Summary
Emanuel Marx, an anthropologist who directed the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo in the early 1990s and, after returning to the University of Haifa, proposed that a Jewish community in Egypt could be renewed — the chapter’s closing example of a post-Zionist perspective in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3769-3789).
Details
- He proposed that if it were not for Operation Susannah, the Jewish community in Cairo would not have been destroyed: “Those responsible for the dirty business (‘esek ha-bish) exploited Jews in Egypt for unimportant purposes. This caused the rupture” (Chapter 8, note 75, Algazi, ha-Aretz, Mar. 17, 1996) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3769-3789).
- He criticized the Israeli Embassy in Cairo for opposing the renewal of a Jewish community in Egypt “because they are prisoners of Zionist ideas according to which all Jews must immigrate (la-‘a lot) to Israel. We live in a post-Zionist era.…Israel has become quite a large state, and it’s time we stopped the idiotic activity of encouraging the dissolution of Jewish communities throughout the world” (Chapter 8, note 76) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3769-3789).
- The Israeli Academic Center he directed was commonly vilified by Egyptian nationalists as a center for espionage and subversion (Chapter 8, note 74) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3769-3789).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Post-Zionism, Operation Susannah