Boudnib is located in the central part of the Guir valley, by a palm grove east of the *Tafilalet, not far from the Algerian border, on the road that links Errachidia to Colomb Bechar in southern Algeria. Because of its location at the southeastern edge of the Moroccan desert and close to Algeria, Boudnib witnessed repeated battles in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries. The Berber tribe from Aït Izdeg settled there in the seventeenth-century. The French occupied Boudnib in 1908, but local forces resisted for twenty years. In 1940-2, the French protectorate authorities, controlled by the Vichy government, set up an *internment camp where hundreds of Algerian Jewish and Muslim prisoners were interned in what resembled a concentration camp; they were forced to build the Trans-Saharan railway.

Though the origins of the local Jewish settlement are unknown, it seems to have existed there at least since the seventeenth-century. Along with those from Bou Anan, Bou ‘Arfa, Toulal, Talessint and Gourrama (the latter dates only from the twentieth-century), Boudnib represented the most eastern part of the Jewish settlement in Tafilalet, whose main community was Sijilmasa until the fifteenth-century. In the twentieth-century, Boudnib consisted of 200 families. Because of a French garrison in the area, Budnib served the French army and the region. The Jewish community benefited from this activity; it increased its small trade and craft industry, while initiated a new business in supplying foodstuff to French troops.

Similarly to other communities in Tafilalet since the 19th-century, the Jews from Boudnib venerated the descendants of the holy men from the *Abuḥaṣera family. They took pride in the fact that the holy rabbi Abba Abuḥaṣera, grandson of the holy rabbi *Ya‘aqov Abuḥaṣera (1807-1880), was buried in Boudnib.

The Boudnib community immigrated gradually to Israel in the years 1962-66.

 

Bibliography

Abitbol, Michel. Les Juifs d’Afrique du Nord sous Vichy (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1983).

Bar-Asher, Shalom. Toldot Yehude Derom-Mizraḥ Maroḳo: ba-meʼot ha-shemone-‘esrh-ha-ʻeśre: sheṭarot mi-ḳehilot Ḳaṣer Asuḳ u-Gris (Jerusalem, 1992).

Jacques-Meunié, Djinn. Le Maroc saharien des origines à 1670, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1982).