product of both her frustration at a global education system that is leaving out this part of her fellow Jewish Libyans’ story in the history textbooks, as well as her seeing the world at the precipice of climbing anti-semitism, she said. The conversation, which featured moderated questions from Abe Baker-Butler ’25 and a question and answer session, ended with Boukhobza encouraging the Jewish youth generation to acknowledge the diverse complexities that comprise their Jewish identity. 

“They almost killed us,” Boukhobza said. 

She emphasized that her experiences were not unique and that they were lived by thousands of other Jewish people who confronted ethnic cleansing in the Arab world during the mid-1900s.

The Six-Day War was a “boiling point for simmering persecution” against Jewish Libyans, Baker-Butler added. The war was a catalyst for this persecution, but not the beginning, according to Boukhobza. All her life, she described feeling like a “second-class citizen,” both because she was Jewish and because she was a woman.

Like many other Jewish children in Libya, attending Arab schools was not an option for her. Instead, they went to Italian schools, which were led by Catholic administration who put a “crucifix” at the front of every classroom. In the streets, she watched as men sexually harrassed Jewish women who chose not to comply with standards of clothing.

“If I had to [say] which was worse [in Libya at the time] — being a Jew or being a woman, I honestly wouldn’t know,” she added.

But there was an enduring attitude of hopefulness throughout Boukhobza’s story. She found the “happy moments” in her family, thanking the Muslim man who helped save them, as well as her schoolteachers, who despite being Catholic, still brought her kosher food.

It was this support — this persistence in the face of resistance — that made her commitment to her faith stronger than it already was, she acknowledged. And following life after Libya, she took pride in her family’s recovery as they “built” a new future for themselves in Italy, and commended the collective strength and industriousness of Jewish people who left the Arab countries and made their new home countries better.

Netanel Schwartz ’25, whose mother’s entire family left Morocco for Israel in 1962 and 1963 out of their “own Zionist ideals,” was an attendee at the talk and raised an issue with Boukhobza’s identification of the 850,000 Jewish people who left the Arab World after 1948 as refugees. He mentioned that the “pull factor” of many outside countries should be considered alongside Arab nationalism and antisemitism when discussing the migration of Jewish communities during that time period. 

A combination of these reasons have led to several countries without a Jewish population today, including Lebanon, Yemen and Libya, according to Gabriel Diamond ’24. Diamond, who was an attendee, currently serves as the co-president of Yale Friends of Israel, a pro-Israel, non-partisan campus group.

“While it is important to recognize the many instances of persecution, ethnic cleansing, and [expulsion] of Jews in the Arab World, calling the entire Jewish population that left in the twentieth century [refugees] is not only historically inaccurate,” Schwartz wrote to the News. “It also strips Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews of any agency in determining their futures.”

As Boukhobza finds a newfound sense of purpose and confidence in sharing her forced exodus from Libya and imparting advice for the younger generations, one piece of her journey remains murky.

When Baker-Butler asked Boukhobza about why her family was among the less than one percent that stayed in Libya until 1967 — despite there being an opportunity for most Jewish people to leave Libya between 1945 and 1951 — she stated that she has yet to learn the answer herself.

“I wouldn’t know how to answer because you think [our parents] will always be alive,” she said in a podcast with the American Jewish Committee. “And then they disappear, and you realize there are things you don’t know. I never asked.”

The Joseph Slifka Center is located at 80 Wall St.

BRIAN ZHANG
Brian Zhang is Arts editor of the Yale Daily News and the third-year class president at Yale. Previously, he covered student life for the University desk. His writing can also be found in Insider Magazine, The Sacramento Bee, BrainPOP, New York Family and uInterview. Follow @briansnotebook on Instagram for more!