"We, the Jews, have been living here for more than 2,000 years," said Claudine Saghroun, who lives in the Hara Kbira, the island's large Jewish neighborhood.

"And during the (2011) revolution, when at one time there were no more police, Muslims told us 'Come back to your homes, we'll protect you'."

"Just after the revolution, we were afraid. Not any more," Tunisia's Grand Rabbi Haim Bittan said, adding that there were some 1,500 Jews in the country, mostly in Djerba. 

The neighborhood, which was once entirely Jewish, has welcomed Muslim inhabitants for many years. Down one of its streets, Belgacem Boujenah, a cobbler who supports the main Islamist party Ennahda, is set up next to "Chez Rami," a small bakery specializing in "briks," a typical Tunisian pastry.

"We even share our names," the cobbler says, referring to his surname that is also used by Tunisian Jews.

Children from the two religions generally study in schools together, and Jews have Hebrew schools where they take classes in their ancestral language and in Judaism.

But behind the seemingly calm coexistence, there is a painful history.

Before independence in 1956, Tunisia had a Jewish population of nearly 100,000.

But waves of emigration saw that number plummet, a trend accelerated by the Arab-Israeli conflict which fuelled discrimination.

And this year, just before the annual pilgrimage to the Ghriba synagogue on Djerba, a controversy split Tunisia's political establishment with several parties demanding Israelis be barred from entering the country.

Amid the dispute, the authorities did not scrimp on security around the Hara Kbira and Africa's oldest synagogue, which was targeted by a suicide bombing in 2002 that killed 21 people.

Pilgrims were unable to lead their procession through the streets and had to stay in the area around the Ghriba mosque.