Summary
The term coined in Chapter 3 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry for the way the Egyptian state and the Jewish community sometimes represented their post-1948 relationship — “a concept that emphasized mutual obligation and equity, as opposed to civic rights and responsibilities,” drawing on the Qur’anic definition of Jews as dhimmis (ahl al-dhimma, a “protected” people possessing a recognized holy book) and on the Ottoman millet system, as “a culturally authorized alternative to a discourse of rights and citizenship” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1230-1232).
Details
- Egyptian Jews were “contradictorily interpellated” after 1948 by their status as citizens or noncitizen permanent residents (legally “local subjects” without citizenship), their status in Islamic civilization as dhimmis, and the real or imagined security threat they posed to the Egyptian state (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1142-1143).
- The discourse did not simply reproduce a timeless Islamic model: “the textually based classical model was always already inflected by local histories and particular circumstances,” and neo-dhimma was “intermittently deployed concurrently with the secular-liberal discourse of rights and citizenship, sometimes by the same people on different occasions,” generating hybrid practices “easily destabilized by the state of war between Egypt and Israel and the consolidation of an authoritarian nationalist security state in Egypt after 1954” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1232-1233).
- Its operation is illustrated by al-Ahram’s demand that the state clean the Karaite quarter as steward of a dependent population, against pre-1948 al-Kalim’s citizen language of rights; by Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum’s 1952 allegiance telegram and Muhammad Naguib’s ahl al-dhimma reply, followed by Naguib’s synagogue visits under the 1919 slogan; by the state’s negotiated allocation of flour to remake the March 1953 fire-destroyed Passover matzahs, which “reinforced the relationship of neo-dhimma”; by the appeal to reinstitute Jewish bank holidays; and by Nahum’s petitions for high-holiday leave for Jewish soldiers, police and prisoners (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1234-1258).
- Despite republican rhetoric, the Free Officers “commonly continued to treat Jews as a corporate group and to consider the state responsible for maintaining the customary rights of the Jewish community,” and individual Jews and the community’s official leadership acted within the boundaries those expectations defined (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1249-1250).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Communitarianism, Haim Nahum, Muhammad Naguib, Karaites