The author thanks Ron Martin Wilson for his invaluable contributions to this article and Chloe Bordewich for her generous feedback at every stage of writing. For comments on various drafts, the author is grateful to Myriam Amri, Youssef Ben-Ismail, Iheb Guermazi, Alma Heckman, Nicole T. Hughes, Aamer Ibraheem, Jessica Marglin, Ahmed Mitiche, M’hamed Oualdi, Natalie Reinhart, Jessie Stoolman, Laura Thompson, Fern Thompsett, and Mariam Godshadze. Special thanks to Valentina Zagaria for her careful editorial eye. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened this article.
1The sky above the Borgel municipal cemetery in Tunis, Tunisia, was bright and clear and blue on the day of Leïla Adda’s funeral. There was no sign to mark the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot at the cemetery’s northeast corner. No iconography suggested that the plot’s nineteen tombs, inscribed in French and often Arabic, belonged together. But two things set this section apart from the surrounding cemetery: the absence of overt religious symbols, like Hebrew inscriptions or a Christian cross, and the diversity of origins hinted at by the names on the tombstones—Tunisian, British, Italian, French, Corsican, Austrian, among others. The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is a curious footnote in the history of Tunisian cemeteries. Though it is small and easily overlooked, the ostensibly nonreligious burial ground illuminates the rules of death and burial in present-day Tunisia: religious identity follows even those who, in life, neither professed faith nor practiced it into the grave.
2Leïla Adda (1948–2022) was buried in one of these simple tombs beside her mother Gladys (1921–1995), her father Georges (1916–2008), and her twin brother Serge (1948–2004). Her parents had petitioned for the plot’s creation in the mid-1990s; Gladys was the first to be buried there. Nearby in the same plot lay self-identified leftists, secularists, Communists, atheists, and “freethinkers” (libres penseurs)—broadly encompassing believers in the autonomy of reason, particularly with respect to religion. This is how more than a dozen interlocutors described them, using these terms almost interchangeably despite their categorical differences and histories. “The crème de la crème of Tunis is here,” commented a funeral attendee, gesturing to the mourners walking the long, sandy path flanked by house-like tombs. One was the social historian Leïla Blili, who later told me, “In the eyes of the Tunisian leftist elite, the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot was the site of ultimate freedom of identity for atheist Christians and Jews.”
- 1 Two local legends were recounted to me in connection to this proverb: one of a man who had maintain (...)
3“Oh what a day is the day of death, what a day of revelations!” (Yā nhār il-mawt, yā nhār il-kshīfa) goes the Tunisian proverb.1 It inverts the common saying that people take their secrets to the grave: here, death is the moment when a hidden facet of one’s life is forced into the open and made permanent. “Where the Outliers Lie” explores what the proverb underscores: that death quietly revokes certain privileges available to the living. Decisions must be made about how to define the departed, including the choice of burial site and the physical form of the tomb. The dead must be categorized.
4Nowhere is this reality more visible than among those buried in—and absent from—the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot. Most people in Tunisia—Muslims, Jews, and Christians—are buried in a cemetery that aligns with their family’s religious background, regardless of their adherence to that faith: Jews are buried with Jews, Muslims with Muslims, and Christians with Christians. The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot reveals the posthumous possibilities for non-religious identity, or anti-religious identity, for those otherwise categorized as Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as the challenges of navigating these labels in a postcolonial context wherein Tunisian national identity is deeply tethered to Islam (Hajji, 2004; Perkins, 2014). Jewish and Christian-born “freethinkers,” who are minorities in Tunisian society at large, are a majority in the plot. Having rejected the material categorization that would come with burial in their inherited religion’s designated cemeteries, they find themselves reinscribed discursively in their religious communities of origin. Muslim-born freethinkers, who, statistically speaking, should be most represented, are instead strikingly absent: death returns them both materially and discursively to the category of “Muslim.” The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot in Tunis then makes visible the process by which death recommits people who were born Muslims, Jews, and Christians to being Muslim, Jewish, and Christian, in perpetuity. And yet its very existence testifies to lives that defied religious containers. In other words, the plot reveals that, despite the best efforts of those buried there, the religious categories they sought to avoid are central to how they are remembered and, perhaps, in forming popular notions of freethinkers and secularists.
- 2 Hertz writes about “double burial,” or the widespread mortuary practice in many societies, notably (...)
5The anthropologist Robert Hertz’s foundational study of death and burial in southeastern Borneo offers a useful starting point.2 He argues that funerary rites move from the dissolution of the social person toward the restoration and reintegration of what he calls the “moral community”—his term for the collective social order (Hertz, 1960 [1907]). But the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot complicates this picture: rather than restoring a pre-existing “moral community,” it actively creates a new one, that of the freethinkers. Building on Hertz, the cultural historian Thomas Laqueur argues that the dead carry out work for the living—creating, disrupting, and reproducing the social order to which they belonged (Laqueur, 2015). This is also visible in colonial Alexandria, Egypt, where, as shown by historian Shana Minkin, death fixed what life left fluid. Imperial subjects could move between identities—Ottoman, Egyptian, European, French, British—but their dead bodies could be categorized and claimed by only one authority, one consulate, one religious community. Cemeteries were the mechanism through which this fixing occurred. In this sense, burial is not the end of identity negotiation but its most legible moment, when the social order declares who one is, once and for all (Minkin, 2019). In answering Minkin’s call to center death in scholarly inquiry of the modern Middle East (Minkin, 2013), this article probes the crystallization of communal belonging at death—even when the deceased has chosen to privilege a different identity. The Freethinkers’ Plot “fixes” a freethinker identity in ways that are nevertheless uneven, dependent on the religion one was born into. Burial is never simply a matter of individual will but a social act (Hertz, 1960 [1907]; Hagerty, 2023).
