Summary
Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (University of California Press, 1998): a history of the Egyptian Jewish community after 1948 that refuses both national narratives — the Zionist narrative, in which Egyptian Jewish history is fulfilled only in Israel and life in Egypt was unrelieved persecution, and the Egyptian nationalist narrative, in which Jews lived in undisturbed harmony until Zionism ruined it. Taking Gudrun Krämer’s The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 as its point of departure, the book argues that Egyptian Jews were “always already a heterogeneous community of cosmopolitan hybrids,” divided by rite (Rabbanite and Karaite), origin (indigenous, Sephardi, Ashkenazi), class, language and citizenship status, and that their identities were historically constructed and multiple rather than exclusive to one nation-state. Part 1 of this ingest gives the front matter, the Acknowledgments and the Introduction in full, with its 40 notes: the community’s component elements; the book’s interdisciplinary method and its author’s autobiographical route from ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir Zionism through Egypt, Israel and Detroit to the Egyptian labor movement; the critique of Bat-Ye’or and the neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history and of its mirror image in Arab apologetics; Operation Susannah as the symbol of the community’s transformation “from a national asset into a fifth column” between 1919 and 1956; and the place of Mizrahim in the Zionist national narrative. It then gives Chapter 2, “Communitarianisms, Nationalisms, Nostalgias,” in full: the contest between Aviezer Golan’s authorized memoir of the Operation Susannah prisoners and the Egyptian official account, and three sectors whose outlooks resist both narratives — the Arabized Karaites of Al-Kalim, the Egyptianist haute bourgeoisie of the Qattawi and Cicurel families, and the Francophone middle-class youth divided between Zionism and communism — closing with the nostalgic literary reconstructions of Jacqueline Kahanoff, Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren and the Susannah prisoner Robert Dassa (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1-724).
What the file is
The UC Press E-Books Collection Archive HTML edition of the book (preferred citation as printed: Beinin, Joel, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2290045n), made freely available by the publisher. The original as saved is the HTML file; the paired text copy is a plain-text rendering of the same edition, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers in the text copy (5,066 lines; about 125,700 words). The text copy opens with the archive’s site frame and accessibility notice before the title page; the site header renders the title with a period after “Politics” and drops the “a” before “Modern Diaspora,” against the title page and preferred citation. The notes to each chapter are printed at the chapter’s end without note numbers in the text copy; note numbers on wiki pages follow the order of the in-text markers. The contents list gives an Introduction, then three parts — “Discourses and Materialities of Identity” (Chapters 2–4 on the contents numbering, which counts the Introduction first), “Diasporas and the Reconstruction of Identity” (Chapters 5–7) and “Egyptian-Israeli Peace and Egyptian Jewish Histories” (Chapters 8–9) — plus an interview with Jacques Hassoun, plates, abbreviations and a bibliography. In the body, “Discourses and Materialities of Identity” stands as the first part’s title heading (line 468), followed at once by Chapter 2, “Communitarianisms, Nationalisms, Nostalgias.”
Section by section
Front matter and Acknowledgments (lines 1-77)
Title page (© 1998 The Regents of the University of California), dedication “To Miriam, my life partner,” and the table of contents as described above. The Acknowledgments record the book’s evidentiary base and milieu: the many Egyptian Jews in Egypt, Israel, Paris and San Francisco who shared memories and papers; the clippings, personal papers and materials supplied by named helpers including Raymond Aghion, Ada Aharoni, Shlomo Barad, Yusuf Darwish, Jacques Hassoun, Reuven Kaminer and Robert Vitalis; Roger Kohn of the Stanford University Library’s Judaica collection; draft readers Saba Mahmood, Aron Rodrigue, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed and Jane Zimmerman, with Zachary Lockman and Nancy Reynolds reading a late draft in full; the project’s home in Stanford’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature and its Seminar in Empires and Cultures; and funding by a Fulbright Research Grant in 1992–93 (hosted by Tel Aviv University’s Department of Middle Eastern and African History) and a Social Science Research Council Advanced Research Grant in 1994.
Introduction: opening and “The Jews of Egypt” (lines 78-109)
Since the 1979 Israel–Egypt peace treaty, cross-border subjects have become feasible research agendas and new sites of contention; the book examines the Egyptian Jewish community after 1948 in three movements — the Jews who remained in Egypt after 1948 (mainly to the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai War), the dispersion and reestablishment of communities in Israel, France and the United States, and contending revisionings of Jewish life in Egypt since Sadat’s 1977 Jerusalem visit. The point of departure is Krämer’s The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952, “the best comprehensive work on the history of Egyptian Jewry in the twentieth century,” which shows that no single experience was shared by all Egyptian Jews and challenges both the Zionist teleological reading and the Egyptian nationalist argument that all would have been well but for Zionism; yet although Krämer puts 50,000–55,000 Jews still in Egypt at the 1956 war, her book gives only six pages to events after 1948, so she “unwittingly reinforces the prevailing assumption that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked the end of the Egyptian Jewish community”. The community was formed by “a distinctive process of historical accretion”: at its core indigenous Arabic-speaking Rabbanites and Karaites with a Judeo-Arabic culture, perhaps 20,000 of the 75,000–80,000 Jews in Egypt in 1948 (the 1947 census recorded only 65,639, “but this is commonly regarded as an undercount”); Sephardim, arriving from Spain’s 1492 expulsion through the Ottoman cities and the 1860s cotton boom and 1869 Suez Canal opening, who formed the social and business elite and, in their middle strata, the community’s largest single section — “the confused Jewish masses,” politically quietist; and Ashkenazim, entirely modern arrivals concentrated in Cairo’s Darb al-Barabira quarter, with a separate communal organization from 1865, Yiddish in the streets, a Yiddish theater group and a Yiddish program on Egyptian state radio until the 1950s, looked down on by the Sephardim. The Karaites — some 5,000 in 1948 — are introduced at length: rejecters of the Talmud who date their community to the late second temple period and to ‘Anan ben David (ca. 754–75), established in Fustat by the ninth century, declared heretical by Sa’adya ben Yosef al-Fayyumi (882–942), strong under the Tulunids (868–969) and Fatimids (969–1171); estranged from Rabbanites in the Russian empire after Catherine II’s 1795 exemptions and the German Ministry of Interior’s 1939 declaration that Karaites were not Jews — but in Egypt “there was never any doubt that the Karaites were Jews,” the traditional bans on intermarriage defended by the last Karaite chief rabbi, Tuvia Babovitch (r. 1934–56), against Murad Farag (1866–1956) and his protégés, who called for intermarriage and closer ties, with the two quarters, harat al-yahud and harat al-yahud al-qara’in, adjacent and the communities drawing together socially through the twentieth century.
Introduction: “Authenticity and Cosmopolitanism” (lines 110-123)
Against the canons of nationalist historiography, which would reconstruct an originary, authentic Jewish identity separable from an originary, authentic Egyptian identity, “This book seeks to denaturalize these categories and adopts the view that ethnonational identities are historically and socially constructed.” The title “intentionally inverts Zionist imagery by suggesting that Egypt can be considered a center of Jewish life from which a diaspora was generated.” The community’s cosmopolitanism is historicized — French in the schools from the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s proselytization, legal privileges through European connections, Mediterranean kinship — and also rooted in the classical Arabo-Islamic heritage: Fatimid dinars circulating from Muscovy to India, shari’a as the Mediterranean’s merchant law, Cairo as the Arab world’s premier intellectual center in the last third of the nineteenth century. Jews were “different from” their Muslim and Christian neighbors in religion and institutions and “the same as” them in languages, newspapers, trades, neighborhoods, foods and films — until the struggle against the British occupation, the establishment of Israel and the Arab-Zionist conflict “radically altered” the conditions supporting the two cosmopolitanisms. For all their diversity, Egyptian Jews also shared communal structures, historical memories, and contemporary attachments that distinguished them from French or even Syrian Jews; individuals and groups held a wide range of ideas about these elements, and “most of them probably did not think consciously about such issues at all.”
Introduction: “Interdisciplinary Renegotiation of History, Diaspora, and Memory” (lines 124-176)
The book is “a self-consciously interdisciplinary text structured not by an overarching linear historical narrative… but by the themes of identity, dispersion, and the struggle over retrieval of identity”. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that positivist history is inseparable from the coerced imposition of modernity, and James Clifford’s case of the Mashpee Indians of Cape Cod, Massachusetts — whose claims to land and recognition were denied when the court ruled the community was not a tribe, a trial he suggested “can be seen as a struggle between history and anthropology” — are accepted with a reservation: “I would insist that the historically formed social sources of the court’s power are as much a part of Mashpee identity as the community’s discursive self-representation.” Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is criticized for detaching Zionism from “the concrete history of the Zionist project’s historical alliance with British imperialism in the Middle East from 1917 to 1939 and with U.S. hegemony in the region from the mid-1960s to the present”; Deleuze and Guattari’s “Nomadology” is dismissed as unrelated to any contemporary social structure, against Ines in Ronit Matalon’s Zeh ‘im ha-panim eleynu: “A person does not need roots, he needs a home.” Ines reluctantly abandoned her roots in Egypt to move to Israel in the 1950s; rhizomatic connections and a life of nomadism were not alternatives she or others in her circumstances could embrace. After dispersion, Egyptian Jews were constrained by passports, wealth, languages, education and political commitments, and by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, decolonization, Arab socialism, pan-Arabism, Egypt’s defeats of 1948, 1956 and 1967, and the 1979 treaty. Rushdie’s “description is itself a political act” is endorsed, but no consensus countermemory is possible: “Countermemory tends to be fragmentary, dispersed, and disunited.” Part 1 uses social, political and cultural history; Part 2 ethnography and oral history; Part 3 cultural and social history and literary analysis. The oral-history method is forced by closed archives — the Cairo and Alexandria communities’ papers may not be read, and part of the Cairo archive was illegally removed to become the “Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection: Records of the Jewish Community of Cairo, 1886–1961” at Yeshiva University. In May 1993 Emile Risso, acting president of Cairo’s Jewish community, refused access — “Ma lish da’wa bi’l-ta’rikh” (I have nothing to do with history) — and a Suq al-Hamzawi merchant said the mukhabarat had instructed him not to speak freely; when one of the three Jewish women still living in harat al-yahud began telling of her career as a dancer and actress, Beinin could not decide what to make of her story — she “appeared somewhat demented” — and the host insisted she exaggerated grossly, though very likely motivated, at least to some extent, by concern not to be identified with information about Jews given to a foreigner: “Here were clear instances in which the subaltern could not speak.” The author does not claim to “speak for” Egyptian Jews.
Introduction: “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab history” (lines 177-197)
Bat-Ye’or (Giselle Littman), an Egyptian Jew living in Switzerland since 1956, is presented as the leading exponent of what Mark R. Cohen termed “the neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history”; her Les juifs en Egypte (1971) appeared in an expanded Hebrew version in 1974 (Ma’ariv Library and the World Jewish Congress) “on the initiative of the [Israeli] Ministry of Education and Culture with the participation of the Department for Sephardic Communities of the World Zionist Organization,” consecrating her perspective “as the normative Zionist interpretation of the history of Jews in Egypt” — a conscious challenge to the more positive self-image the community’s leaders, including Zionists, had held before 1948, and enabled by Egyptian Jews’ near silence about their lives from 1948 to the late 1970s. Against Cohen, two distinctly Israeli sources of the perspective are identified: the need to counter resurgent Palestinian claims after 1967 (some adherents arguing that roughly equivalent numbers of Middle Eastern Jews had fled and lost property, so “the Palestinians had no valid claim against Israel”), and Mizrahi claims to redress for discrimination in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, in which a narrative of unrelenting suffering under Islam asserted a status comparable to Ashkenazi survivors and distanced Mizrahim from stigmatized Arab culture — “the price of admission to Israeli society.” Yehoshafat Harkabi’s post-1967 Arab Attitudes to Israel is named a further source. The 1974 institutional sponsorship belongs to a new school of Israeli historical writing integrating Middle Eastern Jews into a national narrative whose two themes are “the relentless oppression and suffering of Jews in the diaspora and the modern secular redemption of Jews by Zionism.”
Introduction: “Alternatives To Neo-lachrymosity” (lines 198-210)
The mirror image — the common Arab claim that Jews were always well treated in the lands of Islam — is rejected in the same terms, as is the newer Arab nationalist and Islamist claim that the Jews betrayed Egypt by collaborating with imperialism and embracing Zionism (critiqued in Chapter 9). Against Bat-Ye’or: nothing in medieval Jewish-Arab history compares to the expulsion from Spain, and nothing in modern Jewish-Arab history to the Nazi mass murder, but “communities and individuals live in specific moments, not broad historical tendencies,” and there were “more than occasional instances of socially structured discrimination against Jews in Egypt,” in the twentieth century linked to colonization and decolonization, the British occupation of 1882–1956, and the Arab-Zionist conflict. The sketch that follows runs from Jewish support for the 1919 uprising (with Yusuf Cicurel Bey and Yusuf ‘Aslan Qattawi Pasha regarding themselves as nationalist Egyptians while wary of the Wafd’s populism) through nominal independence in 1922, the abolition of the Capitulations in 1937, the Company Law of 1947 and the abolition of the mixed courts in 1949, to the Free Officers’ July 23, 1952 coup and the regime’s markers: the October 1954 evacuation agreement, the abolition of the communal courts in 1955, the Suez Canal nationalization and the 1956 confiscation of British, French and Jewish property, and the nationalizations of 1961–62 — with the caution that “Listing these measures in chronological succession creates the impression of an inexorable trend, but this was not the perception of most contemporary observers.”
Introduction: “Operation Susannah” (lines 211-222)
“The most salient symbol of the transformation of the status of Jews in Egypt was Operation Susannah.” In July 1954 Israeli military intelligence ordered its espionage network of Egyptian Jews, formed three years earlier, to firebomb the main Alexandria post office, the United States Information Service library in Cairo, the Cairo train station, and several movie theaters in Cairo and Alexandria. The trial (December 1954) and sentences (January 1955): Sami (Shmu’el) Azar and Musa (Moshe) Marzuq to death, as were the handlers John Darling (Avraham Dar) and Paul Frank (Avraham Seidenwerg) in absentia; Marcelle Ninio and Robert Dassa to life; Victor Levy and Philip Natanson to fifteen years; Me’ir Meyuhas and Me’ir Za’fran to seven years; Caesar Cohen and Eli Na’im acquitted; Max Binnet’s suicide in jail; Armand Karmona’s death in interrogation, by suicide or beating. Two possible objectives are canvassed — derailing the British evacuation from the Canal Zone, or a deliberate initiation and exposure by Ben-Gurion loyalists to break up secret Egyptian-Israeli negotiations and prevent a Sharett–Nasser meeting. Documents have “apparently been destroyed by the governments of Israel, the United States, and Britain or are unavailable,” so the perennial question “Who gave the order?” — the focus of the 1960 Lavon Affair (ha-‘esek ha-bish, “the mishap”) — cannot be answered by traditional political history; the book therefore treats the operation’s discursive aspects in Chapters 2 and 4 (see Operation Susannah).
