Summary
Dr. Musa (Moshe) Marzuq, a Karaite physician employed in Cairo’s Rabbanite Jewish hospital, who commanded the Israeli espionage network in Cairo and was executed in January 1955 for his role in Operation Susannah (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222, 534-574).
Details
- In the Introduction’s Operation Susannah account, Sami (Shmu’el) Azar and Musa (Moshe) Marzuq were sentenced to death along with the network’s Israeli handlers, John Darling (Avraham Dar) and Paul Frank (Avraham Seidenwerg), who were tried in absentia; the verdicts were delivered in January 1955 after the December 1954 trial (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222).
- He was “the best-known Karaite involved in organized Zionist activity”: a member of he-Halutz and of the underground self-defense (Haganah) organization established by emissaries from Palestine in 1946, before becoming a spy and saboteur for Israel (Chapter 2, note 50) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).
- His older brother Yosef was arrested as a Zionist activist in May 1948 but was one of the first freed because of the French Consulate’s intervention — his grandfather had bought a Tunisian passport from the French Consulate — and emigrated to Israel in 1953 (Chapter 2, note 50) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).
- The book suggests his milieu explains his receptivity to Zionism: his family background, and his employment as a doctor in the Rabbanite Jewish hospital — which many Karaites used because their community ran no medical facility, and to which the Karaite community contributed annually — meant his social and cultural milieu was “not limited to harat al-yahud”. Because he was a well-known and respected doctor, and “not even his older brother suspected he was engaged in espionage and sabotage on behalf of Israel,” his arrest and execution “had a chilling effect on the Karaites” (Chapter 2, note 51) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 87-109, 534-574).
- Chapter 4 records the Israeli press’s martyrology on the day of his and Azar’s execution, January 31, 1955: Davar’s editorial proclaimed that “The blood of these two Jewish martyrs flows into the river of blood of millions of our people, who were slaughtered and burned for the sanctification of the Name and the nation in our generation and in previous generations” (Chapter 4, note 20); and Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon’s 1965 book memorialized Azar and Alexandria’s Jews on the execution’s tenth anniversary (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1760-1775, 1902-1903).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Operation Susannah, Karaites, Robert Dassa