Summary
Yusuf Darwish, a Karaite-born Egyptian communist and labor lawyer, a founding member of the New Dawn group, presented in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as the link through whom the author was introduced to the Karaite community of San Francisco (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2607-2851, 3158-3165).
Details
- Darwish was a founding member of the New Dawn communist group and a prominent Cairo area labor lawyer; the New Dawn tendency resolved the “foreigner” question by “the corridor” (al-mamarr) — mastery of Arabic and identification with Egypt made a member 100 percent Egyptian — and its leaders Yusuf Darwish, Ahmad Sadiq Sa’d and Raymond Douek are named among the movement’s Egyptianized Jewish communists (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2607-2851).
- Born into the Karaite community, he married Iqbal, a Rabbanite Jew, in 1949 after converting to Islam — a quick, simple formality for two non-observant people, necessary because Egyptian personal-status law ran through the confessional courts and a Karaite–Rabbanite Jewish marriage would have required his conversion to Rabbanite Judaism, in which, as a communist, he had no interest; Muslim men may marry Jewish and Christian women (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3158-3165).
- When the three principal communist tendencies united to form the Communist Party of Egypt in 1958 and resolved that Jews could not be members of the Central Committee, Darwish — despite his conversion — was excluded from the party’s leadership on the grounds that he was a Jew; the same exclusion was accepted by the former New Dawn leaders Darwish and Sa’d in the January 1958 unity (Chapter 6, and Chapter 7, note 1) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2676-2730, 3158-3165).
- His daughter Nawla, in whose Cairo house the author read his papers in 1980, is Jewish according to Rabbinic halakhah and Muslim according to the shari’a; “She prefers to define herself as Egyptian” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3158-3165).
- Darwish had spent three terms in prison in Egypt; he was involved in the Communist Party’s reorganization after it publicly resumed its existence in 1975, lived abroad as a political refugee and party representative, returned to Egypt with Iqbal in 1986, and left again shortly after the 1973 war period when the police became aware of his activities, not wishing to risk a fourth term (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3158-3165).
- His sisters Nelly Masliah (San Francisco) and Yvonne Masliah (Boston area) emigrated to the United States; his 1990 visit to them was the occasion of the author’s introduction to the San Francisco Karaite community (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3158-3165).
- As a lawyer he arranged the legal aspects of his brother-in-law Jacob Masliah’s Alexandria partnership with Nasim Yahya (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3166-3203).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Karaites, HADETU, Jacob Masliah, Karaite Jews of America