Summary
Author of The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), which The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry calls “the best comprehensive work on the history of Egyptian Jewry in the twentieth century” and takes as its point of departure (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 78-86, 294-300).
Details
- Krämer demonstrates, as Beinin summarizes her, that no single experience was shared by all Egyptian Jews, because differences of class, ethnic origins, rite and political outlook eroded Jewish communal solidarity without completely effacing it; she challenges both the Zionist historiography that treats Israel as the teleological fulfillment of Egyptian Jewish history and the traditional Egyptian nationalist argument that all would have been well were it not for Zionism (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 78-86).
- Her conclusions, quoted from pp. 234–35 of her book: “a Jewish question as it emerged in nineteenth-century Europe did not exist in twentieth-century Egypt. Jews were not discriminated against because of their religion or race, but for political reasons.” Egyptian Jews experienced “neither uninterrupted persecution and terror nor uninterrupted harmony” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 78-86).
- According to Krämer, some 50,000–55,000 Jews remained in Egypt at the time of the Suez/Sinai War in 1956. Beinin’s criticism is that, despite her book’s nominal 1952 end date, it contains only a minimal discussion — “a mere six pages” — of events and issues after 1948, so she “unwittingly reinforces the prevailing assumption that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked the end of the Egyptian Jewish community” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 78-86).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history, Karaites