- 3 The Perspectives Tunisiennes was founded in 1963 by Tunisian university students in Paris. It began (...)
- 4 I interviewed Gilbert Naccache in July 2018; Jacques Pérez in March 2021, and Leïla Adda in Februar (...)
6This article accounts for what this specific burial plot in Tunis reveals about death and the work the dead do for the living. “Where the Outliers Lie” draws on personal archives, newspaper articles, field notes from a funeral, a public memorial service, and an exhumation, and a study of the physical layout and tombs of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, as well as on conversations with Jewish and Muslim freethinkers, their families and friends, and the Muslim caretakers of the Jewish and Christian cemeteries. This material was gathered while conducting ethnographic research on Tunisian Jews, Jewishness, and Jewish-Muslim relations. Between 2016 and 2021, I made regular research visits to Tunis, and in 2021 and 2022 was a full-time resident. The Jewish “community” I refer to is a loose collective of Jewish people still living in Tunis and Djerba who fall under certain administrative structures with authority over aspects of communal life, including who can be buried in the Jewish cemetery. For most of my interlocutors from the Jewish community, the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot was not an option. They wished to be buried in Jewish cemeteries in Tunisia or close to their spouses, children, and grandchildren abroad. However, the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot came up favorably in conversations with Jews associated with the Tunisian left—mainly the Communist Party and the Perspectives Tunisiennes (Harakat Afāq) leftist group, including its various offshoots.3 Several people I interviewed belonging to the Tunisian left are now buried there, including Gilbert Naccache, Leïla Adda, and Jacques Pérez.4
7This article is divided in two parts. In part one, I first situate the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot within the broader landscape of Tunisian cemeteries and describe its physical and demographic particulars. Then, I trace the genealogy of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot to its colonial predecessor and consider how Tunisia’s Code of Personal Status created the conditions for the contemporary burial plot’s existence. Part two opens with a reflection on the Muslim absence and then examines the Jewish and Christian presence in the plot, with a special focus on the Jewish decedents. More specifically, it considers the fact that the Jewish-born occupants of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot were religiously non-observant Jews, and many held Communist and anti-Zionist politics, as well as having been born to or living in interfaith partnerships. Finally, I consider some of the funerary rites practiced in this space as evidence of the co-existence of overtly non-religious self-identification and the omnipresence of religious classification in spite of it.
8The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is the only one of its kind in Tunisia and, to the best of my knowledge, the only one established in the entire Arabic-speaking world during the postcolonial period. The plot is a community of the dead bound, at least in principle, by shared cultural or political affinities rather than religious ones. Yet almost nobody I encountered during my extensive ethnographic research in Tunisia had heard of it, including people one may have expected to know of its existence. For instance, a Tunisian Jewish scholar based in Tunis discovered the plot’s existence only after her father, who identified as a freethinker, had been buried without religious rites in the Borgel Christian cemetery—but not in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot. In the mid-1990s, the city of Tunis allocated this strip of land at the behest of the prominent non-religious Tunisian Jewish Communists Gladys and Georges Adda, Leïla’s parents. They received municipal approval in a society where religious identity remains a powerful organizing force and atheism, though tolerated, has always been marginal. In 1996, Gladys was the first to be buried there.
- 5 The Borgel Jewish cemetery is the “new” Jewish cemetery, founded in the late 19th century because t (...)
- 6 The nineteenth tomb is unidentifiable because it is under heavy brush.
9The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is known in French as the Carré des libres penseurs (Freethinkers’ plot) or the Carré laïque (secular plot) and in Tunisian Arabic as the Murabbaʿ al-Mufakkirīn (thinkers’ plot) or the Murabbaʿ al-Mulḥidīn (atheists’ plot). Carré des libres penseurs is most common in French and Murabbaʿ al-Mufakkirīn in Arabic. I use “Freethinkers’ Burial Plot” because it is capacious and is a term I often heard used by friends and family of the people buried there, as well as by the Tunisian historians I engaged with during and after the completion of my fieldwork. Located in the Montplaisir neighborhood of Tunis, this plot is part of the active 26-hectare Borgel cemetery complex.5 An internal wall separates the 18-hectare Jewish cemetery, established in 1890, from the 8-hectare municipal cemetery, established in 1927 (La Barbera, 2003). The Jewish portion of the Borgel is maintained by the Jewish community, and only Jews are buried there. The other section is managed by the municipality and open to all denominations but is in practice a Christian (e.g. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox) cemetery. It is predominantly European, but also, more recently, West African. The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot occupies a single row in the very back of this Christian cemetery, and in it, the Christian-born and Jewish-born are buried side by side. Ten of the nineteen graves belong to people born into Tunisian Jewish families, and eight to individuals of European Christian origin.6 Each decedent has an atypical story; the cemetery is a riot of particulars. And yet despite choosing to be buried in a plot that is divorced from religious rites, they continue to be sorted by origin. People who speak about the plot largely refer to those buried there as “the Christians” and “the Jews.” I follow this usage not to reify these categories but because it reflects how the dead themselves remain legible to the living.
- 7 The historian Pierre Soumille notes this shift in naming, but does not explicitly explain it (Soumi (...)
10The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is unique today, but it follows a much older burial ground established when Tunisia was a French Protectorate (1881–1956) known as the Carré sans culte (plot without religious rites), and later as the Carré laïque (secular plot).7 In the first half of the twentieth century, the plot for those buried without religious rites would be populated by the European settler community who associated with anti-clerical, free-thinking, and socialist milieus, including liberals, Freemasons, teachers, and, later, members of the socialist and Communist left. Many of this last group explicitly requested a purely civil funeral in their wills, symbolically affirming their non-religiosity and, in many cases, declaring their anti-clericalism—or even atheism (Soumille, 1971).
