Summary
Ezra Talmor (born Zanona), the central figure in revitalizing ha-‘Ivri ha-Tza’ir in Egypt in the late 1930s, a founder of Kibutz Nahshonim, MAPAM’s representative in London from 1956 to 1959 and later a Haifa University philosophy professor, whose career Chapter 5 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry uses to trace how the Egyptian Hashomer Hatza’ir graduates’ Francophone identity was sublated in Israel (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2274-2325).
Details
- Talmor’s parents had emigrated to Egypt from Aleppo; his grandparents spoke only Arabic, his parents Arabic and French at home, and he received no Jewish education and attended the secular Collège Français du Caire. He knew Arabic well enough to read al-Ahram and pass the Arabic section of the Egyptian baccalaureate, but was more comfortable in French. His older brother Zaki, not a Zionist, rose at the National Bank of Egypt to head of the foreign currency department before leaving Egypt for Switzerland in 1956 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2283-2296).
- He requested an emissary from ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir in Palestine; Sasha Korin of Kibutz Mesilot was despatched to Cairo in May 1938, and together they reorganized ha-‘Ivri ha-Tza’ir and opened the Heliopolis ken, which Talmor led and which became the largest in Egypt, with about 150 members by 1945. In 1938 Talmor publicly debated communism versus socialist Zionism at the ken with Bernard Lewis and Henri Curiel — Talmor’s 1983 testimony dates the incident to 1940, but in 1993 he dated it to 1938, “in fact, the more likely date” (Chapter 5, note 7) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2274-2296).
- A founder of Kibutz Nahshonim, he served as Mapam’s representative in London from 1956 to 1959, while his wife Sascha obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of London. In London he met Syrian and Iraqi Ba’thist medical students several times after Fenner Brockway reported Michel Aflaq’s interest in meeting Israelis; they drafted an outline of an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, and MAPAM leader Me’ir Ya’ari rebuked him for acting on his own initiative (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2297-2325).
- On his return he wanted to work in MAPAM’s Arab department because he “wanted peace between Jews and Arabs,” then retired from political activity, feeling excluded from a political career in MAPAM: “At first I thought it was simply racist. They could not accept that an Egyptian Jew would do something in political leadership,” he said — later attributing the exclusion to the cliquishness of ha-Kibutz ha-Artzi and MAPAM and to his not belonging to Ya’ari’s Eastern European inner circle (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2308-2325).
- In the 1960s he obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris; he and Sascha became professors at Haifa University, and in 1980 they founded and edited History of European Ideas. Of Nahshonim’s distinctiveness in 1993, the only characteristic that came to his mind was its food culture: “We know how to cook rice properly. We don’t make hard white balls like the Poles. We have pride of rice” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2308-2325).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Kibutz Nahshonim, Hashomer Hatza’ir, Mapam, Henri Curiel