Summary
Pseudonym (meaning Daughter of the Nile) of Giselle Littman, an Egyptian Jew living in Switzerland since 1956, presented in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as the leading exponent of the Neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history of Jewish-Arab history (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
Details
- She first presented her interpretation of the history of the Jews of Egypt in a short book, Les juifs en Egypte: Aperçu sur 3000 ans d’histoire (Geneva: Editions de l’Avenir, 1971), published under an earlier pseudonym, Yahudiya Misriya (Introduction, note 24) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197, 294-467).
- An expanded Hebrew version, Yehudei mitzrayim, was published in 1974 by Ma’ariv Library and the World Jewish Congress “on the initiative of the [Israeli] Ministry of Education and Culture with the participation of the Department for Sephardic Communities of the World Zionist Organization”; Beinin reads this institutional imprimatur as “the consecration of Bat-Ye’or’s neo-lachrymose perspective as the normative Zionist interpretation of the history of Jews in Egypt” (Introduction, note 25) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197, 294-467).
- Her perspective was “expounded as a conscious challenge” to the more positive view of Jewish history in Egypt that leading individuals and institutions of the Jewish community, including self-described Zionists, had proudly embraced before 1948, and it drew its authority from her claim to authenticity as an Egyptian Jew; its acceptance was enabled in part by the near silence of Egyptian Jews about their lives in Egypt from 1948 until the late 1970s (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 177-197).
- Martin Gilbert explicitly adopts her perspective in The Jews of Arab Lands: Their History in Maps (1976) and recognizes her in his acknowledgments; Beinin’s note 26 calls Gilbert’s book “a propaganda tract rather than a piece of scholarship,” with “errors, inflated numbers, and tendentious “facts.”” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 294-467).
- Against her claims, Beinin holds that “there is nothing in medieval Jewish Arab history that can reasonably be compared to the expulsion of Jews from Spain” and nothing in modern Jewish-Arab history comparable to the Nazi mass murder — while also recording “more than occasional instances of socially structured discrimination against Jews in Egypt” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 198-210).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history, Mark R. Cohen, Mizrahim