11This colonial precedent stood in the now-razed Bāb al-Khaḍrā cemetery in the Belvedere neighborhood in Tunis. Originally only intended for Catholic burials, Bāb al-Khaḍrā was municipalized in 1885, enabling the creation of two new sections separated from one another by walls: a section for Protestants and a section for the “non-religious,” namely secularists and freethinkers (Soumille, 1971, p. 145–146). Municipalization entailed the transfer of private or ecclesiastically owned institutions to public municipal ownership and administration. In this case, Cardinal Charles Lavigerie of the Roman Catholic Church sold the cemetery land to the city in 1885, which then administered it as a public facility under civil authority. That shift was significant because it made Protestant and “non-religious” sections possible. Unlike the Catholic Church, a public municipal cemetery could not legally restrict burial on the basis of religion.
- 8 See Balibar, 2012; Burke 2014; Shepard, 2013; Stora, 2006.
- 9 J. Montels, “Le cimetière catholique”, Tunis-Journal, no 141, 2 septembre 1885, cited in Soumille, (...)
12The colonial-era municipalization of the Bāb al-Khaḍrā cemetery was a concrete expression of laïcité, a distinct model of secularism that developed in France and its colonies during the French Third Republic (1870–1940). It was a laïcité shaped by anti-clericalism (specifically, anti-Catholic sentiment) and animated by universalist ideals popular in France.8 Among the staunch defenders of municipalization was former Communard Jules Montels (1843–1916), a “laïque convaincu” (committed secularist) who lived and wrote prolifically in Tunis. In 1885, Montels stated in Tunis-Journal: “Let us joyfully welcome the municipalization of cemeteries and note that religious administrations are losing their grip—the habous [Islamic religious endowments] as well as the Catholic cemeteries…”9 This was an early expression of the association between the “freethinkers” and the left, which we later see in the case of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot in the Borgel cemetery.
- 10 The European cemetery in Bizerte is an interesting counter-example: following French legislation, t (...)
13The anti-clerical movement among European settlers extended outside of Tunis, too, to European cemeteries in Sousse and Gabes that followed the capital’s example in allocating plots for those with no religious affiliation.10 Beyond Tunisia, in Egypt, a non-religious cemetery plot was created in Alexandria in the 1870s and 1880s by freethinkers, largely Europeans, where the cemetery similarly functioned as a means of claiming civic recognition (Minkin, 2019; Auji and Minkin, 2022). Minkin shows that this cemetery was less about the dead than about the recognition of the living—securing a burial plot was a way for this new civil, non-religious freethinkers’ community to claim its place in the social fabric of the city. In Tunis as in Alexandria, the secular burial was not merely a practical accommodation for the non-religious dead, but a site through which a self-consciously civil and anti-clerical community asserted its place in public life.
- 11 The Libre Pensée, groupe international de Tunis, established in July 1903, advocated for civil fune (...)
14In colonial Tunis, there even existed a Freethought Society (est. 1903) that advocated for a municipal crematory.11 In Europe, cremation was deeply entangled with the rise of secularism—an expression of freethought currents—at a time when the Catholic Church explicitly prohibited cremation (a policy it maintained until 1963) (Lalouette, 1997). However, the crematory project never materialized in Tunisia, in part because it failed to gain traction among the native Jewish and Muslim populations (Soumille, 1971), for whom cremation was categorically prohibited by religious law. Its failure is telling: while ideas associated with freethought had adherents among the country’s local populations, European secular modernist practices were not bought into wholesale but refracted through existing religious and cultural frameworks.
15This colonial precedent provided a model Gladys and Georges Adda could draw on when making their appeal to the Tunis municipality for a new, nonreligious burial ground in the mid-1990s under the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali government (in power 1987–2011). Both the historical and the contemporary plots were carved from “Christian” cemeteries and populated by those who chose to be buried without religious rites. Yet there are crucial differences. Notably, the earlier plot was created by and for the European settler community while the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot was created by and for Tunisians, though some settlers who remained after independence in 1956 are also buried there.
- 12 Tunisian Jews remained subjects of the Bey with their personal status governed by rabbinical courts (...)
16The 1956 Code du Statut Personnel (Code of Personal Status, or CPS), which brought matters of personal status under civil authority regardless of religious affiliation, created space for a place like the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot. Under French colonial rule (1881–1956), the personal status matters of the native populations—Muslim and Jewish—continued to be governed through religious institutions. Muslim subjects’ personal status matters were handled through sharīʿa (Islamic religious law) courts, while Jewish subjects fell under halakha (Jewish religious law), with personal status matters adjudicated by the Beit Din (rabbinical courts).12 It was only European Christian-born settlers who thus fell outside the bounds of this system and who could consequently be buried in a non-religiously aligned cemetery. Habib Bourguiba, who served as prime minister from 1956 and president from 1957 until 1987, abolished the sharīʿa courts and the Beit Din, placing Muslims and Jews alike under a unified civil legal system (Charrad, 2001). As a consequence of these policies, the postcolonial nation-state does not exclude religion from public life but regulates it through the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Even so, as the historian Malika Zeghal (2024) has demonstrated, state custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion has shown remarkable continuity across colonial and postcolonial contexts and Tunisia is no exception.
- 13 L’Action, no 133, 1958. Thank you to Youssef Ben-Ismail for sharing this newspaper article with me (...)
17The new civil law gave Tunisians a tool to subvert the constraints of the religious communities into which they had been born. In a notable 1958 case, for example, a Jewish Tunisian woman appealed to the new civil courts to claim her share of a family inheritance.13 In effect, she was invoking the jurisdiction of the CPS to assert her rights against traditional religious norms in the Jewish community. This episode is striking because it shows how these legal reforms reconfigured the relationship between individual rights and communal tradition, and how a member of a minoritized religious group used the levers of the postcolonial legal apparatus to circumvent communal structures. The 1958 inheritance case illustrates the pragmatic use of the civil legal apparatus by a member of the Jewish minority to secure material rights, while the creation of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot forty years later represents both a similarly pragmatic claim by individuals and a more explicitly ideological refusal of religious categorization.