Introduction: “From Pillars of the Community To Compradors” (lines 223-233)
The community as a whole was identified with the cosmopolitan culture, international business connections and foreign citizenship of its wealthiest members, and as Mutamassirun its status was undermined by decolonization — most mutamassirun left after 1956, suggesting many Jews might have left in the 1950s regardless of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The inquiry is framed by three propositions: “(1) Only a small minority of Jews were active Zionists, even after 1948. (2) Most Jews who left Egypt after 1948, especially those with enough resources to have a choice, did not go to Israel. (3) Wherever Egyptian Jews did go, including Israel, many of them reconstructed forms of communal life and collective practices that preserved a link between them and Egypt.” The Company Law of 1947 (75 percent of salaried employees, 90 percent of workers and 51 percent of paid-up capital to be Egyptian) forced firms to answer the constructed question “Who is an Egyptian?” The Cicurel store illustrates the answer’s instability: specified as an approved “national store” in the Wafd’s 1921–22 boycott and described by its own firm in 1948 as “one of the pillars of our [Egyptian national] economic independence,” it was firebombed in 1948 and burned in the Cairo fire of January 26, 1952, rebuilt with government support both times, then sequestered in 1956. “Between 1919 and 1956, the entire Egyptian Jewish community, like the Cicurel firm, was transformed from a national asset into a fifth column.”
Introduction: “Middle Eastern Jews (mizrahim) and the Zionist National Narrative” (lines 234-247)
Mizrahim felt excluded and neglected by the MAPAI- and Labor-led governments of the 1950s and 1960s: labor Zionism was a self-consciously European synthesis whose institutions (the Histadrut, the kibutzim [as printed], the Haganah, the Palmah) most Mizrahim had no links to; except for the old yishuv’s descendants and several thousand Yemenis brought to mandate Palestine “by Zionist authorities seeking Jewish workers who would work for Arab wages,” only a small minority had participated in the Zionist project before 1948. On arrival in large numbers in the 1950s their customs were discounted as “primitive”; by conscious decision they were settled in development towns, moshavim, or “in the former homes of recently departed Palestinian refugees in cities such as Jaffa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, and Tiberias,” their role “to establish a Jewish population in territories and neighborhoods previously inhabited by Palestinian Arabs and to occupy the bottom ranks of the Jewish labor force.” Their alienation supplied the votes that brought the first Likud government to power in 1977, after which the Eurocentric history of Zionism was extensively revised to assert a Middle Eastern Zionist movement and Mizrahi contributions to the state; the reassertion of Egyptian Jewish identity examined in Chapter 8 is both part of that Mizrahi self-assertion and a function of Egyptian-Israeli relations (see Mizrahim).
Introduction: “Encountering Egypt” (lines 248-293)
Part 2’s three case studies are announced — the ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir graduates of Kibutz Nahshonim and Kibutz ‘Ein-Shemer, the communist émigrés in Paris, and the Karaites of the San Francisco Bay Area — chosen not as representative (the Zionists and communists are “expressly atypical”) but because neither national narrative comprehends them. The author’s own formation follows: the summer of 1969 in Cairo studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo, suspicious and blacked-out after 1967; his friendship with “Ahmad” (the one name in the book altered to protect an interlocutor, per note 40), to whom he confessed his Zionism and ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir membership; Ahmad’s disappearance; the summons to the Mugamma’, where an official asked, “Why did you put down that you are Jewish on your visa application?” and had him write his departure date, flight and the words “for good”; his meetings with PLO-supporting Palestinian students at AUC and the PLO’s Cairo office; emigration in 1970 with some sixty ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir graduates to Kibutz Lahav; the Hebrew University student new left, arrests at demonstrations, and his conclusion “that I was no longer a Zionist and that I could not serve in the Israeli army and enforce the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”; return to the United States in 1973; Detroit auto plants and the Arabic section of a workers’ newspaper for the Arab community of Dearborn and southwest Detroit; and the Ph.D. turn to Egypt on his mentor Richard P. Mitchell’s advice. The first Egyptian Jews he met were members of the 1940s communist organizations. See Joel Beinin.
Introduction: Notes 1-40 (lines 294-467)
The notes carry the full citations for the Introduction’s evidence and several substantive judgments: Krämer (1989), pp. 234–35; El-Kodsi, The Karaite Jews of Egypt, 1882–1986 (1987) and Algamil (1985), with the added fact that in 1996 the last formally affiliated male Karaite in Cairo, Yusuf al-Qudsi, died; Mark R. Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish-Arab History,” Tikkun 6 (May–June 1991):55–60, moderated in Under Crescent and Cross (1994); note 26’s verdicts on Martin Gilbert’s The Jews of Arab Lands: Their History in Maps (1976) — “a propaganda tract rather than a piece of scholarship,” with “errors, inflated numbers, and tendentious “facts.”” — and on Norman Stillman’s and Bernard Lewis’s books; note 29’s observation that Harkabi’s 1980s work “substantially repudiates” Arab Attitudes to Israel (1972) though he never admitted changing his mind; note 30’s source for the Egyptian official claim, Egypt, Ministry of Information, The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt ([1955]), p. 5, the examined copy in USNA RG 84; notes 32–33 on the exposure thesis (Avri El-Ad’s Decline of Honor, 1976; Stephen Green, Taking Sides, 1984) and on Shabtai Teveth’s ‘Onat ha-gez (1992) as “a systematic apology for Ben-Gurion” to “be used with great caution”; note 36, Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism (1983), p. 116, for the Cicurel store’s approved status; and note 40, the Ahmad name alteration.
Part One: “Discourses and Materialities of Identity” — Chapter 2: “Communitarianisms, Nationalisms, Nostalgias” (lines 468-698)
The chapter opens on Operation Susannah, “the most salient political event in the life of the Jewish community of Egypt from 1949 to 1956,” and on the authorized collective memoir of four of its prisoners — Robert Dassa, Victor Levy, Philip Natanson and Marcelle Ninio — told by Aviezer Golan (note 1: Operation Susannah, New York: Harper & Row, 1978; Hebrew Mivtza’ suzanah, 1976). The four reached Israel in the prisoner exchange after the 1967 war after fourteen years in Egyptian jails; their presence was an official secret until 1971, and only in March 1975 did the Israeli government acknowledge they had been trained and directed by the Israeli army. Golan nonetheless denied treason: the foursome “were born and brought up in Egypt, but they never regarded themselves—nor were they ever regarded by others—as Egyptians.…It was a community with shallow roots.…[t]hey could not read or write Arabic…All of Egypt’s Jews could have been considered Zionists—or, to be more precise, “lovers of Zion.”” (note 2, pp. 5–6). Against this, Minister of Interior Zakariyya Muhyi al-Din at the arrest press conference stressed that most Egyptian Jews were loyal citizens, that some approached by Israeli agents had refused, and that the government would treat harshly only the minority who committed espionage while treating “the non-Zionists with the kindness and respect due to every decent citizen” (notes 3–4); prosecutor Fu’ad al-Digwi closed: “The Jews of Egypt are living among us and are sons of Egypt. Egypt makes no difference between its sons whether Moslems, Christians, or Jews” (note 5). “These contradictory representations of the identity and consequent obligations of Egyptian Jews are products of the national narratives of Israel and Egypt. Both national projects required Jews to identify unequivocally with one or the other.” Egyptian Jews in fact maintained “more complex multiple identities and loyalties,” inflected by class, ethnic origin, rite, education, political outlook and personal accident; “Forced to decide between Egypt and Israel, most chose to make new homes in other diasporas."
"Between Two Homelands: Egyptian Jewish Representations of Egypt” (lines 485-513)
Egyptian Jews themselves invoked the ancient bond to legitimate their residence: the 1942 Annuaire des Juifs d’Egypte et du proche-orient, edited by the avowed Zionist Maurice Fargeon, traced Joseph, Goshen and Moses — “Thus the first halutzim [pioneers] of history were the Jews of Egypt led by Moses and then Joshua” (note 7) — with some Jews remaining after the Exodus at Asyut and later joined by Jeremiah and Barukh (note 8); the 1945–46 edition even derived Jewish monotheism from the cult of Ra and several commandments and rituals from ancient Egypt, after Renan (notes 9–10) — assertions whose weak evidence “does not diminish their significance in the construction of Egyptian Jewish identity”. The narrative disputed both Young Egypt and the Society of Muslim Brothers, antagonistic to the Jewish presence by the late 1930s with a “romantic-reactionary vision of the Egyptian nation,” and the Zionist “negation of the diaspora.” Between the wars, dual commitments were livable: Léon Castro ran Wafd propaganda in Europe, edited the pro-Wafd La Liberté, headed the Zionist Organization of Cairo and served as the Jewish Agency’s representative in Egypt in the 1940s; Félix Benzakein was simultaneously a Wafd deputy, an Alexandria rabbinical court member and president of the Zionist Organization of Alexandria, remaining in Egypt until 1960 (note 12). Albert D. Mosseri’s open letter asked Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum to explain “that one can be an excellent patriot of the country of one’s birth while being a perfect Jewish nationalist. One does not exclude the other” (note 11); Nahum, “a consistent anti-Zionist throughout his tenure in office (1924–60),” refused. The 1936–39 Arab Revolt strained dual commitments and 1948 nearly ended them — yet the chapter insists on the sequel Zionist historiography omits: the May 1948 internments at Huckstep, Abu Qir and al-Tur (with the communists, including some 300 Jews, and the Muslim Brothers), the sequestrations and the summer 1948 attacks the government did little to stop; then about 20,000 departures in 1949–50, of whom 14,299 settled in Israel (note 15); the July 1949 amnesty, the January 1950 release of all internees, and reports from Zionist activists and emissaries themselves (notes 16–18) that a Jewish community would continue in Egypt — Benzakein in 1961 still expecting Jews to “come back in peace to resume our unalterable friendship with the [Egyptian] people.” “Ultimately, perhaps 45 percent of all Egyptian Jews resettled in Israel; others reestablished their communities in Europe and the Americas.” As late as 1965 the Alexandrine Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon, by then a Knesset member, memorialized the executed Shmu’el Azar in a book arguing accommodation between the Egyptian and Israeli national movements was possible and desirable (note 13).
”Millet, Minority, and Citizenship” (lines 514-533)
The Egyptian narrative is “similarly flawed” because its secular-liberal nation “has never been fully realized.” Under the Ottoman millet system, in force until 1914, Jews were a protected religious community whose affairs ran through autonomous institutions and rabbinical courts — by the twentieth century used mainly for personal status. This identity “can be termed communitarianism: the worldview and self-perception of Jews (and other non-Muslims) living in a multi-ethnic, multiconfessional empire,” with high toleration, communal autonomy and cultural symbiosis inside a hierarchy Muslims headed. Secular-liberal nationalism promised to abolish the hierarchy, “But by dividing citizens into a “majority” and “minorities,” secular-liberalism created new and somewhat less transparent forms of hierarchy” (note 19). The 1919 slogan “Religion is for God and the homeland is for all” (al-din li’llah wa’l-watan li’l-jami’) invited Jews into citizenship, but mixed courts (1876–1949) preserved colonial legal separatism and the communal courts survived until 1955 because shari’a court authority “derived from the same conceptual order” — “Until Gamal Abdel Nasser, no political leader commanded sufficient authority to challenge it.” By the late 1930s many Egyptians rearticulated nationalism in pan-Arab or Islamist terms excluding Jews (note 20). The citizenship figures expose the gap between slogan and practice: autochthonous Jews entitled under the 1929 nationality law were at least half the community at the century’s turn, “But in 1948, only 5,000–10,000 of Egypt’s 75,000–80,000 Jews held Egyptian citizenship. Some 40,000 were stateless, and 30,000 were foreign nationals” (note 22) — many of them the poor Arabic-speakers of Cairo’s Rabbanite and Karaite Jewish quarters and Alexandria’s harat al-liman (note 23). Foreign citizenship had been bought from consuls in an era when “the category of Egyptian citizen did not exist”; certification was cumbersome, rarely needed before the Company Law of 1947, and Nahum’s encouragement of applications in the 1930s–40s met bureaucratic delay and rejection — treatment shared by Syrian Christians, Greeks, Italians and Armenians, “not directed specifically at Jews” (note 24). Egyptian Jews thus “blended elements of communitarianism and nationalism in practices and worldviews shaped by the European presence in the Middle East yet incompatible with the logic of the nation-state."
"The Karaites: An Arab Jewish Community” (lines 534-574)
The Karaites — in Egypt over 1,000 years, goldsmiths and jewelers of harat al-yahud al-qara’in whose family names (al-Sirgani) still mark Cairo’s gold market — are the limiting case of Egyptian belonging: in all respects except religious practice their daily lives “were indistinguishable from those of their Muslim neighbors”. Their communal council (organized March 1901) bore the archaic name majlis milli, “the Karaites’ self-conception as an ethnic-religious Ottoman millet” (notes 25–26); their newspaper defined the community by religion and “the law of our lord Moses” (shari’at sayyidina musa) (note 27); their chief rabbi mourned the shaykh of al-Azhar in 1945 with condolences “to the Egyptian nation and the Eastern countries” (al-umma al-misriyya wa’l-aqtar al-sharqiyya), “a formulation implying that Egypt was a Muslim country, not a secular-liberal state” (note 28). Their own history legitimated them through Islam: present at ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As’s conquest, granted the Basatin cemetery and jizya exemption, enjoying good relations except under the Fatimid al-Hakim (note 31). “By the 1940s, most Karaites had only partially assimilated the secular-liberal notions of citizenship and nationality recently introduced to Egypt. They saw themselves as a protected religious minority in a Muslim country”. The Young Karaite Jewish Association (formed 1937) and its Arabic bimonthly Al-Kalim (to 1956) pushed communal reform — Hebrew study, scouts, orchestra, theater, women’s status (note 33) — and won seven of ten council seats in 1946 (note 34); editor Eli Amin Lisha’ urged participation in national holidays “because our Egyptian citizenship requires this” (note 35). Al-Kalim’s “Abu Ya’qub” cartoon, its term “abna’ al-balad” (sons of the country), its Arabic place-names (“Nablus,” “al-Quds al-sharif,” “Filastin”) (note 37), its zagal poetry and its celebration of Da’ud Husni (notes 38–40) all substantiate the paper’s claim of authentic Egyptianness. Yet in October 1949 a governorate official rejected the Karaite court’s judges’ citizenship claims and demanded certificates he admitted Egyptians generally lacked; council head Jacques Mangubi answered, “It is known that we are Egyptians. The government must determine if we are foreigners or Egyptians. And as long as we are not foreigners, then we are Egyptians,” and Yusuf Kamal called the difficulty of obtaining certificates one of “reasons not hidden from anyone” (note 44). “This incident indicates, in a small but crucial way, that even Jews who regarded themselves as fully Egyptian and who eschewed political Zionism were not treated exactly like other Egyptians”. The community had a religious love of Zion without organized political Zionism (notes 47–48), but stepping beyond its boundaries exposed some youth: several hundred young Karaites emigrated to Israel in 1948–56 against Babovitch’s advice (note 49), among them Moshe Marzuq, a he-Halutz and Haganah member who became the Cairo network’s commander and was executed — a chilling blow to the community (notes 50–51). Still, “a significant proportion of the Karaites remained in Egypt until the 1960s,” longer than the Rabbanites, before the forces excluding Jews prevailed.
