A Jewish Livornese family in Tunisia 

The archives of the Uzan family, memories of a golden age (1890-1960) 

Beside the native Jewish population, Tunisia has been home to a Jewish Sephardic community for a long time, who arrived the country through a series of immigrations between the 17th and the 20th centuries. The history of this population, also known as “Portuguese or Livornese”, has often been relegated to the margins of Tunisian Judaism. This collection aims to restore a piece of this presence, through the memory of the Uzan, a Livornese Jewish family. 

The reconstructed iconographic corpus consists of 160 images selected from an archive of several hundred photos which were found – sometimes organized in albums, sometimes scattered and recovered as they were – in a storage room in the house of Mr. Carlo Uzan in Paris. 

Through the lens of the pictures taken or collected for seventy years, the viewer is invited to discover a new perspective on the history of the Jews in Tunisia. That of a Family which was rooted in Tunisia but kept a strong link to Europe and a family which at the time of uprooting, conserved the memories of a permanently lost “golden age”.