- 14 There is an annual pilgrimage to a tomb in the rabbi’s section of the Jewish cemetery: the Kabbalis (...)
18If the CPS and associated infrastructure represented the postcolonial state’s assertion of civil authority over the personal status of the living, then the municipal cemetery system extended an analogous logic to the dead. The municipality wields authority over zoning, logistics, and upkeep of the city’s burial grounds, including the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot. Even the Borgel Jewish cemetery, which is technically under Jewish communal authority, receives occasional state support in the form of maintenance workers and protection by Tunisian security forces during events like the Haï Taïeb Lo Met pilgrimage (Fitoussi, 2024).14 In other words, the CPS made the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot conceivable and Gladys and Georges Adda’s petition for “non-religious” burial possible. The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot was a bottom-up initiative made possible by top-down decisions.
19The second part of this article shifts from the historical origins and conditions that led to the plot’s creation to a discussion of some of the the biographies and politics of the Jews buried there as well as the bricolage of funerary rites practiced in this site. To identify as a “freethinker” is to be in the minority in Tunisia, regardless of one’s religious origin. The small size of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot reveals the limits of this social and political identity. The bulk of the following case studies focuses on people of Jewish origin buried there. But before I turn to these, I will reflect on the notable Muslim absence from the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, as noted by my interlocutors, whose remarks ground my discussion below. Still, these communities were not the focus of my fieldwork. A broader picture of this social world requires further research about Muslim and Christian freethinkers and the social rules underwriting their burial practices.
20In Tunisia, a person of Jewish, Muslim, or Christian origin may live as a freethinker, rejecting or stepping outside of religious observance. There is a certain degree of public visibility and social legitimacy for individuals who choose to live outside accepted communal religious norms, as well as institutional and symbolic space for non-religious or critically religious worldviews. For instance, in October 2017, the Association des libres penseurs tunisiens (Association of Tunisian Freethinkers) was officially recognized by the state (Kapitalis, 2017). Death, however, leaves little room for heterodox behavior. The crystallization of identity that happens in a cemetery threatens to overwhelm or override the political and social particularities of the living. When it comes to death arrangements, being born a Muslim means dying a Muslim. How they led their lives as freethinkers recedes in importance after death. In other words, Muslim freethinkers cannot become “historical”—cannot be remembered or recognized—in quite the same way as their Jewish and Christian counterparts in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot.
21If death, as the proverb tells us, can briefly make the whole heterodox self visible—at the funeral, in stories, in the presence of those who knew them—then the gravestone has the paradoxical effect of simplifying and reducing. For instance, several interlocutors explained that a Muslim freethinker may request the modification of conventional rites, but this would only be obvious to someone present at the funeral. These ephemeral practices are lost to time, leaving only a tombstone in a Muslim cemetery. The same could be said for Jewish and Christian freethinkers who were buried in their respective cemeteries prior to the establishment of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot in the mid-1990s.
22One former teacher—the daughter of Communists, one Jewish and one Muslim—expressed an interest in being buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot like her mother, but her friends told her this could never happen: the patrilineal rule of Islamic descent means that she would have to be buried in a Muslim cemetery and not beside her mother in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot. Her sibling, who had passed away a few years prior, also preferred this burial ground but was ultimately buried in a Muslim cemetery. As one self-identified Muslim-born atheist explained: “No Tunisian, even a freethinker, would dare ask to be buried there. And even if they did ask, the legislation forbids it, the burial places of Tunisians being Muslim cemeteries. Some atheists ask only that there be no Qur’an readers at their burial.” Nowhere can I find that it is explicitly forbidden for a Muslim to be buried in this municipal cemetery, and yet it was widely deemed impossible by people I spoke with. In the grammar of Tunisian social identity, the Muslim freethinker is simply, “The Tunisian,” the noun—the unmarked default excluding Jews and Christians from the category of Tunisian.
23Tunisian cemeteries have historically been sites where the entanglement of Tunisian and Muslim identity can be observed. In Divided Rule (2013), Mary Lewis examines how colonial-era burial was not only a personal or religious matter, but a political one that mobilized ordinary Tunisians to the nationalist cause (Lewis, 2013). Muslim cemeteries became a flashpoint—a metonym for the nation writ large. In 1933 and 1934, led by a militant faction within the Destour Party, tens of thousands of Tunisians opposed the burial of Tunisian Muslims with French nationality in Muslim cemeteries. Lewis writes that this anti-colonial protest “connected the veneration of dead bodies to that of the nation, which in turn came to be understood not as a legal abstraction but as physical territory worth defending from desecration” (Lewis, 2013, p. 132).
24Notably, the dead bodies at stake were Tunisian Muslims. Tunisian Jews who naturalized as French continued to be buried in Jewish cemeteries without issue—in part because, over the colonial and postcolonial periods, the native Jewish population increasingly came to be perceived as foreign and European adjacent (Fitoussi, 2024). However, this foreignness cut in more than one direction: it also meant that Jewish Tunisians could be associated with atheism in ways that Muslim Tunisians could not. As the historian Leïla Blili explained to me, freethinking’s close cousin, atheism, has long been perceived as a “foreign” ideology in Tunisia. Even the term ʿilmānī (secularist) carries this charge. In a country still grappling with the scars of colonialism, the label can easily translate as an insult. This historical genealogy of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot would seem to indicate that burial there is a kind of red line difficult for a Muslim freethinker to cross.
