Summary
Jacques Hassoun, an Egyptian Jewish psychoanalyst and former communist in Paris, a principal animator of the ASPCJE, treated in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as a central figure in the post-1977 retrieval of Egyptian Jewish heritage (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
Details
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Hassoun supplied materials to the book’s research and was interviewed in Paris on May 30, 1994 for the account of the Zionist youth movements (Chapter 2, note 68); draft readers and helpers named in the Acknowledgments include him among those who shared memories and papers (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1-77, 725-1127).
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He was expelled from Egypt as a communist in 1954; his three trips to Egypt in 1977 and 1978 were his first return since the expulsion and prepared the way for the organization of the ASPCJE (Chapter 8, note 25) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
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He was one of the ASPCJE’s principal animators, former communists who had worked with Henri Curiel and the Rome Group, and served as editor of Juifs du Nil, a history of the Jews of Egypt from antiquity to the modern era published by a press associated with Egyptian communist exiles (Chapter 8, note 26); he and Jacques Stambouli had met as members of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League in the 1970s (Chapter 8, note 27) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
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With Carmen Weinstein, whom the author met in Hassoun’s Paris home in 1994, he shared — as a secular Jew with little attachment to orthodox observance — a fierce determination to preserve Cairo’s Basatin Jewish cemetery, financed by the ASPCJE, “as material evidence that a Jewish community had lived and flourished in Egypt” (Chapter 8, note 28) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
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The leaders of the Historical Society of Jews from Egypt, initiated in Brooklyn in October 1995, had been in contact with Hassoun and the ASPCJE and were inspired by that example (Chapter 8, note 29) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
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The book closes with an interview with Hassoun (Palo Alto, California, Nov. 2, 1995; transcribed and translated from French by Mara Kronenfeld), whose introduction gives his formation: born 1936, educated at the Lycée de l’Union Juive pour l’Enseignement in Alexandria; a teenage member of Dror, the Marxist-Zionist youth organization; after Dror’s dissolution in 1952 a member of HADETU; arrested as a communist and expelled from Egypt in 1954; active with Henri Curiel’s Rome Group in France until 1968; and a founder in 1979 of the ASPCJE, whose journal Nahar Misraïm the introduction dates 1981-1986, against Chapter 8’s 1980-86 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
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In the interview Hassoun gives the formula that heads it: “I am Jewish because I am Egyptian. I am Egyptian because I am Jewish.” He states that he was expelled “not… because I was a Jew but because I was a communist,” that communism offered Egyptian Jews “a theoretically coherent possibility of being Jewish and Egyptian at the same time,” and that France complicated rather than resolved his identity until the recuperation work of 1979-80; he also states his positions on France — for “a republican, centralized, and integrated state” and against public manifestation of the Jewish religion (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
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In the same interview Hassoun discusses Paula Jacques and Edmond Jabès as the best-known Egyptian Jews in France, known there as French Jews; he says Egyptian Jews dislike Jacques’s novels because they take them for nonfiction, and that Jabès acknowledged his family’s harat al-yahud sextonship publicly only one or two years before his death, in an interview Hassoun conducted with Carole Naggar (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4606-4740).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, ASPCJE, Henri Curiel, Rome Group, HADETU, Paula Jacques, Edmond Jabès