Henri Curiel

Summary

Henri Curiel, the Egyptian Jewish communist leader named in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as the exceptional detainee still held at the end of 1949, whose followers among the Francophone Jewish middle class consciously sought to Egyptianize themselves, and whom the Egyptian regime’s 1954 press campaign cast as the Zionist controller of Egyptian communism (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 613-634, 1272-1277, 1789-1799).

Details

• The Marxists among Egypt’s Francophone middle-class Jewish youth, “especially the followers of Henri Curiel (see Chapter 6), consciously sought to Egyptianize themselves,” though not very many succeeded by the standards of the post-1952 regime (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 613-634).

• After May 15, 1948 the public Jewish presence in Egypt diminished, but by the end of 1949 all but one of the Jewish detainees — “the communist leader, Henri Curiel” — had been released, alongside the communists, Zionists and Muslim Brothers interned in 1948 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1181-1183, 1272-1277).

• A prominent feature of the Egyptian government’s stepped-up anticommunist press campaign after Abdel Nasser’s March 1954 victory over Naguib was to accuse the communists of being Zionists: a month before the Operation Susannah arrests were announced, lead articles in the major Egyptian dailies explained that the Egyptian communist movement was controlled by a Zionist Jew, Henri Curiel, who resided in Paris (Chapter 4, note 26); an al-Musawwar photo essay asserting that the communists were Zionists, atheists, and sexually promiscuous featured a picture of Curiel in short pants, which made him appear totally alien and ridiculous by Egyptian cultural standards (Chapter 4, note 27) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1789-1799).

• The chapter treats the Zionism–communism equation of which the Curiel campaign was part as a modern instrument in the struggle against Zionism, inflected with European anti-Semitic ideas such as those in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, rather than an expression of primordial Arab or Muslim anti-Jewish sentiment (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1793-1799).

• Chapter 6 gives his full career. The younger son of the Cairo banker Daniel Curiel, he held Italian citizenship through his family but became a citizen of Egypt on reaching the age of majority in 1935; educated at the Jesuit Collège des Frères in Cairo, he never became fluent in Arabic despite his deep attachment to Egypt. In 1943 he founded the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation (HAMETU) on a strategy of Egyptianizing the communist movement, and in May 1947 it united with Iskra to form HADETU, of whose first fifteen Central Committee members three were Jews (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2607-2624).

• Of the three Jewish communist leaders, Curiel himself admitted Marcel Israel was “by far the most Egyptianized, the only one who knew Arabic perfectly”; Israel nonetheless insisted, “We were foreigners. He [Curiel] couldn’t accept that” (Chapter 6, notes 4-5). Curiel rejected the view that foreigners were in principle ineligible to lead the Egyptian communist movement, holding ethnonational identity to be merely a tactical question (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2618-2624).

• Arrested in the May 1948 roundup and released by January 1950, he was arrested again on July 25, 1950 and ordered deported “as a foreigner dangerous to public security” despite fifteen years of Egyptian citizenship; on August 26 he was placed in a locked cabin on an Italian ship that discharged him in Genoa, and he settled in Paris, refusing to join the Communist Party of France because that would accept the judgment that he was a foreigner who should abandon Egyptian politics (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2640-2651).

• In Paris he led the Rome Group. The Communist Party of France impugned his reliability in November 1952 by implicating him in the Marty affair on circumstantial evidence and innuendo, rendering him a political pariah; as a condition of communist unity his Unified Egyptian Communist Party membership was suspended in February 1955 and restored in July 1956 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2685-2704).

• Twenty days before the October 29, 1956 invasion he obtained a copy of the Anglo-French-Israeli attack plan and forwarded it to the Egyptian press attaché in Paris; Abdel Nasser saw the plan but thought it too outlandish to consider seriously, and later rebuffed a request to restore Curiel’s Egyptian citizenship in recognition of his patriotic activity (Chapter 6, note 25). In October 1957 the Rome Group was dissolved as an al-Raya unity condition, and the united Communist Party of Egypt of January 8, 1958 excluded Jews from its leadership and the Paris emigres from membership (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2705-2730).

• From November 1957 he built the FLN support network in France, supplanting Francis Jeanson as its leader by 1960; he was arrested on October 21, 1960 and held until after the 1962 Evian accords, donated his family’s Zamalek mansion to independent Algeria for its embassy in Egypt, and expanded the work into Solidarité, which aided anticolonial movements from the MPLA and FRELIMO to the ANC and ZAPU. Conspiracy accounts of him — Georges Suffert’s 1976 Le Point cover story and Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network — are judged wrong in nearly every biographical detail and unsupported by independently checkable evidence (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2727-2763).

• As an intermediary he upheld the 1947-48 communist formulations: Israel’s Jews constituted a national community with the right of self-determination, “because many national states have their origins in colonial facts, a truth well-verified in Africa and the Middle East” (Chapter 6, note 45). He arranged the 1968 Hamrush meetings with Israeli peace activists, the preparations for the May 11, 1973 Bologna conference, and, from 1976, the meetings between ‘Isam Sartawi and the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, acknowledged publicly at his January 1, 1977 Paris press conference for Matti Peled and Sartawi (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2764-2851).

• He was assassinated in Paris on May 4, 1978 by unknown assailants; suspicions focused on Abu Nidal and on right wingers in the camp of the former Algerian colons, but the French authorities never resolved the case. Didar Rossano-Fawzy took pleasure in noting that the Rabin-‘Arafat handshake of September 13, 1993 took place on Curiel’s birthday (Chapter 6, note 75) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2840-2851).

Related pages

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Operation Susannah, HADETU, Rome Group, Eric Rouleau