25Despite the plot’s universalist ethos, the implicit baseline is de facto Jewish or Christian. A free-thinking Jew or Christian is more easily able to shed their religious identity even while remaining marked by it. Therefore, the plot records not the absence of religious identity, but rather its negation. In conversations about the plot, the decedents remain “the Jews” and “the Christians.” To which group a gravestone belongs is usually deduced through surnames when fuller biographical information is unavailable, since both native Tunisian Jews and Christian European settlers born during the colonial period were often given French first names even if they were not of French origin (e.g. Gilbert, Jeanne, or Gladys).
26The Jewish and Christian populations of Tunisia have out-migration in common, the majority having emigrated in the mid-twentieth century. The Christian settler populations came primarily from southern Europe (Italy, Malta) and from France during the nineteenth century, and the majority emigrated within a few years of Tunisian independence in 1956 (Finzi, 2000; Montalbano, 2016). The Jews of Tunisia had been there for centuries—there were the Grana (sing. Gurni), from the Arabic name for Livorno (al-Ghurna), who began arriving from what is now Italy in the seventeenth century, and the Tunisian Jews known as Twansa (sing. Tunsi), the Arabic word for those from Tunisia, whose presence in the region goes back at least a thousand years, though the community’s origins are difficult to trace. Much of the native Jewish population departed over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.
27The Jewish occupants register a complex set of tensions and identities that the Christian occupants do not bear in the same way. The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot was established at the end of a liminal period for the Tunisian Jewish population—a decades-long transition concentrated in the 1950s and 1960s during which, after a millennium-long presence in the region, it underwent a profound demographic transformation under the asymmetrical pressures of French colonialism, Arab nationalism, and Zionism. In 1956, there were 100,000 Jews and today there are around 1,700 (Haley, 2012; Ben Achour, 2019). The Jews in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot come from among both the Grana and the Twansa, and either never permanently left Tunisia or chose to return and be buried there.
28What is clear in the following is that the Jewish freethinkers buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot distinguished themselves in their practice of radical politics, distanced themselves from the religious communities they were born into, and were often in non-typical family arrangements. Their bricolage methods of commemoration and memorialization often incorporated Islamic and Christian (or Christian secular) burial practices.
- 15 In Morocco, many (if not most) Communist Jews did not consider themselves atheists, according to hi (...)
29Most people interred in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot came of age before Tunisian independence in 1956. Their identities were shaped by their political ideals and by a refusal of, or distancing from, inherited religious norms. Still, identifying with or being involved in Communist politics did not necessarily mean cutting all ties with all communal institutions and practices.15 Leïla Adda told me, for instance, that she continued participating in Jewish holidays with her extended family throughout her childhood and felt an affinity with the customs even if her world was predominantly Muslim or secular. However, her identification with the Jewish community did not extend to her place of burial. The non-religious identity edged out religious belonging as the eternal one.
- 16 Eugénie Foata (1924–2015) was married to Mohamed Enaafa. She was of Corsican origin and part of the (...)
30The Tunisian Communist Party, founded in 1934, remained active after independence in 1956. Gladys and Georges Adda, Suzanne Meimoun Jrad, Eugénie Foata Enaafa, Gilda Khiari, among others in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, were part of this first generation of Tunisian Communists.16 The party was banned in 1963 following an alleged coup attempt against President Habib Bourguiba, part of a broader crackdown intended to suppress political pluralism and consolidate one-party rule under Bourguiba’s Neo-Destour, later known as the Socialist Destourian Party (Perkins, 2014). Like in Algeria and in Morocco, Jews in Tunisia were disproportionately represented among Communists, a phenomenon linked to colonial injustices that were compounded by antisemitism (Heckman, 2021; Le Foll Luciani, 2015). For Jewish Tunisians increasingly questioning their relationship to religious institutions, the Communist movement provided a home. It also provided them a space to assert an anti-colonial position and to articulate a class-based identity that cut across the ethnic and religious divisions of colonial society.
- 17 Written clandestinely in prison on cigarette paper between 1968 and 1979, Cristal is Naccache’s acc (...)
31By the time Leïla Adda was buried in 2022, Joseph Gilbert Naccache (1939–2020) had been lying in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot for a year and a half. Naccache’s last wish was to be buried in Tunisia, and President Kaïs Saïed had instructed the Tunisian ambassador in Paris to facilitate the repatriation of his remains (Espace Manager, 2020). A writer and a lifelong Communist, Naccache was not the only occupant who had lived at odds with both colonial and postcolonial authorities, but he was among the best known (Omri, 2020). A member of Perspectives, he was imprisoned for over a decade under the Bourguiba regime for his left-wing political activities.17
- 18 On his departure for France following harassment of his son, see Belhassine, 2021. He also filed a (...)
32One bright day when we spoke in his apartment in La Goulette at the end of his life, between drawn shades, he sketched out an elaborate family tree of the post-independence Tunisian left. This included how he met his Muslim-born wife Azza Ghanmi, a feminist and human rights activist, who chimed in to fill in details he had missed. Naccache never denied his Jewish origins. One obituary describes him as “the last in a line of a particular breed of public intellectuals: Jews of the Arab lands who rejected the Israeli birthright… and who claimed the right to belong fully to the lands of their birth” (Omri, 2020). However, Naccache did spend several years in France after his son was attacked in the street in a reported anti-Jewish attack.18 Even though he identified and was identified as a Jew, he consistently distanced himself from organized Judaism, and choosing burial in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot reflected this position. He even told a fellow Jewish anti-Zionist friend that he was afraid to be buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot because the Jewish community might someday annex it. The friend laughed, saying, “He has no idea how disorganized they are. They’d never be able to pull that off—nor would they want to.” The joke landed, but the anxiety beneath it was real—even in death and in a plot of his own choosing, Naccache could not fully escape the fear of being reclaimed by a religious identity he had turned away from in life.
