Abstract
This thesis examines the genre of essays on religion and ideology that emerged in Tunisia in the late nineteenth century with a focus on the essays contained in two particular booklets. These essays represented a unique historical moment, in which the Jewish community of Tunis faced changing external conditions and produced various attempts to adapt to these changes, especially regarding the changes in education brought by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. In many cases, a new affinity toward France accompanied increasing secularization and a detachment from traditional Tunisian Jewish life.\r The essays explored here are reactions to these changes in attitudes and practices, in which the authors rebuke the wayward among their community and seek to establish the enduring value of normative Judaism in the eyes of the new generation. The two booklets examined here are "Shuvah Yisrael" and "Nesah Yisrael" ("Return, Israel" and "The Eternal of Israel" respectively), both of which were published in the 1880s.\r The goal of this thesis is to analyze the approaches taken by the rabbis and community leaders in attaining their objective of maintaining traditional Judaism within the community. The essays found in these books represent a number of styles, and various registers of the Judaeo-Arabic language. Translated quotations from the essays have been incorporated to provide a sense of the original materials to the reader.