”Cosmopolitanism and Egyptianism: The Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie” (lines 575-612)
The haute bourgeoisie held that lacking long residence and Arabic culture made them no less Egyptian. Yusuf ‘Aslan Qattawi Pasha (1861–1942), president of the Cairo Sephardi council 1924–42, built the Egyptian Sugar Company and the Kom Ombo Company (70,000 acres in Aswan Province) with the Suarès family (note 52); Tal’at Harb began his career in their employ (note 53), and Qattawi and Yusuf Cicurel were founding directors of Bank Misr in 1920, Qattawi its vice-president. Qattawi — pasha in 1912, deputy for Kom Ombo 1915–22, member of the committee that drafted the 1923 constitution, minister under Ziwar Pasha 1924–25, senator from 1927, his wife chief lady in waiting to Queens Farida and Nazli — “considered himself an Egyptian patriot” of a “socially conservative and business oriented” nationalism, and led the council in a consistent non-Zionism (note 54). His sons ‘Aslan and René succeeded him; René (council president to 1946) promoted the Association of Egyptian Jewish Youth’s 1935 manifesto “Egypt is our homeland, Arabic is our language” (note 55), sent the November 1944 “Note on the Jewish Question” to the World Jewish Congress with Edwin Goar (note 57), fought Léon Castro over the Zionist youth camps, and resigned in August 1946 (note 58). Such intercommunal alliances were common to the Adès, Aghion, Goar, Mosseri, Nahman, Pinto, Rolo and Tilche families (note 59). The Cicurel firm sat midway: Moreno Cicurel, an Izmir migrant holding Italian citizenship, opened the department store in 1909; Yusuf Cicurel Bey was a Bank Misr founding director in 1920; Salvator Cicurel — Swiss-educated, managing director, Chamber of Commerce executive, national fencing champion and captain of the 1928 Olympic fencing team, bey in 1937 — led the community 1946–57 and was a founding member of the Friends of the Hebrew University in 1934 without being a political Zionist (note 61). The chain, “Egypt’s largest and most fashionable,” a purveyor to the palace, was spared administration in 1948 by royal favor, bombed on July 19, 1948, burned in the 1952 Cairo fire and rebuilt under Naguib, then sequestered in 1956, the family ceding its majority to a Muslim-headed group and Salvator leaving for France in 1957. The author’s count from The Egyptian Who’s Who quantifies the elite’s persistence (note 62): 892 Jewish names in 1947; 43.5 percent left after the 1948 war; 504 still listed in 1952; 472 in 1956, 52.9 percent of the 1947 figure, including 170 names new since 1947; at least 251 as late as 1959. “Between the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1956 a substantial portion of the Jewish elite remained in Egypt and continued to occupy positions in its economic life in numbers far greater than their proportion of the Egyptian population, though their role was gradually diminishing” — and those who left mostly chose Europe or the Americas, not Israel.
”French Culture, Radical Politics, and Middle-Class Jewish Youth” (lines 613-634)
The Alliance Israélite Universelle’s 1860 “mission civilisatrice” made French the business community’s lingua franca and a requirement for white-collar work, so “many Egyptian Jews willingly underwent de-Arabization” (note 63); Victor Sanua estimated more than half the students in Cairo’s Catholic schools were Jewish (note 64). French education’s political inflection “was often toward the left”; Jacqueline Kahanoff’s schoolyard memoir is quoted: “We thought ourselves to be Socialist, even Communist, and in our school yard we ardently discussed the Blum government, the civil war in Spain, revolution, materialism, and the rights of women, particularly free love.…Revolution, which would destroy a world where we did not have our rightful place, would create another, where we could belong.…We would no longer be what we were, but become free citizens of the universe” (note 65). The Jewish schools became centers of the Zionist youth movements: the largest, ha-‘Ivri ha-Tza’ir, the Egyptian branch of ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir affiliated after 1948 with Mapam (note 66); and Dror-he-Halutz ha-Tza’ir (formed 1949–50), whose Alexandria lycée base taught Marxism-Leninism in geography class and criticism-and-self-criticism to nine-year-olds (note 67), and whose left wing, concluding “that the kibutz was not a revolutionary institution at all,” liquidated the movement in June 1952, most senior members becoming communists in Egypt, Israel or France (note 68). “In the early 1950s, the boundary between communism and socialist Zionism was permeable” (note 70). Except for the Zionist minority, the Francophone middle-class youth saw themselves as part of Egypt; the Marxists, “especially the followers of Henri Curiel (see Chapter 6), consciously sought to Egyptianize themselves”. Zionism and communism were both “strategies for resolving the contradictions of being Jewish in Egypt that relied on the same modernist political categories,” and parents “were often just as displeased by youthful political activism whether it was Zionist or communist."
"Nostalgias: Beyond Nationalism?” (lines 635-698)
Three writers test the narratives. Rahel Maccabi’s Mitzrayim sheli (My Egypt) — by an Alexandrine who emigrated in 1935, joined a ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir kibutz and became a Haganah and army officer — portrays a childhood “almost entirely isolated from everything Arab or Egyptian,” minimal Arabic, and the conclusion “that the world of the Egyptians is frightening” (notes 71–74); first published as essays in the Canaanite journal Keshet in 1965, the book “affirms the Zionist national narrative” and found its market in post-1967 triumphalism; Maccabi disliked the title’s sentimental suggestion and would have preferred “Qantara-West” — the last train station in Egypt on the way to Palestine (note 75). Kahanoff, whose essays Aharon Amir translated for Keshet, is the counter-case: her Levantine synthesis (see Levantinism) held Europe “inseparably part of us” while sympathizing with Muslim nationalists (notes 76–78); blocked in the national arena and in harat al-yahud, where her clinic was accused of advocating birth control and Zionism, she left in 1940 — “I loved Egypt, but could no longer bear to be part of it” (note 79) — and moved to Israel in 1954 (note 80); the Ashkenazi cultural establishment praised her sensitivity while dismissing Levantinism itself, one critic calling her aspirations “fruitful illusions” (note 81). Only after Sadat’s 1977 visit could middle-class Egyptian Jews contest Maccabi’s representation in Israel; Kahanoff’s collected essays, Mi-mizrah shemesh, were warmly received (note 82). Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren’s Kayitz aleksandroni (An Alexandrian summer) relishes unstable dualities — a Turkish Muslim jockey converted to Judaism, Muslim servants speaking French — opening: “Here, in the Land of Israel, which lies on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Sometimes you wonder if Vilna is really the Jerusalem of Lithuania or if Jerusalem is the Vilna of the Land of Israel” (note 83); reviewers patronized or recoiled (“if this is Mediterraneanism, then it is better for us for now to remain on the coast of the Baltic Sea,” note 88), and Dan Miron dismissed the sequel Blanche as “Alexandrian kitsch” (notes 90–91). The chapter closes with Robert Dassa’s Be-hazarah le-kahir (Return to Cairo), published by Israel’s Ministry of Defense after his 1979 return as an Israeli television journalist: Dassa oscillates between the official narrative (a show trial; Paul Frank a double agent; no connection to Egypt) and disclosures that undermine it — a mixed Alexandria childhood without apparent anti-Semitism, Zionism “quite an exceptional thing in the Egyptian Jewish community,” a sister married to a Muslim Egyptian in Muntazah (notes 94–99) — and accuses Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan of leaving the prisoners in jail twelve extra years after 1956 as a political embarrassment (note 100). His confessions decide the chapter’s argument: “I do not come to Egypt as a tourist. I never was and never will be a tourist there. I come to it as a free citizen, and only there can I express the full feeling of liberation” (note 101); “In order to feel complete freedom, I need to walk freely in the streets of Cairo. Only there do I feel that I really have been released” (note 103). “Aviezer Golan’s attempt to impose the Zionist representation of Jewish identity on the “heroes” of Operation Susannah obliterates the complex multivocality of Egyptian Jewish identities and histories.…Operation Susannah illustrates one of many instances in which Israel was actively complicit in that exclusion.”
Chapter 2: Notes 1-6 (lines 699-724)
The chapter’s notes begin at the end of this part’s range. Note 1 gives the Golan memoir’s full citation (above); note 2, ibid., pp. 5–6; note 3, al-Ahram, Oct. 6, 1954, p. 1 (Muhyi al-Din’s statement); note 4, Egypt, Ministry of Information, The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt ([1955]), pp. 25, 61; note 5, the prosecutor’s statement through the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Jan. 6, 1955, as quoted in Don Peretz, “Egyptian Jews Today” (AJC report, Jan. 1956), pp. 35–36; note 6, al-Musawwar, Oct. 15, Oct. 29 and Dec. 17, 1954, and Hasan al-Husayni, “Ma’a jawasis isra’il fi al-sijn,” Jan. 7, 1955. Notes 7–103 fall in the next part’s range.
Chapter 2: Notes 7-103 (lines 725-1127)
The remaining notes complete Chapter 2’s evidentiary apparatus. Notes 7–18 document the Egyptian Jewish self-representations: Fargeon’s Annuaire editions of 1942 (pp. 117, 118) and 1945–46 (pp. 80–86), Renan’s Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (p. 34), Mosseri’s 1925 “L’espoir d’un vieux sioniste” as quoted in Laskier, Mizrahi’s L’Egypte et ses Juifs (pp. 37–44) and Krämer (pp. 126, 128), Kohen-Tzidon’s 1965 Azar/Marzuq book, Laskier (p. 187), the Jewish Agency report of a Jew who left Egypt at the end of 1949 (CZA S20/552, p. 13), Haim Sha’ul’s March 12, 1950 report (CZA), and Benzakein’s “A History in Search of a Historian”. Notes 19–24 cover communitarianism, nationality law and citizenship: Rodrigue’s “Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire” (interview with Nancy Reyonolds [as printed]), Gershoni and Jankowski’s Beyond the Nile Valley, Shamir on the nationality laws (pp. 41, 58, 34), the Haganah’s September 1, 1947 report on its Egypt activities, and note 24’s admission that “There are no statistics available, but the testimony of Egyptian Jews is nearly unanimous on this point.” Notes 25–51 are built almost entirely on al-Kalim (issues from April 1, 1945 to December 16, 1955) and on interviews (Maurice Shammas, Jerusalem, May 5, 1994; Lazare Bianco by Shlomo Barad, March 6, 1985; Nelly Masliah, San Francisco, May 8, 1992; Yosef Marzuk by Barad, Tel Aviv, July 17, 1985). Note 26 records, through Shammas, Nahum’s point that Turkish milla means “a people,” with the comment that the Karaite phrase “could not but invoke the late Ottoman millet conception”; note 43 records that when the communal courts were abolished in 1955 the Karaite community publicly supported the decision (Abu Ya’qub, “Tawhid al-quda’,” al-Kalim, Nov. 1, 1955); note 47 is a substantive correction of Krämer: the only reference in al-Kalim between 1945 and May 15, 1948 to anything that could be considered Zionism is Lieto Ibrahim Nunu’s July 1, 1945 letter encouraging Karaite youth to settle in Jerusalem so the one Karaite resident could perform his religious obligations — framed in religious communal terms, by neither a regular contributor nor a recognized leader — and Krämer’s reference to it as a call for ‘aliyah (p. 214) is suspected to rely on Siham Nassar’s al-Yahud al-misriyyun (1979), p. 75 — Krämer does not appear to have read al-Kalim. Notes 52–62 cover the haute bourgeoisie: the Qattawi biography in Krämer (pp. 94–101) and Eric Davis’s Challenging Colonialism (pp. 91–97); Israël, Nov. 18, 1937, quoted in Bat Ye’or’s “Zionism in Islamic Lands” (1977):27; Cattaoui and Goar’s “Note sur la question juive” (CZA S25/5218); Krämer, The Jews in Modern [title truncated as printed], pp. 201–202; the Cicurel sources; and note 62’s source for the Who’s Who count, Blattner’s Le Mondain égyptien editions of 1947, 1952, 1954, 1956 and 1959, with Ethel Carasso’s less comprehensive 1982 analysis. Notes 63–70 cover French culture and radical youth: Rodrigue’s French Jews, Turkish Jews, Sanua (p. 283), Kahanoff’s Mi-mizrah shemesh (p. 17) with the author’s correction of “the omission of a critical word in The Jerusalem Quarterly version that changed a meaning entirely,” his own Was the Red Flag Flying There?, Jacques Hassoun’s Paris interview (May 30, 1994) and movement archives at YTM; note 69 disputes Laskier (p. 155), whose claim that thirty senior members were expelled from ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir in June 1951 for primary loyalty to the Soviet Union was “emphatically denied” by Albert ‘Amar, Ninette Piciotto Braunstein and Benny Aharon (interview, Tel Aviv, Apr. 28, 1994) — “Laskier’s source may have been a report composed to impugn the reputation of MAPAM”; note 70 lists the family splits between Zionism and communism (Ninio, Costi/Keshet, Beressi, Matalon). Notes 71–103 document the nostalgias: Maccabi’s Mitzrayim sheli (pp. 90, 9, 30, and 10, 60, 83, 84–86) and her Hotam piece (Aug. 14, 1968); Kahanoff (pp. 17, 29, 31), Jacob’s Ladder (1951), Gorfin’s “fruitful illusions” review (‘Al ha-mishmar, Nov. 20, 1959) and Ginosar (1978); Gormezano-Goren’s Kayitz aleksandroni (pp. 9, 134, 136), the patronizing and hostile reviews (Kori’anski, Bramah, Shaked’s “nostalgic-folkloric” consignment to the “margins of literary life,” Perlis, Etinger), Blanche (pp. 80, 81), Miron’s Ha-‘olam ha-zeh piece (Apr. 8, 1987), Wolf’s “Alexandrian kitsch” and the Levit interview (Ma’ariv, Feb. 6, 1987); and Dassa’s Be-hazarah le-kahir (1992), cited at pp. 7, 18, 30, 14, 11, 12, 13, 15, 100, 102, 105, 106, 8, 10 and 111.