- 19 Mohamed Salah Flis is a left-wing activist originally from Bizerte, convicted in the late 1960s alo (...)
33Naccache privileged his Tunisian and leftist identities. This fact was on display at his funeral: the Tunisian national anthem, “Ḥumāt al-Ḥimā,” (Defenders of the Homeland) was sung, as was the Arabic-language version of the “Internationale,” the anthem of the international socialist, Communist, and workers’ movement. His tomb was draped in a Tunisian flag and topped with two bouquets and two of his books. Tributes to “Papi” were delivered by his son Slim, by his comrade Mohamed Salah Flis, by his comrade Habib Marsit, and by a young woman on behalf of the wounded of the 2011 revolution (Kazdaghli, 2021).19 Only the name on his tombstone hints at his origins: Joseph Gilbert in French and also Joseph (جوزيف) in Arabic, not the conventional form, Youssef (يوسف). “Joseph” was the standard form of the name among Tunisian Jews of his generation, and he had kept it.
34Six months after Leïla Adda’s funeral, Jacques Pérez (1932–2022) chose to be buried in the Freethinkers’ Plot. A photographer for various Tunisian newspapers and magazines, Pérez’s personal projects always focused on street scenes and landscapes. Tunisia was his entire œuvre; he had no desire, he once told me, to photograph elsewhere. He is perhaps most famous for his collaboration with the historians Lucette Valensi and Abraham Eliyahu Udovitch on their historical ethnography, The Last Jews of Djerba: The Communities of Jerba, Tunisia. To this day, many Djerbian Jews still have prints of photographs that Jacques Pérez took of their family members proudly displayed in their homes.
35I first heard about Pérez in 2016, when I was told he was the last Jew of the Hara, the former Jewish quarter in the Tunis medina. Pérez died at 89 years old, and by the time we met he was frail, sometimes using a wheelchair. He had an ambivalent relationship to Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, but recounted how he was constantly perceived as a Jew. “When is the Jew coming?” a stranger at a dinner party once asked, not realizing he was already sitting at the table.
36Yet even had Pérez wished to be buried in the Jewish cemetery, he would have been refused because of his mixed religious background. Though his father was a Tunisian Jew, his mother was a German Protestant. Under Jewish law, which defines Jewishness by matrilineal descent or formal conversion, Pérez was thus not considered Jewish. Such legal-religious boundaries have tangible consequences at key moments in a person’s life, especially upon marriage or death. Others in Tunisia who identify as Jewish, who have lived their lives within Jewish circles or felt deeply connected to their Jewish heritage, but cannot trace maternal descent or prove conversion, have been directed by Jewish authorities to the neighboring Freethinkers’ Plot, regardless of whether they share its non-religious or political commitments. One can imagine that this was not Georges Adda’s original vision: that the Plot would become a kind of alternative Jewish cemetery within a wider Christian cemetery, a refuge for those excluded by orthodox definitions of Jewishness. The irony is that people like Pérez, perceived as Jews in life by Muslims and by Jews, could not ultimately be buried in a Jewish cemetery. However, Pérez could have been buried in the Borgel’s Christian (municipal) cemetery but chose the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot instead.
37Death is a moment of social reckoning. The anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep identified birth, marriage and death as three major transitions that societies ritualize because they mark a change in social status that the community needs to acknowledge and manage (Van Gennep, 1960 [1909]). If death reinforces communal religious boundaries, then the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is a space where one can see the limits of an interfaith life. Interfaith marriages were disproportionately common among Tunisian Communists, so it is no surprise that a similarly high proportion of those buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot had been in such a union. I asked a woman whose Jewish mother had been buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot what it was like to grow up as the child of an interfaith couple. She disagreed with the very premise of my question and told me: “I did not grow up in a ‘mixed’ Jewish-Muslim family, but a Tunisian one.” The word “mixed” implied, to her, Jewish and Muslim, but neither was the defining characteristic of her identity. The occupants of the plot make a similar claim to Tunisianness, an affiliation that trumps association with any religious community, as was signaled at Gilbert Naccache, Leïla Adda, and Jeanne Chiche’s funerals.
38However, I want to show that as fluid as “interfaith” boundaries can be in life—in friendship, in work, even in marriage—such boundary crossing does not necessarily translate after death. Death’s irrevocability hardens borders, raising the stakes of transgressing them, evident in several cases of Jewish and Christian women married to Muslim men who did not convert to Islam before their deaths and so could not be buried in a Muslim cemetery. One man told me that his mother, who was buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, had wished to be buried beside her husband, but was unwilling to convert to do so. In theory, the state would intervene to prohibit non-Muslims from being buried in a Muslim cemetery. But people also assert their own boundaries. The fact that his mother chose burial in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot shows how the plot is a genuine third option for someone unwilling to convert to Islam or to be reclaimed by Judaism. Yet it also indicates the limits of interfaith life in Tunis: whereas marriage could cross religious lines, burial could not.
39Two months before the death of Leïla Adda, who had married someone of Muslim heritage, she sent me an email with the subject line, “Les textes de Papa” (“Papa’s writings”). Included were series of newspaper articles her father Georges Adda had published on Palestine. They evinced a markedly anti-Zionist perspective. Indeed, one important commonality among the Jews buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot was their critical stance toward Israel and Zionism, which dovetailed with vocal Tunisian patriotism. For these Jews, their non-Zionist, or anti-Zionist, stance was also a declaration of where they did not belong. In a 2006 article about the Palestinian right of return, Georges Adda stated: “Tunisia is my country and the Tunisian people are my people… my philosophical convictions are not those of my mother and my father.” This was not a mere biographical statement, but a political and philosophical one. In short, he had a homeland, and it was not Israel but Tunisia—the country of his birth and that of the generations that came before him.
