Jewish presence in Tunisia extends over more than two thousand years. In a town called Gamarth in the northern part of the capital city of Tunis, a third century Jewish cemetery was discovered, and another third century synagogue was also revealed in a town known as Hammam Lif, located in the southern part of the capital. With the rise of Christianity after the third century, Jews became targets of a violent treatment by Christians who forced them to convert into Christianity. After the Muslim invasion of Tunisia in the seventh century, Jews were granted some degree of equality and religious liberty and were allowed to expand their trade and commerce. However, they became subject to a legal status that classified them as dhimmis, a social status which reduced them to second-class citizens by excluding them from social and political spheres and imposing on them several restrictive measures in terms of taxation and dress codes. This situation continued until the nineteenth century when, in 1857, the Tunisian Bey, Muhammad II ibn al-Husayn, declared the Fundamental Pact which granted equality before the law to all citizens regardless of their religion, and the Jews were no longer to be considered as dhimmis. Yet, it remains possible to say that over twelve centuries of dhimmitude, Tunisia’s Jewish minority had generally lived in a state of mutual peaceful coexistence with the country’s Muslim majority. Intercommunal violence took place only occasionally and sporadically and was a natural result of interreligious rivalries and competition over privilege and domination. After the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881, however, these antipathies came to surface and feelings of enmity and animosity were nurtured and fuelled by French colonial policies, resulting in an unprecedented deterioration in Muslim-Jewish relations which was further deepened by external international factors. Eventually, these historical developments culminated in the near disappearance of the Jewish community of Tunisia which dropped from around one hundred thousand at the end of the Second World War to less than twenty thousand in 1967.