Chapter 3: “Citizens, Dhimmis, and Subversives” (lines 1128-1335)
The chapter takes as its epigraph the Egyptian UN delegate Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s pre-partition warning: “If Arab blood is shed in Palestine, Jewish blood will necessarily be shed elsewhere in the Arab world despite all the sincere efforts of the governments concerned to prevent such reprisals” (note 1). Its opening movement sets the post-1948 Israeli and diaspora-organization reports on Egypt’s Jews (World Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith; note 2) against their own frame: framed by secular-liberal citizenship discourse, they assumed Jewish life in Egypt should remain uninfluenced by the Arab-Israeli conflict, and even objected to Egypt’s ban on the Zionist activity that had been legal until 1948. Zionist discourse itself drew on illiberal, organicist conceptions of the nation — it sought the “new Jewish man,” not actually existing Jews — and “Israel’s treatment of its own minority population was no better, and arguably worse, than Egypt’s treatment of its Jews from 1948 to 1956”: Palestinian Arab citizens under military government until 1965, large-scale land expropriations for “Judaizing the Galilee,” and denial of Histadrut membership and consequently often employment under ‘avodah ‘ivrit (note 3). Zionist criticism served concern, propaganda and proof of the Zionist solution at once; its catalogs “certainly contain a measure of truth” but are “fundamentally flawed as characterizations,” informed by “a neolachrymose fatalism” [as printed]. Anti-Semitism in Egypt is presented as a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon, concentrated in Islamist and ultranationalist groups — the Society of Muslim Brothers and Young Egypt — while most Wafd and Liberal Constitutionalist supporters kept endorsing secular-liberal conceptions. Because Egypt and Israel were in a state of war from 1948 to 1979, “It is simply not credible to assert that Egypt’s invasion of Israel on May 15, 1948, was motivated by anti-Semitic malice”: the conflict grew out of the clash over land and labor in Palestine/Eretz Israel (note 4, on Shafir). Egyptian Jews were interpellated at once as citizens or “local subjects,” as dhimmis (ahl al-dhimma), and as a real or imagined security threat, and were ultimately rendered “a convenient other against whom Egypt’s postcolonial political culture was defined.” Haykal — whose party weekly had in 1938 distinguished Palestine’s Zionist settlers from Egypt’s Jews and defended the latter’s loyalty (note 5) — is read as both prophet and threatener: his warning admitted Jewish security was conditional on events their loyalty could not control, so official non-discrimination proclamations were “as inadequate as the Zionist litany of horrors” “In effect, the Jews of Egypt were held hostage pending the outcome of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both the Egyptian and the Israeli governments collaborated in this hostage taking,” while most Jews struggled to preserve a shrinking social space for both their Egyptian attachments and their Jewish identities.
”The Arab-Israeli Conflict and the Jews of Egypt” (lines 1150-1172)
Before the 1936–39 Revolt the dominant literate current regarded Egyptian Jews as full members of the nation and distinguished Judaism from Zionism (note 6, on Jankowski); after the 1929 Wailing Wall/Haram al-Sharif clash, al-Ahram reaffirmed secular nationalism with the 1919 slogan (note 7). The Muslim Brothers made Palestine a major force-making cause during the Revolt — volunteers, material aid, Muslim-and-Arab propaganda, and a boycott of Egyptian Jewish merchants, most not Zionists, expressing “the organization’s unwillingness to distinguish Jews from Zionists.” The Islamist, pan-Arab and national-chauvinist press (al-Rabita al-‘Arabiyya, Young Egypt) repeated European anti-Semitic stereotypes, complained of Jewish economic domination, declared Jews not “real Egyptians,” and its supporters were arrested for anti-Jewish propaganda and attempting to bomb Jewish neighborhoods (note 8, on Mayer and Laskier). The first popular base for militant anti-Zionism spilling into anti-Semitism appeared in the rioting of November 2–3, 1945: called by the Front of Arab and Islamic Associations for the Balfour Declaration anniversary, thousands marched to ‘Abdin Square, were addressed by Hasan al-Banna, then entered the Jewish quarter attacking bystanders, shops and synagogues; the next day rioting spread to European Cairo and Alexandria, where its main victims were non-Jews — six killed, several hundred injured, dozens of Jewish-, Coptic- and Muslim-owned stores looted, the gravest incident the burning of the Ashkenazi synagogue in Muski. Target selection suggests the most vulnerable Jews were those most identified with Europe, strengthened by the prominence of Greek casualties in Alexandria. Al-Nuqrashi, Faruq and ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Azzam Pasha denounced the violence, the king received Nahum, and most of the press condemned the riots — largely from fear of destabilization: “Such self-interested motives are often more reliable in political life than pious statements of principle.” The riots were “the first occasion in modern Egyptian history that Jews were collectively threatened by physical violence,” yet no unremitting escalation followed, and Muslims and Copts risked themselves to defend Jews — HADETU’s Mansura members standing guard before a Jewish-owned store, at the cost of letting police inventory their membership (note 9, Rif’at al-Sa’id interview). Nahum’s protest letter to al-Nuqrashi nonetheless validated the official discourse, affirming equal rights and asserting (incorrectly) that no synagogue had been desecrated in Egypt since the advent of Islam (note 10). Many Jews still believed they could mediate: Fargeon, an acknowledged Zionist, answered Taha Husayn’s November 1943 Alexandria lecture, “In fact, the Jews are Arabs” (note 11); after partition an Egyptian Jewish delegation travelled to the United States on a reconciliation mission, said by Mizrahi to have been blessed by al-Nuqrashi (notes 12–13), which American Zionist leaders repudiated — the chapter’s gloss: “many Egyptian Jews did not believe that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was in their interest if it entailed an all-out conflict with the entire Arab world."
"The 1948 Arab-Israeli War” (lines 1173-1201)
On May 15, 1948 Egypt invaded with four other Arab armies; al-Nuqrashi imposed martial law, Zionism became illegal, emissaries left and organizations disbanded or went underground, and public denunciations of Zionism were in some cases reasonably presumed coerced (note 14). Within days some 1,300 opponents across the spectrum were interned, including 300 Zionist Jews and a roughly equal number of Jewish communists; the maximum number of Jewish detainees at any one time was probably about 700–800 (note 15, with its El-Tor letter and the warning that other sources’ 1,000 figure “usually includes Jewish communists and a certain inflation due to distance from the spot”), the British ambassador reporting 554 interned at the end of June 1948 (note 16), and in July 1949, 250 Zionists and 60 Jewish communists remained at Huckstep (160), Abu Qir (110) and al-Tur (40) (note 17). Proportion is supplied by comparison, expressly without justifying detention without trial, to the 1942 internment of all 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast. A late May 1948 decree put the property of internees and those under surveillance under “administration”; by January 1949 about seventy Jewish individuals and firms were supervised (note 18) — the Adès, Chemla and Gattegno department stores and firms including J. H. Perez & Co. — several owners active Zionists who could perhaps legitimately be considered security risks, but the Perez family were not political Zionists and were perhaps caught as major investors in Palestine Hotels Ltd., owner of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel (note 19); the largest Jewish banks, insurers, brokerages and cotton firms were untouched, because the wealthiest families kept their distance from Zionism. In summer and fall 1948 Jews and their property were attacked repeatedly: the June 20 bomb in the Karaite quarter killing twenty-two Jews and wounding forty-one, which the authorities “unconvincingly blamed” on stored fireworks and Karaite-Rabbanite antagonism, with Jewish witnesses contradicting al-Ahram’s account of a prompt official response (notes 20–21) and al-Kalim leaving censored blank spaces in protest (note 22); the July 15 Israeli bombing near the Qubba Palace during the Ramadan iftar and the march on the Jewish quarter it provoked, the phantom second raid of July 17, and the bombings of Cicurel and Oreco (July 19), Adès (July 28) and Gattegno (August 1) (notes 23–24); the September 22 explosion in the Rabbanite quarter killing nineteen and wounding sixty-two; and the November 12 bombing of the Société Orientale de Publicité. The government’s response was “inept and disingenuous” out of fear of the Muslim Brothers, whose armed insurrection it believed was being prepared; al-Nuqrashi dissolved the Society on December 8, 1948 and sequestered its assets, and in a 1950 trial its members were charged with all the June–November bombings as a strategy to exploit Palestine to destabilize the regime (note 25). Defending the community would have risked an already illegitimate government’s popularity — the 1944 elections had been rigged to exclude the Wafd — so “sacrificing the security of the Jewish community was a small consideration compared to maintaining power”; a Brother assassinated al-Nuqrashi on December 28, and the government arranged Hasan al-Banna’s assassination in return (note 26). Al-Nuqrashi is quoted lecturing Ambassador Campbell that all “Jews were potential Zionists, but that anyhow all Zionists were communists” (note 27) — “Al-Nuqrashi apparently believed this nonsense. His personal anti-Semitism and political ineptitude may be a good part of the explanation” for the failures of 1948 — while his successor Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Hadi’s cosmopolitan style reassured the community and no violent incidents followed for several years. Detentions and sequestrations were erratic (Léon Castro never arrested; the non-Zionist exporter Isaac Vaena interned), and their modest scale encouraged some Jews to believe a comfortable future in Egypt remained possible.
”Emigration/‘Aliyah” (lines 1202-1216)
The war made emigration to Israel popular for the first time: by Jewish Agency figures, 16,514 Jews left Egypt for Israel between 1948 and 1951, concentrated in 1949–50, with some 6,000 more emigrating elsewhere, including communists expelled or leaving voluntarily for France (small numbers to Italy and England). Emigration declined after the Wafd’s January 1950 return, read by many Egyptians, not only Jews, as normalcy; from 1952 to 1956, 4,918 left for Israel and perhaps 5,000 for Europe and the Americas, leaving approximately 50,000 Jews in Egypt on the eve of the 1956 war. Sephardim remained longer than Ashkenazim: World Jewish Congress research counted 68,000 Jews in 1950 (65,000 Sephardim, 3,000 Ashkenazim) and 45,000 in 1954 (44,900 Sephardim, 100 Ashkenazim) — the study excluding the Karaites, for whom the author’s estimate is that at least 60 percent of the roughly 5,000 remained until 1956 and over 20 percent until the early 1960s; the pattern suggests Jews more assimilated to Arabo-Egyptian culture remained longer. No accurate figures exist for emigration elsewhere or its social characteristics; generally, committed Zionists excepted, poorer families tended to Israel and wealthier families elsewhere, and youth were more inclined to leave. Zionist historiography’s heroic ‘aliyah narrative, its factional credit disputes and its local activists’ claim that Jewish Agency quotas imposed in June 1950 hindered ‘aliyah and radically reduced the ‘olim — with hints the quotas were racist — are set against the chapter’s conclusion: most who remained after 1950 “were not sitting on their suitcases waiting for an opportunity to leave. Rather, they were struggling to maintain their multiple identities and to resist the monism of the increasingly obdurate Zionist and Egyptian nationalist discourses even as the social space in which it was possible to do so was gradually constricting."
"Status Ambiguities” (lines 1217-1271)
The constriction appears formally in citizenship: al-Kalim’s November 1949 protest that Jews born in Egypt, some of families resident continually for 500 years, could not establish citizenship or obtain passports; the Karaites’ countervailing demonstrations of loyalty, above all al-Kalim’s May 16, 1951 celebration of Faruq’s wedding to Narriman Sadiq — a qasida by Murad Farag and colloquial azgal [as printed] by two other poets, avoiding the public’s disgust at Faruq and its attachment to Farida — read as possibly reflexive and preemptive, yet itself proof of Arabic cultural affinity. Routine official abuse and bribe-extortion fell, some Jews believed, more heavily on Jews; the 1951 case of the wealthy businessman Césare Slamun, stopped by a political-police officer, arguing “It was true that he was a Jew, but he was an Egyptian above all,” and released after a £E200 bribe, was critically reported by al-Musawwar under its cosmopolitan Muslim editor Fikri Abaza. Against the declining secular-liberal frame, both community and officials sometimes represented their relationship as Neo-dhimma — mutual obligation and equity drawn from the Qur’anic dhimmi definition and the Ottoman millet, “a culturally authorized alternative to a discourse of rights and citizenship” — deployed intermittently alongside the citizenship discourse, sometimes by the same people, and easily destabilized by war and by the post-1954 security state. Al-Ahram’s demand that the authorities clean the “unkempt and dirty” Karaite quarter to preserve the state’s honor (the adjacent, worse-kept Muslim quarters attracting no such concern) is read against pre-1948 al-Kalim, whose language was that of citizens claiming improvements as rights, where al-Ahram’s implies wards of the state — with the historical caveat that minority protection had been one of Britain’s four reserved points in 1922. After the July 23, 1952 coup, Haim Nahum’s telegram to Muhammad Naguib — “The Chief Rabbi and the Jewish communities in Egypt supported the revolution and asked God for its success” — is read as the head of an Ottoman millet delivering his community’s allegiance to a newly installed sultan, a role familiar to the former chief rabbi of Istanbul; Naguib answered in the idiom of good relations with ahl al-dhimma, then went far beyond formula: his Yom Kipur 1952 visit to Cairo’s ‘Adli Street synagogue, “the first and only courtesy visit by a head of state to a chief rabbi in modern Egyptian history,” his reception of Babovitch, Lieto Barukh Mas’uda and Murad al-Qudsi, and his October 25 visit to the ‘Abbasiyya Karaite synagogue, signing the register “There is no difference between Jews, Muslims, or Christians. Religion is for God. The nation is for all,” with a poem by Murad Farag for the occasion. The Free Officers nonetheless treated Jews corporately: the March 1953 Passover matzah fire, Nahum’s petition to import 20,000 kilograms of Australian or Canadian flour, and the negotiated allocation that remade the matzahs “reinforced the relationship of neo-dhimma”; so did Cicurel and Goar’s appeal to the National Bank governor to reinstitute Jewish bank holidays, and Nahum’s 1953 letters seeking high-holiday leave for Jewish police, soldiers and prisoners — though no Jews served in police or armed forces and most Jewish prisoners were nonobservant communists. The revivalist counter-current appears in Shaykh Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri’s February 1953 state-radio talk — Judaism become “a racist ideology like Nazism,” Jews as swine — which Naguib forced him to apologize for face to face at Nahum’s home after he proposed telephoning; and in Shaykh Ahmad Tahir’s radio insults (all Jews “middlemen and usurers without honor or morality”), which Albert Mizrahi publicly demanded Minister Salah Salim rebuke under the 1919 slogan, with no recorded state intervention amid the Naguib–Abdel Nasser climax of March 1954. After Abdel Nasser’s victory, the October 1954 assassination attempt and the embrace of pan-Arab nationalism, Jewish confidence diminished, yet the state still acknowledged its obligation to facilitate Jewish observance — broadcasting the Kol Nidrei service on state radio on Yom Kipur 1955.