40Georges Adda’s insistence that there was no Jewish “people,” no ethnonational group, resonates with Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Sand, 2009). Sand argues that many Jews were converts, rather than descendants of a people expelled from the biblical land of Israel. This echos with Georges Adda’s critique of an ethno-national definition of Jewish peoplehood and his identification as a Berber Jew—Berber, or Amazigh, referring to the indigenous populations of North Africa. He thus routed his Jewish identity through his Amazigh origin and Tunisian belonging. Other Tunisian Jews chose “Arab Jew” to emphasize their rootedness in Tunisia, the Maghreb, and the Arab world. In her memoir Dedans, Dehors, historian, writer, and public intellectual Sophie Bessis (2020) adopts the term juivearabe, feminizing it and dropping the hyphen, signaling a more integrated identity. Bessis has also been a prominent critic of Zionism, consistent with her broader refusal of ethnic and religious nationalism. She told me in an informal conversation, half-joking, that she has considered being buried in the Freethinkers’ Plot alongside her friends—a gesture that could only ever be meaningful to the living because she does not believe in an afterlife.
41Georges and Gladys Adda, the Jewish founders of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, intentionally distanced themselves from the Tunisian Jewish establishment’s identification with the State of Israel. This was a constitutive part of their anti-colonial and leftist politics. It must be stated carefully that the Jews buried in the Jewish cemetery on the “other side” of the Borgel from the Freethinkers’ Plot, in the Jewish section, were not monolithic in their views—many were deeply attached to their Tunisian homeland and had wide-ranging views on Zionism too. However, the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is populated by people who vocally contested the communal and nationalist frameworks that the creation of Israel sought to impose on Jewish identity, and who refused to define their Tunisian Jewishness in exclusively religious terms.
42There are no strict prescriptions about how people should be buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, but many are buried in coffins. There are no prayers, but there may be songs. There are speeches and sometimes flowers. The heterodox burial practices observed at the gravesite reflect the heterogeneity of the plot’s occupants.
43On the day of Leïla Adda’s funeral there were flowers on her tomb. The traditional Jewish practice is to place stones, not flowers, at graves. This symbolizes permanence and the ongoing presence of the living. Muslims traditionally leave seeds or water for the birds. The choice by friends and kin to leave flowers instead reflects a turn away from customs with ingrained associations with a particular religion and an elevation of political allegiances above religious ones. Leïla’s grave was adorned with a wreath of purple, pink, and red roses sent by the Association tunisienne des femmes démocrates (Tunisian Association of Democratic Women) honoring her feminist commitments, upon which was written, “In memory of the late Leïla Adda’s soul.” Two of the three founders (both Jewish) of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women are buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot beside her: Gladys Adda, her mother, and Gilda Khiari. There was also a bouquet of white lilies, tied with a white ribbon emblazoned with the word Palestine and the image of the Palestinian flag, sent by the Palestinian embassy, honoring her family’s longstanding commitments to Palestinian liberation. These flowers marked her death as a personal and political loss: they represent her causes, her commitments, her associations—and her family’s politics. Burial is often a site of politics (Verdery, 1999).
44The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is a space where the boundaries between religious traditions are porous. Even though more than half the tombs in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot belong to Jews, none are oriented toward Jerusalem as in the Jewish cemetery. They follow instead the orientation of the tombs in the Christian cemetery. Burial customs more common among Muslims and Christians (or secular Christians) have filtered in too. Leïla’s mother, father, and brother are all buried in the same grave, for example. Burying multiple family members in the same grave is customary among Tunisian Muslims—up to six per tomb. The ashes of Georges Adda, who was cremated in Marseilles, were also brought back to Tunis and placed in the family grave. This bricolage—of cremation, a practice associated with European Christian secularism in the Tunisian context, and of shared graves, a custom common among Tunisian Muslims—shows how the deliberate refusal of Jewish religious custom does not produce a neutral practice.
45“I noticed that Georges’ daughter was buried in a coffin, which is neither the Muslim nor Jewish tradition,” said one man who had attended Leïla’s funeral and who was the son of Communists, his mother Jewish and his father Muslim. “So, I turned to the person next to me—someone close to her family, a leftist, and freethinker—and said, ‘That’s bullshit. I don’t understand the interest in burying yourself in a box. Is this ‘civilization?’” His eyes widened, and he leaned in. “This man told me, ‘It’s technical, it’s cleaner to be buried in a box.” This funerary exchange brings to the fore a longer history of colonial public health discourse that extended to bodily and hygienic practices—including in death (Bashford, 2004; Balakrishnan, 2022). He then added, “This trend [of coffin burial] is very European-centric, Christian European-centric, and common among many Communists of this generation—the 1950s generation, their children, and their descendants.” The idea that this practice is simply “cleaner” than being buried in cloth is laden with Christian and colonial cultural assumptions—a rejection of religious burial that unwittingly reproduces a distinctly “European” cultural form. Whether one defends the practice on hygienic grounds or condemns it as imported eurocentrism, no position, including the one that says that there is no meaning to the box, is neutral. His mother would also be buried and had also been buried in a coffin—an expensive one, he noted. If casket burial appears to be the norm in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, then there is also an important class dimension to who can afford to be buried there. Moreover, even someone critical of coffin burial was pressured by family to bury his mother in one—reinforcing of the argument that burial is a social experience.
46Two weeks after Leïla Adda’s funeral, I accompanied a journalist back to the Borgel cemetery complex (Boukhayatia, 2022). The caretaker’s wide-brimmed hat cast a deep shadow across his tanned face. Standing near the nineteen graves of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, he said, “They don’t remove them from the coffin. They put the whole casket in the ground.” The journalist asked, “The Jews—do they leave them in the coffin?” “Yes,” he replied. “The atheists.”
