Hiram (Phoenician king of Tire) and Solomon(king of Israel) could have been among the founders of Phoenician counters, including that of Carthage in 814 BC. One of the founding legends of the Jewish community of Djerba, transcribed for the first time in 1849, relates that the Kohens (members of the Jewish priestly class) would have settled in present-day Tunisia after the destruction of the Solomon's Temple by the Emperor Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC; They would have carried away a vestige of the destroyed Temple, preserved in the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba, and would have made it a place of pilgrimage and veneration to the present day. However, if these hypotheses were verified, it is probable that these Israelites would have assimilated to the Punic population and sacrificed to their divinities, like Baal and Tanit. Thereafter, Jews from Alexandria or Cyrene could have settled in Carthage following the Hellenization of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Basin. The cultural context allowed them to practice Judaism more in keeping with ancestral traditions. Small Jewish communities existed in the later days of Punic domination over North Africa, without it being possible to say whether they developed or disappeared later. Jews have in any case settled in the new Roman province of Africa, enjoying the favors of Julius Caesar. The latter, in recognition of the support of King Antipater in his struggle against Pompey, recognized Judaism and the status of Religio licita, and according to Josephus granted the Jews a privileged status confirmed by the Magna Charta pro Judaeis under the Roman Empire. These Jews were joined by Jewish pilgrims, expelled from Rome for proselytizing, 20 by a number of defeated in the First Jewish–Roman War, deported and resold as slaves in North Africa, and also by Jews fleeing the repression of revolts in Cyrenaica and Judea under the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Trajan, and Hadrian. According to Josephus, the Romans deported 30,000 Jews to Carthage from Judea after the First Jewish-Roman War. It is very likely that these Jews founded communities on the territory of present-day Tunisia. A tradition among the descendants of the first Jewish settlers was that their ancestors settled in that part of North Africa long before the destruction of the First Temple in the 6th century BCE. The ruins of an ancient synagogue dating back to the 3rd–5th century CE was discovered by the French captain