”The Jewish Presence” and “Layla Murad” (lines 1272-1310)
After May 15, 1948 the public Jewish presence diminished — all Jewish newspapers except al-Kalim ceased, the court stopped acknowledging its elite Jewish connections, the Ezbekiyya Gardens Purim celebration ended — yet by the end of 1949 all detainees except Henri Curiel had been released, and the Wafd’s January 1950 return sustained a “return to normalcy” perception (the Jewish Chronicle in 1951: “there remained…a fairly self-sufficient community and there seemed to be no move toward mass emigration”) that persisted until the October 1954 Susannah announcement. Jews freely practiced journalism, law, medicine and finance; Maccabi and other Jewish sports teams competed, Jewish athletes represented Egypt, and communal institutions functioned. In publishing — where higher Jewish literacy meant disproportionate representation — Albert Mizrahi founded the pro-Wafd weekly al-Saraha in September 1950 under Fu’ad Sirag al-Din’s patronage alongside his price-control weekly al-Tas’ira (1944–May 1954), with a Muslim and a Copt as principal collaborators, a symbolic tri-faith coexistence evoking the play Hasan, Murqus, and Cohen; Mizrahi’s brief late-1952 detention, which he editorially criticized as without charge, is attributed likely to his Wafdism, not his Jewishness. Dar al-Katib al-Misri, closed briefly in 1948, reopened; the bombed Société Orientale de Publicité kept publishing Le Progrès Egyptien (Jewish-edited until 1954), La Bourse Egyptien [as printed], The Egyptian Mail and The Egyptian Gazette; Salvator Adjiman directed al-Ahram’s advertising from 1932 until his mid-1954 arrest for illegally transferring capital; Blattner kept publishing the Who’s Who through the 1950s, and the Weinstein firm remained Jewish-owned into the mid-1990s. The palace thread runs from Fu’ad’s grant of citizenship to Nahum and his 1932 Arab Language Academy appointment, through Madame Qattawi Pasha as first lady-in-waiting, the palace purveyors (Cicurel, Perlo, Weinberg), Emmanuel Mizrahy Pasha as palace counsel, and Faruq’s mistress Camelia (Liliane Cohen) — and Karim Thabit, “commonly considered responsible for persuading the king to declare war on Israel in 1948,” whose al-Muqattam articles incited against Jews unreprimanded, yet after a wartime hiatus the palace resumed its elite Jewish associations, bestowing royal decorations on Jews in June 1951 for the first time since the war. In music, Zaki Murad, Ibrahim Sahlun and Zaki Surur were prominent Arabic-music revivers, and the Karaite composer Da’ud Husni (1870–1937) — first Egyptian opera “Samson and Dalilah,” collaborator of Sayyid Darwish — was commemorated annually by al-Kalim under his son’s editorship and by non-Jewish aficionados in al-Misri, al-Balagh and al-Zaman (December 1949), Akhir Sa’a (1951) and the Institute of Arabic Music’s January 10, 1953 “bronze anniversary” [as printed], with state-radio memorial programs until at least 1955; Husni had converted to Islam and married a Muslim, yet the Karaite community claimed him and non-Jewish aficionados overlooked his origins — “avoiding a sharp determination of Husni’s ethnoreligious identity served multiple purposes and enhanced his appeal.” The same contested identity appears in Layla Sannu”s 1955 refusal to sell her father Ya’qub Sannu”s manuscripts to an Israeli archive: “My father was not a Jew. He was Egyptian. His legacy is the property of Egypt.” Mizrahi’s publishing house held the state-radio contract to print Umm Kulthum’s monthly concert programs, and Jews remained pioneers and disproportionately present in cinema — Togo Mizrahi’s Cocaine (1930) and The Children of Egypt (1933), and actresses Victoria Cohen, Nigma Ibrahim, Layla Murad and Liliane Cohen. Murad (1918–95), daughter of Zaki Murad, “Cinderella of the Egyptian screen” and second diva after Umm Kulthum — stage debut 1930, film debut 1935, five name-titled Mizrahi musical romances 1939–44, marriage to Anwar Wagdi celebrated in the final scene of Layla bint al-fuqara’, six further co-starring films before their 1950 divorce, twenty-eight films in all — retired abruptly in 1955 and lived in Cairo until her death. The likely factor was the September 1952 press report accusing her of visiting Israel and contributing £E50,000 to the Israeli government that summer: she, who had announced her conversion to Islam in 1946, declared “I am an Egyptian Muslim,” produced bank documents and Wagdi’s letter affirming her a “genuine (samim) Arab Muslim,” and was cleared by the Egyptian authorities, though Syria kept its total ban on her films and songs until Abdel Nasser personally insisted it be abandoned during the 1958 United Arab Republic negotiations. She remained popular — a film a year 1953–55, Ruz al-Yusuf openly discussing her Jewish origins, her “Is’al ‘alayya” voted best song of 1954 and a 4,000-strong December 1954 concert — yet could not be induced to return: “she seems to have felt that the milieu in which she flourished could no longer be sustained.” Conversions by Murad, Husni, Omar Sharif and Nigma Ibrahim, reported by Ruz al-Yusuf in February 1955 without pejorative tone, are read as evidence that important sectors of the Egyptian public still embraced “a cultural cosmopolitanism akin to the Levantinism or Mediterraneanism of Jacqueline Kahanoff and Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren."
"Denouement” (lines 1311-1335)
The chapter closes by weighing the alarm Jews had reason to feel at the July 23, 1952 coup — an army with no links to the community, several Free Officers formed in the Muslim Brothers or Young Egypt, and a founding grievance in the 1948 Palestine defeat — against Naguib’s efforts; Naguib’s March 1954 demise, the August 1954 Anglo-Egyptian evacuation agreement (denounced by communists and Brothers for its return conditions), the October 1954 Alexandria assassination attempt (thousands of Brothers detained up to ten years, six executed) and the Bat Galim seizure “virtually eliminated any possibility that the government would accept Jews as Egyptians.” “The most fateful development” was the October 5, 1954 announcement of the Operation Susannah network, which “provided an excuse to treat the entire Jewish community as potential subversives” before a security-conscious Revolutionary Command Council whose authority had just been challenged; the February 28, 1955 Israeli attack on Gaza, understood by many Egyptians as retaliation for the two Susannah executions, began a countdown to war: “Between October 1954 and October 1956, Egyptian Jews were caught between the two states moving toward an armed clash. Their circumstances became increasingly difficult, though not yet impossible.” Maurice Orbach’s post-trial Cairo visit found Jews out of the civil service and citizenship hard to obtain, but respected in banking and finance for their “correct business methods and its ethical and moral standing,” with harat al-yahud’s clinic, soup kitchen and old-age home functioning, Hebrew taught and services held: “I found no antagonism between Muslim, Copt, and Jew… although there is grave anxiety among the Jewish community today” (note 78). The Suez/Sinai War broke the community irretrievably: in response to the October 29, 1956 tripartite attack, about 1,000 Jews were detained, more than half Egyptian citizens (note 80); 13,000 French and British citizens were expelled, among them many Jews, plus 500 Jews not holding those citizenships; some 460 Jewish businesses were sequestered, many Jews lost their jobs, British and French citizens’ assets were nationalized, and a November 1956 decree amended the nationality law with stricter residence requirements and deprivation of Zionists’ citizenship claims; after the hostilities, unofficial pressures pushed Jews to leave and renounce citizenship, and by World Jewish Congress figures 14,102 Jews left between November 22, 1956 and March 15, 1957, “just under one-third” of those resident on the war’s eve (note 81), most abandoning the bulk of their assets and reaching Israel as impoverished refugees. The property-seizure proclamation was rescinded April 27, 1957 and non-British/French Jews’ property returned, but the community was “crippled beyond restoration” — Alexandria’s chief rabbi Aharon Angel and Cairo president Salvator Cicurel among the leavers, Babovitch dead months before the war, Nahum chronically ill until his 1960 death. Emigration continued more slowly: some 17,000–19,000 departed from mid-1957 to mid-1967, leaving about 7,000 Jews on the eve of the 1967 war, this wave better off and bound mostly for destinations other than Israel — among them the core of the San Francisco Bay Area Karaite community of Chapter 7; by the end, between one-third and one-half of Egyptian Jewry had relocated in Israel, with Brazil, France, the United States, Argentina, England and Canada the most popular destinations after Israel (note 83). The closing vignette is Dina Monet’s December 1956 Jerusalem Post interviews in the ma’abarot, where the scripted immigrant narrative was disrupted by an Egyptian Jew’s innocent explanation: “Egypt is our country, we have no other, and our fathers were here [i.e., in Egypt] as long as any Moslems” (note 84) — a “minor disruption of the Zionist discourse” expressing many Egyptian Jews’ unpreparedness for their assigned roles, soon disciplined by army service and socialization, so that by 1967 very few would still say, as Fargeon had in 1943, “In fact, the Jews are Arabs.”
Chapter 3: Notes 1-27 (lines 1336-1448)
The chapter’s notes begin at the end of this part’s range. Note 1: “Unitary Palestine Fails in Committee,” New York Times, Nov. 25, 1947, p. 9 (the Haykal epigraph). Note 2 lists the report literature — AJC, A Report on the Situation in Egypt (Jan. 1949); WJC, The Treatment of Jews in Egypt and Iraq (1948); Nehemiah Robinson for the WJC (1951); American Jewish Congress, The Black Record: Nasser’s Persecution of Egyptian Jewry (1957) — judging Don Peretz’s “Egyptian Jews Today” (AJC, 1956) and S. Landshut’s Jewish Communities in the Muslim Countries of the Middle East (1950) “far more judicious than the typical publications of this era.” Note 3: Ian Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State (1980). Note 4: the material definition of the conflict is based on Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1904 (1989). Note 5: al-Siyasa al-‘usbu’iyya, Nov. 5, 1938, pp. 3–4. Note 6: the next three paragraphs are drawn from James P. Jankowski’s IJMES article (1980) and his chapter in Cohen and Baer (eds.), Egypt and Palestine: A Millennium of Association (868–1948) (1984), pp. 314–31. Note 7: al-Ahram, Sept. 29, 1929, p. 1. Note 8: the next two paragraphs are drawn from Thomas Mayer, Egypt and the Palestine Question, 1936–1945 (1983), pp. 298 ff., and Laskier, pp. 84–93. Note 9: Rif’at al-Sa’id, interview, Cairo, May 22, 1986. Note 10: Nahum’s letter in a French translation apparently made by British intelligence, CZA S25/5218. Note 11: Fargeon (ed.), Annuaire, 1944, p. 111. Note 12: excerpt from a letter of Feb. 16, 1948, CZA S25/9034/899/71. Note 13: Mizrahi, L’Egypte et ses Juifs, p. 120 (with “revolu” for “révolu” as printed in this citation). Note 14: for example, Gibra’il Du’ayq, “al-Da’aya al-sahyuniyya,” al-Ahram, July 18, 1948. Note 15: the anonymous El-Tor prisoner’s letter, YTM, with the caution quoted above on the 1,000 figure. Note 16: Krämer, p. 212. Note 17: Efraim S., Skirah ktzarah ‘al matzav ha-‘aliyah mi-mitzrayim, July 24, 1949, CZA S20/552. Note 18: AJC, A Report on the Jewish Situation in Egypt, pp. 10–11; Laskier, pp. 127–29. Note 19: Mario Perez, interview, Paris, June 2, 1994. Note 20: al-Ahram, June 21, 1948, p. 3; al-Kalim, July 1, 1948; Laskier, p. 133. Note 21: Rabbi Avraham Gabr, interview, Ramlah, Jan. 11, 1993. Note 22: al-Kalim, July 1, 16 and Aug. 1, 1948, and its non-appearance on Aug. 16, Sept. 1 and Sept. 16; Shammas interview. Note 23: al-Ahram, July 16, 1948; AJC report, p. 24–32 [as printed]. Note 24: al-Ahram, July 20 and Sept. 23, 1948; Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (1993), pp. 63–64. Notes 25–26: Mitchell, pp. 58–79 and p. 71. Note 27: Campbell to Bevin, Oct. 4, 1948, FO 371/69250.
