Little is said, and little is known, about the Jewish presence in Africa, yet the role of these communities was important in antiquity. It is likely that, after the exodus from Egypt and after the destruction of the first Temple (586 BC), groups of Jews moved towards Cyrenaica and the Maghreb following an Arab wave of merchants from Mosul. According to an ancient tradition of the Touggourt, a region of eastern Algerian Sahara, the Jewish population is so ancient that it can be considered the oldest in the area.

Ibn Khaldun argues that when the Arabs entered the Berber lands in the 7^th century, many of those tribes were Jewish or strongly influenced by Judaism: "It is also possible that other Berber tribes believed in the Jewish religion, which they had inherited from the Israelites at the time of the expansion of their kingdom. This was the case with the Kahina tribe, which was exterminated by the Arabs at the beginning of their conquest."

Leo the Africanus also argues that many in those regions were Jews before being Muslims, and in the Atlas, there were warrior tribes who claimed descent from King David. Many Jewish merchants and artisans lived in Wadi Nun, where the annual gathering of Moroccan caravans on their way to Timbuktu and Oualata took place. Leo Africanus states: "It is said that […] they were Jews of the lineage of David; but after the Mohammedans had acquired that country, the inhabitants adopted the faith of Mohammed. There are many men who were learned in the law, and most of them keep the decrees and the texts of the law very well in memory.”

The Jewish community was then exterminated by the Almohads in 1050 and after a century many Jewish communities of Kairouan, Sfax, Gabes, Meknès, Fès and Marrakech had almost disappeared. Many Jews left those regions to move to India, some however remained in Africa, particularly in the region of Touat (Algeria), where they were very active until the 15^th century, when the Tlemcen-Touat-Niger route was one of the main axes of Saharan trade.

250,000 pages of commercial documents have been discovered in the ghenizot (deposits) of a synagogue in Cairo dating back to the 11^th and 12^th centuries, which report “credit notes” of trans-Saharan merchant traffic managed by Jewish agents based in Touat. The activity was so intense that the Jews of Touat turned to the rabbi of Algiers to study their situation regarding the risk of profaning the Shabbat: since it was certainly not possible to abandon the caravan to respect the Shabbat day, Rabbi Isaac Bar-Sheshet Barfat (1326-1408) declared that the caravanners could continue their journey as long as it had begun at least three days before.

From the end of the 14^th century, persecutions against the Jews increased in Spain and, not long after, the Inquisition continued its work; many Majorcans then moved to the Maghreb, where, however at first, they were welcomed by the local sovereigns. The Jewish population of Touat grew until 1492. In the same year, however, the Jews of Gourara began to be persecuted by the local sultan Cheikh Abd-al-Karim al-Menghili, who, accusing them of practicing usury, destroyed the synagogues of Touat and offered seven gold mitqals to anyone who killed a Jew. This caused a major crisis in the north-south Saharan trade, which was already suffering heavy repercussions from the progressive shift of trade routes eastward, towards Cairo. Dispersed in the lower Maghreb, the Jews became builders of wells and canals, the famous foggara distributed along the entire north-Saharan strip, an art of which they would still give good proof in the 19^th century, especially in the large production areas along the Niger, when it was developed to adapt the production necessary to supply the caravans to and from Egypt. They were able to dig wells, as in the case of Tendirma (Mali), 70 meters deep.

The Jewish presence became rarer, many converted or lost their original identity, mixing with the population. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, Mungo Park still notes the presence of Jews in Timbuktu, under the protection of Tuaregs and Moors, from whom they were not distinguished even though they continued to practice endogamy. The rabbi Mardochée Aby Serur, a traveling companion of Charles de Foucauld, who arrived in Timbuktu in 1860, says he was hosted by the Daggatun tribe, who claimed to be descended from the Jews. Daggatun means: "Those who have changed religion".

See, Gli ebrei del Sahara