Summary
Shihata Harun, an Egyptian Jewish communist — a HADETU member under Henri Curiel in the 1940s, later a Communist Party of Egypt member — who remained in Egypt after the 1950s and whose Yahudi fi al-qahira (A Jew in Cairo) is one of the few published 1980s opinions insisting on the distinction between Jews and Zionists, in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4129-4162).
Details
- His book collects letters, interviews and essays from 1967 to 1985 defining himself as an Egyptian Jew, an anti-Zionist, an Egyptian nationalist, a supporter of Palestinian national rights, and an opponent of Camp David. In a 1975 Ruz al-Yusuf interview he stated: “I am a Jew, yes, and a leftist, yes. But the most important characteristic is that I am an Egyptian. As far as I know, being an Egyptian is not conditional on changing either my religion or my political beliefs” (Chapter 9, note 16) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4129-4162).
- The Marxist publishing house’s name was slightly altered on the book’s title page (Dar al-Thaqafa al-Haditha instead of Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida), suggesting its directors were ambivalent about his position and unwilling to take full public responsibility for it, even though it was entirely consistent with orthodox Marxist doctrine (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4129-4162).
- He was arrested with all other able-bodied Jewish males in the 1967 war and as a communist in 1975 and again in 1979 — neither Abdel Nasser’s nor Sadat’s government accepted the sincerity of his commitments (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 4129-4162).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Henri Curiel, HADETU, Siham Nassar