Chapter 3: Notes 28-84 (lines 1449-1693)
The remaining notes complete Chapter 3’s apparatus. Notes 28–36 document the 1948 war, internment and emigration sections: Ben Ya’akov’s April 17, 1949 report to the Middle East Department head, CZA S20/552/851/71/9776 (notes 28 and, repeated, 36); note 29, Isaac Vaena, Egypt’s leading onion exporter — Egypt’s third largest source of foreign currency — whose assets the Nasser regime sequestered in 1965, after which, unable to market its onion crop, the government invited him back to France from exile, and he returned, was disappointed, and died soon after (Maurice Mizrahi in Shamir (ed.), The Jews of Egypt, 1987, pp. 92–93); note 30, Laskier, p. 187, against the Israeli census of 1961, which records 14,895 immigrants from Egypt and Sudan arriving in Israel in 1948–51 and 15,872 for 1948–54 — somewhat lower than Laskier’s Jewish Agency-based figures, the discrepancy probably due in part to those who died or left Israel — with the author’s caution that “All the emigration figures presented in this chapter are approximations based on my interpretation of those presented by Laskier and other sources”; note 32, the estimate collated from conflicting figures, with similar estimates in Krämer, p. 221, and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, WJC, “Egypt in September, 1957,” p. 3; note 33, Schwartzbart’s WJC comparative chart of Sephardim in the world Jewish population, 1950–54; notes 34–35, the Zionist-activity literature (Laskier, pp. 164–98; Barad; the 1986 Haganah discussion volume) and the Harel/Aharon interview of March 25, 1993. Notes 37–44 cite al-Kalim and al-Ahram for the citizenship and status sections (Amin Lisha’, “al-Isra’iliyun wa’l-jinsiyya al-misriyya,” al-Kalim, Nov. 15, 1949; the Slamun case in al-Musawwar, Oct. 5, 1951; Ibrahim Husni’s al-Kalim pieces of 1946–47; al-Ahram, Dec. 1, 1949, Aug. 3 and Aug. 9, 1952; al-Kalim, Oct. 1, 16, 1952), with note 42 referring to Benbassa (ed.), Haim Nahum (1995) for Nahum’s earlier career. Notes 45–54 cite El-Kodsi for the Karaites (pp. 61, 88–90, with al-Balagh, Oct. 25, 1952, and Journal d’Egypte, Oct. 26, 1952), the JLMC Lettres Expediés for the 1953 matzah, bank-holiday and high-holiday correspondence (notes 47–49, 51), al-Ahram, Feb. 9, 1953 (the al-Baquri affair), Mizrahi, L’Egypte et ses Juifs, p. 57, Albert Mizrahi’s al-Tas’ira piece of March 22, 1954, and the Jerusalem Post, Sept. 27, 1955, for the Kol Nidrei broadcast. Notes 55–70 document the Jewish-presence section: Rouleau’s 1994 Paris interview; the Jewish Chronicle of July 6, 1951, through Robinson (1951), p. 74; al-Saraha, Dec. 8, 25, 1952, and May 12, 1951; Somekh on Jewish participation in modern Arabic culture and Murad Farag (pp. 132–133); Robinson’s “Persecution in Egypt,” Congress Weekly, Nov. 17, 1954; Sabet, A King Betrayed (1989), p. 217; the anonymous 1949 Agency report, apparently by the president of the Zionist Organization of Cairo (CZA S20/552); Stern, Farouk (1965), pp. 195–98; al-Kalim, Dec. 15, 1949, Dec. 16, 1952, Dec. 1, 1953 and Dec. 16, 1955; Akhir sa’a, July 11, 1951, reprinted in al-Kalim, July 16, 1951; and the al-Musawwar Ya’qub Sannu’ piece of Feb. 18, 1955. Notes 71–77 are the Layla Murad apparatus: note 71 gives her biography’s sources — the 1995 obituaries in al-Wafd, al-Hayat and the Middle East Times — and judges Salih Mursi’s instant biography Layla Murad (Dar al-Hilal, 1995) as avoiding all the controversial aspects of her career and barely acknowledging her Jewish origins; notes 72–74 give the September 1952 al-Ahram items (“Layla murad tukadhdhib tabarru’aha li-isra’il 50 alf junayh”), Hasanayn’s biography at pp. 85 ff. and p. 89, and the al-Hayat documents piece of July 4, 1993; notes 75–77 cite Ruz al-yusuf, Nov. 8 and Dec. 6, 1954, Disuqi’s obituary, and “Kharaju min dinihim fi sabil al-hubb,” Ruz al-yusuf, Feb. 7, 1955. Note 78 is “Cairo’s Jews: Uneasy Friendship,” Jerusalem Post, Feb. 16, 1955 (the Orbach visit). Notes 79–84 document the denouement: note 79, AJC, “The Situation of the Jews in Egypt at the Beginning of 1957” (Jan. 7, 1957), on which Laskier, pp. 253–64, also relies extensively; note 80, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, WJC, “Egypt in September, 1957”; note 81, WJC, The Persecution of Jews in Egypt: The Facts (Apr. 1957), p. 7; note 82, the table in Laskier, p. 273; note 83, Cabasso et al., Juifs d’Egypte: Images et textes (1984), p. 42 — non-Israel emigrants estimated at 15,000 to Brazil, 10,000 to France, 9,000 to the United States, 9,000 to Argentina and 4,000 to the United Kingdom, a total of 47,000 that “cannot be reconciled with the Jewish Agency’s figures for ‘aliyah without assuming a Jewish community of at least 85,000 before 1948,” is more easily reconciled with the Israeli census figures (note 30), and claims only one-third of Egyptian Jews emigrated to Israel — “The available statistics are incomplete and to some extent politically designed”; note 84, Dina Monet, “Absorption of Egypt’s Aliya in Good Hands,” Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 1955.
Chapter 4: “Nazis and Spies” — “The Discourse of Operation Susannah” (lines 1694-1936)
The chapter’s opening frames its whole argument: the Nazi mass murder of European Jews “established the standard vocabulary, rhetorical frame, and social experience for assessing all subsequent threats” to any Jewish community, although no postwar anti-Semitic oppression is reasonably comparable to Nazi Germany’s “distinctively modern, European practice of scientifically elaborated racism, mass-marketed propaganda, industrialized genocide, and global conquest”; vigilance, Western guilt, lack of an alternative lexicon and “a certain amount of cynical manipulation by Zionist publicists” installed Nazi-style anti-Semitism as a recurrent trope, yet “in their worst moments, Jews in modern Egypt were very far from experiencing such intense, unremitting, and ideologically committed persecution” (note 1: Evron’s “Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster,” 1983, and Segev’s The Seventh Million, 1993). The arrest, conviction and execution of the Susannah network in 1954–55 “were critical moments in the elaboration of a discourse that cast the Egyptian regime, and ultimately all Arabs, as neo-Nazis”; the chapter traces that discourse from 1948 to 1977 through competing representations of Operation Susannah, arguing that imposing the European Jewish experience on Egypt “censored the voices of Egyptian Jews and blocked their ability to narrate their own history."
"The 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the “Discovery” of Egyptian Nazism” (lines 1702-1734)
Israel’s government described the 1948 measures against Egypt’s Jews as Nazi-like persecution, its statement on “The Position of Jews in Egypt” proclaiming that “the stringent measures taken against the Jewish population are reminiscent of the early days of the Hitler regime” (notes 2–3), and the notion crystallized in American Jewish circles by October 1948: confidential AJC reports asserted that “The situation of the 75,000 Jews in Egypt is in broad terms similar to that of the Jews in Germany in the period beginning about 1936” (note 4), that the Arabic Egyptian press was “more violent in their open attacks against Jews than any former Nazi paper would have dared to be” (note 5), and — from the AJC’s investigator Nessim Z. Moreno, reporting what he had heard — that Egyptian Jews’ condition from May 15, 1948 to al-Nuqrashi’s assassination was “in some respects worse than the condition of the Jews in Germany during the late thirties,” because German persecution was disciplined whereas Egypt saw “many recurrences of uncontrolled mob rule” (note 6). A Wiener Library report described Hasan al-Banna in undisguisedly racist, exoticist terms (“a short, squat, ratty little man… I interviewed this religious fuhrer”) and concluded that a “pogrom of Jews” was “an actual reality” in Egypt: “The pattern is the Hitler pattern—on a small scale” (notes 7–8). The AJC’s Report on the Jewish Situation in Egypt, presented confidentially to U.S. officials in November 1948, attributed Western ignorance of “Egypt’s recent venture into Hitlerian brutality on a national scale” to press censorship (note 9). The chapter judges that such assertions’ credibility “depended on Orientalist preconceptions, substantial ignorance, and the uncritical transfer of European terms of reference to Egypt,” and that the AJC reached its conclusion only by ignoring its own firsthand source: Salvator Cicurel, who told the committee in New York in late October 1948 that “the recent anti-Jewish outbreaks…[were] connected with the existence of Israel and the defeats of the Egyptian Army there” (note 10), specified that the army and the Muslim Brothers harbored anti-Jewish sentiments, sought U.S. intervention against the Company Law of 1947 — and, enjoying Faruq’s favor, had reopened his bombed store with royal support: he “could hardly have thought that he and his Jewish staff were in danger of Nazi-like persecution if he planned to continue his business operations in Egypt.” S. Landshut’s 1950 report for the AJC and the Anglo-Jewish Association likewise criticized the 1949 report’s claim of “systematic thorough-going anti-Semitism,” concluding that “it is wrong to speak of any deeply-rooted anti-Jewish-as distinct from generally anti-Western-feeling were it not that the Palestine question had temporarily crystallized Egyptian xenophobia into anti-Semitism” (note 11). Cicurel’s and Landshut’s judicious accounts could not overcome the trope: competition among Jewish organizations encouraged the most extreme conclusions from limited evidence, fabrications and exaggerations were repeated as truth, and so in 1954 the Susannah arrests “was easily inserted into a well-defined discursive structure” already established.
”The Israeli and Anglo-American Jewish Discourse” (lines 1735-1788)
Within days of the Israeli press’s first reports in mid-October 1954, the Jerusalem Post, Davar and Herut began comparing Egypt with Nazi Germany; the Post, because of its foreign audience, was particularly significant in establishing the common frame. Its substantive account, relying on information reaching Geneva, reported 150 Jews arrested, interrogation methods that “stagger the imagination,” the police beating of Armand Karmona to death (Egyptian authorities claimed suicide; the exact circumstances remain uncertain) and Marcelle Ninio’s torture and attempted suicide, and concluded that responsibility rested with “the newly formed National Egyptian Militia which is described as a paramilitary organization trained by former German Army officers on the storm trooper model,” a Jewish official adding, “they are reminiscent of the days of Hitler” (notes 12–13). “Every significant assertion in this report was totally fictitious or highly questionable”: no other reference to the National Egyptian Militia has been found in any English or Arabic book or article on Egypt of the period, hard data on former Nazis in Egypt are elusive as printed (“illusive”), and “there is no credible evidence that former Nazis exercised a policy-making role in Egypt” (note 14: Gehlen’s and Hersh’s accounts note the CIA’s role in supplying former Wehrmacht and SS officers to the Egyptian State Security Service, but no policy-making capacity). The arrests answered actual bombings by Egyptian Jews acting as Israeli agents, and did not directly disrupt the lives of the vast majority of the approximately 50,000 Jews then in Egypt. The report was never retracted; there was “simply no public consideration of the possibility that those arrested were actually guilty,” partly because the pro-Zionist Manchester Guardian held the charges must be fabricated since “any Jewish underground would presumably act with some sanity” (note 15) — “The ultimately anti-Semitic presumption of superior Jewish intelligence led to the conclusion that the accused were innocent victims of anti-Semitic persecution.” Herut was the most incendiary: its trial-opening editorial hung on the defendants “all manner of crimes that the Levantine imagination can invent,” linked them to Mendel Beilis and the blood-libel tradition, and resolved that Israel must abandon self-restraint (note 16); on Max Binnet’s suicide it proclaimed “The clique of Nazi-Levantine hangmen has claimed the life of one of the martyrs of the Egyptian blood libel” and demanded “revenge!” (note 17) — Binnet being an IDF major, wanted in Iraq for earlier espionage, whose Egypt mission appears to have been far more substantial than Susannah, with which he had no direct connection. Davar, closest to the government, deployed the same trope: the Cairo trial was “an expressly anti-Jewish trial” and Abdel Nasser “influenced by the spirit of the Nazis…also in his attitude to the Jews” (note 18), and a Davar analysis headlined “German Nazis are at the head of a ‘Jewish Department’ in the Egyptian government. They have staged the trial of the 13 and are preparing additional trials” (note 19). On the execution day Davar appropriated religious martyrology: “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” (note 20). Only MAPAM’s ‘Al ha-Mishmar and the independent ha-Aretz covered the trial with relatively little hyperbole; La-Merhav was as bloodthirsty as Herut in demanding retaliation without invoking the whole history of European anti-Semitism. Nehemiah Robinson’s widely reprinted “Persecution in Egypt” revived the fictitious National Militia “trained by Germans” (note 21). Prime Minister Moshe Sharett proclaimed to the Knesset that Israel “rejects most emphatically the fantastic libels” of the Egyptian charges and that “If their sin is their Zionism and their devotion to the state of Israel, then many Jews throughout the world are partners in this sin” (note 22) — a statement that “was, in fact, entirely false,” whether consciously or not, since the government already knew a military intelligence unit was involved and the Olshan-Dori Committee reported on January 12, 1955. Ambassador Abba Eban’s off-the-record background talk the day after the executions asserted Israel “[knows] the complete falsity of the fabricated absurdities” (note 23), and an AJC leader was satisfied that it “effectively exploits the trial as an occasion for condemning Western admiration for the Nasser dictatorship” (note 24). The executions also gave Israel a pretext to cease attending the Mixed Armistice Commission (note 25), removing any local forum for discussing the massive Gaza raid of February 28, 1955 — widely regarded as retaliation for the executions and punishment for Egypt’s opposition to the Baghdad Pact — which “began a cycle of escalation of border violence that culminated in the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt."
"The Official Egyptian Story” (lines 1789-1813)
Egyptian officials were astounded: for them this was a clear espionage and sabotage case, with confessions and material evidence, prosecuted as any European state threatened with subversion would; the accused were not on trial as Jews and the community per se was not persecuted — claims that “were not entirely accurate,” given Jews’ continuing difficulties establishing citizenship and their unease after 1948, though the case itself was well supported by the evidence. Aspects of the presentation nonetheless made the official version hard for a Western audience to accept. After Abdel Nasser’s March 1954 victory over Naguib, the regime’s anticommunist press campaign accused the communists of being Zionists: lead articles explained that the Egyptian communist movement was controlled by a Zionist Jew, Henri Curiel, residing in Paris (note 26), and an al-Musawwar photo essay asserted the communists were Zionists, atheists and sexually promiscuous, featuring Curiel in short pants to make him appear alien and ridiculous (note 27). The Zionism–communism equation, common among conservative Arab leaders including al-Nuqrashi and King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa’ud, “was not an expression of primordial Arab or Muslim anti-Jewish sentiment. Its categories are too modern for that and obviously inflected with European anti-Semitic ideas, such as those in” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; it offered a facile explanation for the disproportionate number of Jewish communists, socialist Zionism’s strength and Soviet support for partition, and may have adapted to McCarthy-Dulles Cold War discourse — but after World War II such charges “resonated with Nazi efforts to portray Jews as the animators of the international communist movement” and aroused Western suspicion. The official representation also shifted: police first minimized the affair as “child’s play” (note 28) — Susannah caused no injuries or deaths and relatively minor property damage — while al-Ahram headlined only “The Big Zionist Spy Trial before the Supreme Military Court” on the trial’s opening day (note 29) and acknowledged the violence charges only two days later (note 30); foreign observers generally attributed the shift to the concurrent trial and execution of the Muslim Brothers who had attempted to assassinate Abdel Nasser on October 26, 1954. Gender representations cut against Egypt in the West: the prosecution and press portrayed Marcelle Ninio as a Mata Hari — al-Ahram pictured her on its front page three times in the trial’s first week as “a young Jewish woman with a great deal of intelligence, shrewdness, and spirit of self-sacrifice” (note 31), and al-Musawwar held that she “used her femininity to influence and control her abettors. She was the brains of the ring” (note 32), that the young men “were trained by Israeli young women” (note 33), and, under “Always…Money and Women,” that minors were seduced by money and pretty girls in Paris, Israel and Alexandria, the Alexandria flat a place of girls, drink and music where “an Israeli devil” ordered the burnings (note 34) — while in Israel and the West the same focus feminized all the defendants and made them seem less threatening and more vulnerable. Finally, the press’s staged proof of proper procedure — the Qur’an, Hebrew Bible and New Testament available for oaths (note 35), and jail photos and interviews claiming Ninio’s prison diet included string beans, meat, cheese, winter cress and tangerines and that her only complaint was being denied pen and paper (note 36) — was unconvincing to anyone familiar with Egyptian prisons and “could only arouse suspicion that something was not right."
