The Jewish community of Libya is one of the oldest in North Africa, with a continuous presence dating back over two thousand years. By the mid-twentieth century, the community had been almost entirely displaced. Corinne Elgai (EP 36) is the first Jewish Libyan voice on Damiri, and her episode opened a subject the show had not previously addressed.
Jewish Libyans numbered approximately 38,000 in 1948. By 1970, virtually none remained. The departures occurred in waves — after the Tripoli pogrom of 1945, after the creation of Israel in 1948, and most dramatically after the anti-Jewish violence triggered by the 1967 Six-Day War. Those who left carried their culture into Israel, Italy, the United States, and elsewhere. But upon arrival, they were typically absorbed into broader categories — Mizrahi, Sephardic — that erased the specifically Libyan character of their identity.
The result is a double erasure. In Libya, the Jewish community's historical presence has been minimised or forgotten. In Israel and the diaspora, Libyan Jews were folded into pan-ethnic categories that obscured their particular traditions, language, food, and memory.
When language fades and geography is lost, food is often the final cultural carrier. Corinne's plan to serve Libyan family recipes in her New York kitchen was not nostalgia — it was preservation. The recipes encode a way of life that no longer exists in its original context. Each dish is a document.
She also raised the renaming of "Arab salad" as "Israeli salad" — a small act of cultural appropriation through rebranding that illustrates how food becomes contested territory when communities are separated by political boundaries.
Corinne has never visited Libya. Her connection to the country is entirely inherited — stories, recipes, names, a piece of wrapping paper that smelled like her grandmother. When her husband told her "you're not Libyan," he was stating a fact about geography. She heard it as a denial of identity. Both readings are defensible. Neither is complete.
The question of whether one can belong to a place one has never been is not unique to Jewish Libyans, but their case is particularly acute. The community was expelled within living memory, the homeland remains largely inaccessible, and the cultural infrastructure that might sustain identity at a distance — institutions, media, language schools — is minimal.
See: The Wrapping Paper, You Are Not Libyan, King Idris Rescue
Corinne described a growing movement of Libyan Jews and Libyan Muslims reconnecting through social media, particularly Instagram. One message she received read: "My grandmother was raised by a Jewish family and remembers nothing but kindness." These individual acts of memory — surfacing now, decades after the rupture — suggest that the political separation of the communities did not fully sever the personal bonds. The reconnection is tentative, informal, and driven by individuals rather than institutions. But it exists.