47The caretaker used the word “mulḥidīn” (atheists) to distinguish the Jewish-born individuals in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot from the Jews in the Jewish cemetery, but he ultimately hailed both groups as Jews. He gestured to his left toward the Jewish cemetery. “But the Jews over there, they remove the body from the casket and bury them directly in the ground.” “Like Muslims,” I added. He nodded, repeating: “Here [in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot], the atheists—yes, they bury them with the casket.”
48Like Christians, I thought. The caretaker of the Jewish cemetery later explained to me that the few Jews buried in coffins had families abroad who hoped to transfer the body at a later moment in time. She said that Jews in the Jewish cemetery were buried in cloth shrouds, like Muslims—a practice that can be attributed to Judeo-Islamic cultural proximity and the long Jewish presence in the Maghreb.
49There’s a well-known Jewish joke: Every Jew needs two synagogues—one to go to, and one to never set foot in. The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is right next door to the Jewish cemetery, and the joke captures something of the logic of their relationship. There is a certain porousness that allows Jews to cross the wall and be buried in the Christian cemetery, but not the reverse. Non-Jews cannot be buried in the Jewish cemetery, which remains structured by religious law. This asymmetry implies a hierarchy within the minority space. The Jewish section remains more rigidly bounded, while the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, carved out of the Christian cemetery, is a kind of secular European zone that Jews could also access. That Jews could access this zone is not incidental—the colonial categorization of Tunisian Jews as European-adjacent, with its postcolonial legacies, made burial in the municipal Christian cemetery imaginable for a few people with Jewish heritage in a way it may not have been for Muslim Tunisians. Within that broader phenomenon, the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot represents the most deliberate and ideologically explicit expression of that crossing.
50It is fitting to end with the story of Jeanne Chiche (1941–2024), the most recent person to have been buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, as told to me by her friend Sophie Bessis. Chiche embodies each of the characteristics that have appeared separately across the other case studies: Jewish birth, Communist politics, anti-Zionism, an interfaith marriage, and a strong sense of her Tunisianness maintained across decades of life abroad. During her studies in Paris, she married a Moroccan Communist activist of Muslim origin. Jeanne followed her husband to Morocco, where they had a child and soon divorced. She built her entire career there as a geographer—“knowing Morocco hamlet by hamlet,” Bessis recalled. Still, she maintained her relationship to Tunisia through her parents, her friends, and her nationality. On her tombstone, Tunisia is described as “son pays” (her country) and Morocco as “son pays d’adoption” (her adopted country), but as Bessis told me: “it was obvious to her that her country was Tunisia.” When she died, she was flown to Tunis to be buried in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot and not in Morocco or in Tunis’ Jewish cemetery like her father, or in the State of Israel like her mother. The plot did not require her to shed her Jewish identity, one that she never denied; instead, it allowed her to hold it at an angle.
51I did not attend her funeral, but Bessis made clear that it was crowded, in part because of the Chiche family’s assistance to political prisoners associated with the Perspectives movement. As at the funerals of others in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, no prayers were said. Chiche’s eulogy was given by a former leader of the Tunisian Communist Party. Today, her tomb holds shells and an inscription about her work as a geographer and her life as a militant. Qu’elle repose en paix (May she rest in peace). Al-salamu ʿala ruhiha al-tahira (Peace upon her pure soul).
52The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot gathers together those who died outside Islam, the predominant religion that structures social and civic life in Tunisia, and outside the minority religious establishments of their birth. It produces a posthumous classification, identifying them as freethinkers regardless of the labels they chose in life. The plot is a product of colonial history and postcolonial contradiction alike, made possible by the French tradition of laïcité, and shaped by the ambivalent relationship of its occupants to that tradition, as well as the Tunisian CPS that created the conditions for the plot’s establishment. The timing of its creation is poignant: a minoritized space was established just as the community responsible for its creation was disappearing from the social landscape. There is a further irony in the fact that the plot was approved by a post-independence government that had progressively narrowed the definition of Tunisianness to Muslimness. And yet, for the Christian- and Jewish-born buried side by side, the ideal of the Tunisian nation as an egalitarian coalition of people with diverse identities beyond religious affiliation was how they wished to live—and position themselves in death.
53One could be buried outside the Jewish or Christian cemetery and in the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot, but not outside the corresponding confessional identity. This reality especially reveals a tension inherent in this article’s discussion of the Jewish-born occupants of the Freethinkers’ Burial Plot. None actively practiced the religion. Many were associated with Communist and anti-Zionist politics; some, often these same individuals, had been in interfaith unions. They all asserted their Tunisianness at a time when Tunisian national identity was growing closer to Islam and harder to reconcile with Jewishness. And yet they are still perceived as Jews. Their critical attitude towards Zionism is notable because they were Jews, asserting their Tunisian patriotism in distinct opposition to the Zionist project. The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot liberated them from one set of communal codes around burial but left intact the categories they were born into.
54The Freethinkers’ Burial Plot is an active burial ground, but the generation that defined its character—its Tunisian patriotism, its anti-Zionism, its ambivalent relationship to inherited religious identities—is, in the most literal sense, dying out. Now, as the inscriptions fade and the tombstones become overgrown with brush, the plot remains a site of sociopolitical forensics, where the overlapping and fluid categories of identity that structure Tunisian society become legible. This burial ground stands for something else. For people like the writer Sophie Bessis, whose comrades are buried there and who may one day join them, it is not a cemetery of Jews and Christians but a place where a particular vision of Tunisianness is memorialized and remains legible to those who share it. New generations attached to histories of left-wing activism and ideals have a place to visit, to pay tribute, to claim a lineage. While the dead are often essentialized back into their religious affiliations—they remain “the Jews” and “the Christians”—the plot also exceeds those categories. It is a place where a different kind of Tunisianness is not just remembered but kept alive.
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