"The International Campaign for the Defendants” (lines 1814-1841)
British and North American opinion generally accepted the Israeli version, and major-paper coverage mirrored the Israeli press, but the U.S. and British governments were disinclined to intervene publicly — they sought good relations with Egypt and doubted the Israeli version. Israel’s December 1954 request to the Foreign Office, reinforced by a World Sephardi Federation and Anglo-Jewish Association delegation whose leader consulted the Israeli Embassy in London before and reported back after (notes 37–38), won no commitments: the Foreign Office regarded the trial as fair, unofficially determined the defendants were not mistreated, rejected the Israeli claim that Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum’s November 10, 1954 statement that Jews were not systematically persecuted was issued under duress, and advised the WJC’s A. L. Easterman against visiting Egypt; Labour MP Maurice Orbach visited Cairo on December 6–16 seeking leniency. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, repeatedly directed by Washington to monitor Jews’ situation, consistently reported no significant official anti-Semitism; months before the Susannah arrests he wrote that “There does not appear, however, to be any organized campaign by the present regime against the Jewish community as a whole. On the contrary, Jews in Egypt are probably better treated than those in other Arab states” (note 39). The declassified embassy records contain no reference to any investigation of who was responsible for the firebombings or their objectives — “a very suspicious omission because the library of the United States Information Service in Cairo was among the targets”; very likely Caffery knew the conspirators had attacked U.S. government property (note 40, on the author’s examination of the State Department and Cairo post records and Stephen Green’s FOIA-obtained preliminary report). The State Department resisted a formal protest, probably knowing the charges were well founded; after the trial Caffery twice urged Foreign Minister Husayn Fawzi to permit no executions, Dulles’s message referring only to the damage executions would do to reducing Middle East tensions — the secret Egypt–Israel talks the January 31, 1955 executions and the February 28 Gaza assault did disrupt (note 41). Roger Baldwin, sent by the AJC when Jacob Blaustein could not travel, arrived in Cairo on January 8, 1955, after the trial concluded and left before the verdicts, yet concluded that “There seems to be no doubt of some guilt of all the defendants” and that “By accepted western standards the trial was not fair,” though in Egyptian terms proper procedures were followed (note 42); assured no death sentences would be imposed, he called the two death sentences “shocking,” “savage,” and “vindictive” because the conspiracy “did not involve any serious acts of espionage or sabotage. It was, as the defense said, a childish and irrational affair of young people acting on instructions of two agents [Dar and Seidenwerg, alias Paul Frank] who escaped and were not condemned… The explanation for such severity is to be found not in the trial record, but politics” (note 43). Western attention then fixed on the sentences’ severity — editorials in the London Observer (note 44), the New York Times (note 45), the New York Herald Tribune (note 46) and the Manchester Guardian (note 47), the Washington Post’s “show trial…of 13 Jews…under trumped-up charges” (note 48) and the Washington Star’s “judicial lynching” (note 49) — drawing attention away from Baldwin’s correct conclusion that the defendants were guilty.
”After the Executions” (lines 1842-1880)
The Egyptian government’s pamphlet The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt had its central claims well supported by the court evidence, but some assertions were blatantly false — for example that “during the Palestine War the Jews of Egypt were not interned” (note 50) — its linkage of Susannah to the Moyne and Bernadotte assassinations and to holy-place violations was unconvincing, and its argument that Zionism and communism share “one political objective-world domination. Both powers co-operate secretly and in public without friction since the power in the end will eventually go to Zionism” (note 51, punctuation as printed) reproduced elements of Nazi propaganda and discredited the whole Egyptian case for many foreign observers. The AJC distributed the pamphlet with another Egyptian tract criticizing the February 28 Gaza raid, claiming the Egyptian Embassy was spreading anti-Semitic propaganda — drawing attention to the first pamphlet’s anti-Semitism allowed it to obscure the Israeli aggression the second described (note 52). Foreign Minister Fawzi was reported “embarrassed at having it brought to their attention and avoided any discussion of its contents” (note 53); the General Security Services’ own investigation reports to the Ministry of Interior do not mention communism at all, are dry and factual (trips to Israel, contacts with Israeli agents, transmitters and encryption codes), and neither investigators nor prosecutors treated Natanson’s and Levy’s initial statements that they acted for a communist organization as credible — so the pamphlet’s anti-Semitic content apparently came from the midlevel Ministry of Information officials who produced it (note 54). After Egypt’s September 1955 Czechoslovak arms purchase, the Dulles brothers’ Cold War map let Egypt be cast as an enemy of the “Free World,” and the New York Times began calling Abdel Nasser “Hitler on the Nile” (note 55). After the October 1956 invasion — in which many Jews were arrested, property was sequestered and confiscated and, unlike 1948, Jews were pressured or, if foreign nationals, compelled to leave — Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that Egypt’s acts “remind us of those committed by Hitler before the world war” and that many Egyptian officers’ vehicles in Sinai were decorated with swastikas and carried Arabic translations of Mein Kampf (note 56) — allegations Israel never supported with verifiable evidence, uncritically reported in Israel and the United States. A French-initiated international conference of Jewish organizations in January 1957 asserted that “The Egyptian authorities acted with the advice of notorious Nazis and with the aid of techniques elaborated by the totalitarian regimes whose existence has darkened the human scene during the past generation…and if they have singled out the Jews it is only because they have chosen to begin with the most defenseless minority” (note 57), without mentioning Israel’s recent invasion of Egypt. In January 1957 B’nai B’rith announced at a press conference that “former officials of the Nazi regime in Germany are administering the Egyptian government’s anti-Jewish ‘terror’ program” (note 58); the AJC’s European director Zachariah Shuster wrote privately that “the release has much information which is patently false and much which is greatly—and usually luridly—exaggerated… We are confident that most of it is pure invention and represents a concoction of imaginary horror stories without any basis in reality” (note 59), yet the AJC’s own early-1957 fact sheet “The Plight of the Jews in Egypt” charged that three former Nazis, including an SS general, held high positions in Egypt (note 60) — 10,000 copies printed, its full text inserted into the Congressional Record by Representative Abraham Multer (note 61). Don Peretz, an AJC consultant from 1955 or 1956, reported after a two-week June 1957 visit that the situation “in no way resembles that as portrayed by most of the American press or by the American Jewish Committee fact sheets,” which he regarded as “very misleading and not very helpful” (note 62); a committee-commissioned investigation, apparently by Peretz, could trace none of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s alleged former SS leaders, found all such reports based on World Jewish Congress and B’nai B’rith information, and concluded that “None of the known German councillors who have been active for years in Egypt has ever been able to have immediate political or other influence” (note 63). The AJC never publicized Peretz’s statements, nor his comprehensive “Egyptian Jews Today” (January 1956) (note 64): to publicly oppose the Nazi-like anti-Semitism claim “would have been organizational suicide” amid competition among Jewish organizations for the most vigilant stand, the memory of Nazi mass murder weighing “like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (note 65). The section’s notes 58–78 fall in the next part’s range.
”Marginalizing the “Heroes of the Affair”” (lines 1881-1925)
Despite the storm of protest, concern for the still-living convicted prisoners soon disappeared from Israel’s public agenda: exposure threatened leading political and military careers — the end of Ben-Gurion’s premiership in 1963 was directly related to the MAPAI factional contention that erupted in 1960–61 — and the details of 1954 remained under official secrecy until 1975, the censor in late 1955 even prohibiting reporting that the accused’s families were about to arrive in Israel (note 66). “However, if Israeli authorities were so concerned for the welfare of the members of the Operation Susannah network, why did they fail to request their release in the course of the general prisoner exchange after the war?” Egyptian officials expected such a request and were prepared to grant it; Israel did not raise the matter (note 67). Meyuhas and Za’fran served out their seven-year terms; Dassa, Levy, Natanson and Ninio were released only in the post-1967 exchange, and the four have repeatedly charged that senior Israeli military figures, including Moshe Dayan, were uninterested in their release (note 68). The charge is read against the Lavon Affair: the Olshan-Dori Committee (January 1955) could not determine whether Pinchas Lavon or military intelligence director Binyamin Gibli gave the order; Lavon was forced to resign while insisting he had not authorized it; the affair exploded in 1960 after Avri Seidenwerg’s (Paul Frank’s) 1959 conviction as a double agent exposed his perjured Olshan-Dori testimony and the forged document establishing Lavon’s responsibility. Ben-Gurion refused to exonerate Lavon because that would implicate his proteges Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan and the whole security establishment. Every official inquiry framed the affair as a question of relations among MAPAI and army leaders — sharpest in the title of Ben-Gurion’s ordered investigation, published only in 1979, Mi natan et ha-hora’ah? (Who gave the order?) (note 69) — excluding the Egyptian Jews themselves, who, released after 1956, would have stated as they consistently have since 1975 that they acted only under orders and denied Gibli’s version that the earliest bombings were unauthorized. Even Ben-Gurion’s critics accepted the frame: Hasin and Hurvitz’s scathing 1961 defense of Lavon held he was accused of giving “an ill-considered and unwise order which he had in fact not given; however, giving such an order was within his legal authority and had no stain of criminality” (note 70), yet never clearly stated what the order was — censorship very likely prevented specifying that it was for Egyptian Jews to begin bombing in Egypt (note 71) — and did not ask whether such an order should have been given. Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon’s tenth-anniversary memorial to Azar and Alexandria’s Jews, apparently the first book about Egypt’s Jews published in Israel, reinserted the community into the debate but reproduced the prevailing discourse: recounting the “foolish and childish” exploits, Kohen-Tzidon did “know” the arrested Jews’ treatment was reminiscent of “cruelest tortures of the gestapo” (note 72), reprinted Felix Harari’s claim that “Victorine [Marcelle Ninio] was entirely innocent” (note 73), and yet, sixty pages later, appeared to admit guilt — “To the extent that the youths did what was attributed to them in the court, or a little of what was attributed to them, they acted good heartedly as a result of misdirection according to ill-considered instructions” (note 74) — the guilt enhancing the community’s status in Zionist terms. Censorship defaced parts of his text, including Ze’ev Schiff’s ha-Aretz article asking whether recruiting Egypt’s Jews as spies was permissible and quoting The New Statesman and Nation — “just as Colonel Nasser should have acted with mercy, it would be best for Mr. Sharett…to exercise strong supervision over the Israeli Ministry of Defense and its various secret operations” — a passage excised from the book despite having appeared in ha-Aretz in 1955 and 1964 (note 75). The two 1960s books thus “write the Egyptian Jews who undertook Operation Susannah out of their own history,” rendering their fate incidental to the state of Israel’s needs as its leaders defined them.
”Can the Perpetrators of Operation Susannah Speak?” (lines 1926-1936)
Twenty years after the trial, the government finally admitted the conspirators had acted on its behalf: Dassa, Victor Levy and Marcelle Ninio appeared on television in March 1975 declaring they had acted on orders from Israel (note 76), posing new questions — why they were abandoned after the 1956 war, and who decided not to request their release — and Ninio pressed why they had not been allowed to publish their book. Their collective memoir Operation Susannah, as told to Aviezer Golan, unequivocally confirmed the espionage and sabotage, although Golan strained to avoid characterizing the acts as punishable crimes in Egyptian terms. Yet the book “conspicuously deploys the trope of Nazi-like persecution as exculpatory evidence”: Ninio’s German nurse at al-Muwassat Hospital is described as a surly blonde “whose appearance and behavior made her resemble the SS women in the European extermination camps” (note 77), and Golda Meir’s preface recalled meeting the four in 1968: “I thought of the six million Jews during World War II in Nazi camps, buried alive, tortured, gassed. I thought of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto who fought the Nazi tanks” (note 78). Meir — the first official to admit the four were in Israel, by announcing after a November 1971 cabinet meeting that she would attend Ninio’s wedding — redressed the years of denial by embracing them and associating their story with Nazi anti-Semitism and resistance to it: “Europeanizing the story of these Egyptian Jews was Meir’s ultimate expression of their acceptance and legitimacy.” Thus even the admission that the agents were not victims of a Nazi-style show trial reinforced the imagery and “the barriers to a critical examination of Operation Susannah.”
Chapter 4: Notes 1-57 (lines 1937-2172)
The notes give the chapter’s archival base: AJC/FAD-1 files (the 1948 Paris, Wiener and Levy reports, the Cicurel meeting of Oct. 28, 1948, the Eban background talk of Feb. 1, 1955, and Hevesi to Slawson, Feb. 7, 1955); the Israeli and Egyptian press of October 1954–February 1955 (Jerusalem Post, Davar, Herut, ha-Aretz, al-Ahram, al-Musawwar, al-Jumhuriyya); British and U.S. records (FO 371/108548/JE1571; Caffery to State, Apr. 21 and June 5, 1954, and to the secretary of state, Jan. 10, 1955; Jones to State, Jan. 31, 1955); Laskier’s Michael article on Anglo-Jewry’s intervention (note 38); and the Egyptian pamphlet at notes 50–51. Substantive notes: note 1, Evron and Segev on Holocaust memory; note 11, Landshut (1950), pp. 29, 40, with the first quotation from the AJC’s own Report; note 14, the former-Nazis assessment quoted in the section above (Gehlen, p. 260; Hersh, pp. 331–32), with the suggestion that the Jerusalem Post perhaps referred to the “National Guard,” an auxiliary military unit similar to its U.S. namesakes; note 40, the embassy-records examination and Green’s FOIA report; note 54, documents 105 and 106 in the appendix to Haykal, Milaffat al-suways (1989), pp. 763–66 — the only available official Egyptian documents relating to the case, so the conclusion based on them “most be considered provisional” [as printed, for “must”]; note 55, Rowghani’s unpublished 1994 Stanford manuscript on the New York Times’s portrayal of Nasser (its closing quotation mark displaced after the parenthesis, as printed); note 56, Ben-Gurion’s Knesset statement as reported in the New York Times, Nov. 29, 1956; note 57, the January 22, 1957 Waldorf Astoria conference statement. Printed slips kept as printed in this part: “Dec. 22 1954” without a comma (note 17); “350. 21” (note 39); “General Records(1955)” without a space (note 53). Notes 58–78 fall in the next part’s range.
