Return, Israel

Yehuda Jarmon was a well-respected rabbi of Tunis and a scion of an illustrious Sephardic family of scholars. He is reputed to have composed a biographic history of the rabbis of Tunis, which was never printed. His moralistic booklet, Shuva Yisra’el (Return, Israel), was part of a new genre of Judeo-Arabic literature that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, as the Jewish communities of North Africa wrestled with questions about secularization, modernity, education, Zionism, and the changing meaning of Jewish identity. When Jarmon died in 1911, it was reported that he was more than one hundred years old.