Key passages
- Gudrun Krämer, as quoted and endorsed as the point of departure: “a Jewish question as it emerged in nineteenth-century Europe did not exist in twentieth-century Egypt. Jews were not discriminated against because of their religion or race, but for political reasons.” Egyptian Jews experienced “neither uninterrupted persecution and terror nor uninterrupted harmony” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 78-86).
- “The Jews of Egypt were always already a heterogeneous community of cosmopolitan hybrids. This was both a strength of the community and one of the factors in its ultimate demise” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 110-123).
- Emile Risso, acting president of Cairo’s Jewish community, refusing a history researcher access in May 1993: “Ma lish da’wa bi’l-ta’rikh” (I have nothing to do with history) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 124-176).
- “Between 1919 and 1956, the entire Egyptian Jewish community, like the Cicurel firm, was transformed from a national asset into a fifth column” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 223-233).
- Aviezer Golan, for the Operation Susannah prisoners: “All of Egypt’s Jews could have been considered Zionists—or, to be more precise, “lovers of Zion.”” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 470-484).
- The October 1949 citizenship exchange, Jacques Mangubi: “It is known that we are Egyptians. The government must determine if we are foreigners or Egyptians. And as long as we are not foreigners, then we are Egyptians” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).
- Robert Dassa: “In order to feel complete freedom, I need to walk freely in the streets of Cairo. Only there do I feel that I really have been released” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s epigraph to Chapter 3: “If Arab blood is shed in Palestine, Jewish blood will necessarily be shed elsewhere in the Arab world despite all the sincere efforts of the governments concerned to prevent such reprisals” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1128-1148).
- “In effect, the Jews of Egypt were held hostage pending the outcome of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both the Egyptian and the Israeli governments collaborated in this hostage taking” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1128-1148).
- Maurice Fargeon, in 1943: “In fact, the Jews are Arabs” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1165-1172).
- On those who remained after 1950: “they were struggling to maintain their multiple identities and to resist the monism of the increasingly obdurate Zionist and Egyptian nationalist discourses even as the social space in which it was possible to do so was gradually constricting” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1202-1216).
- Muhammad Naguib, signing the Karaite synagogue register, October 25, 1952: “There is no difference between Jews, Muslims, or Christians. Religion is for God. The nation is for all” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1241-1245).
- Layla Sannu’, refusing an Israeli archive in 1955: “My father was not a Jew. He was Egyptian. His legacy is the property of Egypt” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1293-1295).
- An Egyptian Jewish immigrant in a ma’abarah, December 1956: “Egypt is our country, we have no other, and our fathers were here [i.e., in Egypt] as long as any Moslems” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1331-1334).
- On the Nazi trope: “Yet, in their worst moments, Jews in modern Egypt were very far from experiencing such intense, unremitting, and ideologically committed persecution” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1694-1701).
- Salvator Cicurel to the American Jewish Committee, October 1948: “the recent anti-Jewish outbreaks…[were] connected with the existence of Israel and the defeats of the Egyptian Army there” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1702-1734).
- On the Jerusalem Post’s first Susannah account: “Every significant assertion in this report was totally fictitious or highly questionable” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1735-1788).
- Roger Baldwin’s conclusion on the Susannah defendants: “There seems to be no doubt of some guilt of all the defendants” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1814-1841).
- On the prisoners Israel did not seek back after 1956: “if Israeli authorities were so concerned for the welfare of the members of the Operation Susannah network, why did they fail to request their release in the course of the general prisoner exchange after the war?” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1881-1925).
Evidence the work relies on
For the parts read so far: Krämer’s The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (1989) as the scholarly point of departure; Mark R. Cohen’s Tikkun essay (1991) for the neo-lachrymose category; Bat-Ye’or’s Les juifs en Egypte (1971) and its 1974 Hebrew edition, Gilbert’s The Jews of Arab Lands (1976), Stillman’s and Bernard Lewis’s books, and Harkabi’s Arab Attitudes to Israel (1972), as the exhibits of the perspective criticized; the Egyptian government’s The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt ([1955], copy in USNA RG 84) for the official Egyptian account of Operation Susannah; Golan’s authorized memoir Operation Susannah (1978) and Dassa’s Be-hazarah le-kahir for the prisoners’ self-representations; the Annuaire des Juifs d’Egypte et du proche-orient (1942, 1945–46) for communal self-presentation; the Karaite newspaper al-Kalim and the Arabic Jewish weekly al-Shams for Karaite and communal discourse; The Egyptian Who’s Who (1947, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1959 editions), counted by the author for the elite-persistence figures; Hebrew literary works — Maccabi’s Mitzrayim sheli, Kahanoff’s essays, Gormezano-Goren’s Kayitz aleksandroni and Blanche — read as evidence of identity; and the author’s oral history and fieldwork encounters (Ahmad Sadiq Sa’d, conversation, Cairo, May 1986; Emile Risso and the Suq al-Hamzawi merchant, 1993; the anonymous Ramat Amidar bystander, July 1987). Chapter endnotes give full citations throughout. For Chapter 3, additionally: the AJC, WJC and American Jewish Congress report literature of 1948–57 (with Peretz and Landshut as the judicious exceptions, note 2); Ian Lustick’s Arabs in the Jewish State (1980) and Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labour (1989) as its framework sources; Jankowski’s and Mayer’s studies of Egyptian responses to Palestine for the interwar and 1936–45 sections (notes 6, 8); Richard P. Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers (1993) for the Brothers and the 1948 bombings (notes 24–26); British diplomatic correspondence (Campbell to Bevin, Oct. 4, 1948, FO 371/69250, note 27); Central Zionist Archives reports and letters (notes 12, 16–18); Jewish Agency and World Jewish Congress population and emigration figures; and interviews including Rif’at al-Sa’id (Cairo, May 22, 1986), Mario Perez (Paris, June 2, 1994) and Rabbi Avraham Gabr (Ramlah, Jan. 11, 1993). For Chapter 4, additionally: the AJC’s own archive (AJC/FAD-1: the 1948 confidential reports of Isenburgh, Wiener and Levy, the October 28, 1948 Cicurel meeting record, the Eban background talk and the 1957 fact-sheet correspondence); U.S. State Department and Cairo Embassy records (USNA RG 59 and RG 84), including Ambassador Caffery’s consistent reports of no organized official anti-Semitism and the absence of any embassy investigation record of the firebombings; British Foreign Office records (FO 371/108548/JE1571) and Laskier’s Michael article on Anglo-Jewry’s intervention; the Israeli, Egyptian and Western press runs of 1948 and October 1954–February 1955 (the Jerusalem Post, Davar, Herut, ha-Aretz, al-Ahram, al-Musawwar and the editorializing U.S. and British papers); the Egyptian government’s The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt ([1955]) against the General Security Services’ investigation reports as reproduced in the appendix to Haykal’s Milaffat al-suways (1989), documents 105 and 106 — stated to be the only available official Egyptian documents relating to the case; Roger Baldwin’s reports to the AJC; Don Peretz’s unpublished “Egyptian Jews Today” (AJC, January 1956) and his 1957 investigation of the former-SS reports; and the 1960s Lavon-affair literature (Hasin and Hurvitz, ha-Parashah, 1961; Kohen-Tzidon, Dramah be-aleksandriah, 1965) read against the censorship marks in the printed texts.
Analysis
The Introduction states the method openly: an interdisciplinary cultural-studies history that treats ethnonational identities as historically and socially constructed, mixes social and political history with ethnography, oral history and literary analysis, and includes the author’s autobiography as evidence of how the questions were formed. Its central critical move in the parts read is symmetrical: the neo-lachrymose conception and the Arab mirror-claim of uninterrupted harmony are both rejected as nationalist essentialisms, and the Cicurel and Karaite cases are used to show that “Egyptian” and “Jew” were unstable, negotiated statuses — the October 1949 Karaite court incident and the Who’s Who count do the empirical work. The argument’s stated limits are archival: Egyptian and communal archives are closed or removed, Operation Susannah’s documents are destroyed or withheld by three governments, and no traditional political history of the operation is possible — the book responds by shifting to discourse, which it justifies by the operation’s symbolic afterlife. The author’s position is declared rather than hidden (a former Zionist and kibbutz member who is “not an Egyptian Jew” and “cannot claim to be a disinterested party”), and Egyptian Jews’ own countermemories are presented as fragmentary rather than assembled into a counter-narrative.
People, organizations, places and events (links)
Joel Beinin · Gudrun Krämer · Bat-Ye’or · Mark R. Cohen · Yehoshafat Harkabi · Murad Farag · Tuvia Babovitch · Yusuf ‘Aslan Qattawi · Jacqueline Kahanoff · Aviezer Golan · Robert Dassa · Moshe Marzuq · Karaites · Al-Kalim · Les Grands Magasins Cicurel et Oreco · Operation Susannah · Lavon Affair · Hashomer Hatza’ir · Mapam · Muhammad Husayn Haykal · Hasan al-Banna · Al-Nuqrashi · Haim Nahum · Muhammad Naguib · Layla Murad · Da’ud Husni · Muslim Brotherhood · Young Egypt · Marcelle Ninio · Henri Curiel · Don Peretz · Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon · Moshe Sharett · Abba Eban · Pinchas Lavon · Golda Meir · Moshe Dayan · American Jewish Committee
Concepts (links)
Neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history · Mizrahim · Communitarianism · Mutamassirun · Levantinism · Neo-dhimma
How it relates to other sources
Beinin and Zachary Lockman are long-standing collaborators — Lockman read this book’s late draft and is thanked in its Acknowledgments, and Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies in turn cites Beinin’s work — and the two books share a relational, anti-essentialist approach to Jewish-Arab history, Lockman’s for mandate Palestine’s workers and Beinin’s for Egypt’s Jews (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948). On the Lavon Affair, the wiki’s earlier sources treat the affair from inside Israeli politics — as a symptom of Labor’s decay in The Jewish State: A Century Later, as background to the 1962 attorney-general crisis in Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, and as the extension of Israel’s courting of the USA in Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace; Beinin gives the operation itself — its Egyptian Jewish network, targets, trial and sentences — and its meaning for the community that paid for it, a dimension those accounts lack. His account of Mizrahi marginalization under MAPAI and of the 1977 Likud turn runs parallel to The Jewish State: A Century Later’s communal-split chapter, from the Mizrahi side of the story rather than the state’s.
Open questions
- The Egyptian Who’s Who figures (Chapter 2, lines 575-612) sit in tension as printed: the text says “over 37 percent” of the 892 Jewish names identified in the 1947 edition were still listed on the eve of the 1956 war, and also that the 1956 total of 472 included 170 names new since 1947 — which leaves 302 of the 1947 names, 33.9 percent of 892 (computed from the figures as printed). Both statements stand as printed; the basis of the 37 percent figure is not specified in the text.
- The firm’s name is spelled two ways as printed: “Les Grands Magasins Cicurel et Oreco” in the Introduction (lines 223-233) and “Les Grand Magasins Cicurel et Oreco” in Chapter 2 (lines 575-612).
- Printed slips kept as printed: “subjects that transverse the border” (Introduction, lines 78-86); “non-Pharasaic” (lines 87-109); “Ashkenazi survivers” (lines 177-197); the section heading “Alternatives To Neo-lachrymosity” against “neo-lachrymose” elsewhere (line 198); “arrested and hung in Egypt” inside the quoted Gormezano-Goren interview (lines 635-698).
- Who gave the order for Operation Susannah, and which of the two objectives canvassed (derailing the British evacuation; deliberately breaking up Egyptian-Israeli negotiations) is correct, are left unresolved: the work states that the relevant documents have apparently been destroyed by the governments of Israel, the United States and Britain or are unavailable, and no Egyptian government documents for the 1950s are open (lines 211-222).
- Community totals are given as ranges and estimates: 75,000–80,000 Jews in Egypt in 1948 against the 1947 census figure of 65,639, “commonly regarded as an undercount”; some 5,000 Karaites in 1948; 50,000–55,000 Jews remaining at the 1956 war (Krämer’s figures, as the Introduction presents them). The work does not reconcile these figures with one another in the parts read.
- Detainee totals in Chapter 3 (lines 1181-1183) are given with their discrepancies held open: some 1,300 opponents interned within days, including 300 Zionist Jews and a roughly equal number of Jewish communists; a maximum Jewish detainee figure of probably about 700–800 at any one time; the British ambassador’s 554 at the end of June 1948; and other sources’ figure of as many as 1,000 Jews interned, which note 15 says “usually includes Jewish communists and a certain inflation due to distance from the spot.” The July 1949 camp figures (Huckstep 160, Abu Qir 110, al-Tur 40) sum to 310, matching the stated 250 Zionists plus 60 Jewish communists (computed from the figures as printed).
- Population and emigration figures in Chapter 3 do not fully reconcile as printed: the World Jewish Congress counted 68,000 Jews in Egypt in 1950 and 45,000 in 1954, excluding the Karaites (lines 1202-1210), while the chapter also gives approximately 50,000 remaining on the eve of the 1956 war (lines 1202-1206) and, for the post-1956 exodus, 14,102 departures between November 22, 1956 and March 15, 1957 as “just under one-third of those residing in the country on the eve of the Suez/Sinai War” — which implies a pre-war total of somewhat over 42,300 (computed from the figures as printed), against the approximately 50,000 given earlier in the same chapter. All figures stand as printed, with their different sources (Jewish Agency, World Jewish Congress, the author’s Karaite estimate) noted in the text.
- Chapter 3 (line 1208) says the Ashkenazim may have taken “the sacking of their synagogue in 1948” as a sign of imminent danger; the burning of the Ashkenazi synagogue in Cairo’s Muski quarter is placed in the same chapter’s account of the November 2–3, 1945 riots (lines 1159-1160). Both dates stand as printed.
- Printed slips kept as printed in this part: “Muslim Bothers” for the Muslim Brothers (line 1159); “neolachrymose” as one word (line 1138), against “neo-lachrymose” elsewhere; “azgal” for the colloquial poems in al-Kalim’s Faruq wedding issue (lines 1221-1222); “the leading bank in the county” for country (lines 1253-1255); the verb form “advocated” stands as printed at line 1283 (“Nahum advocated cultural integration”), the same form as at lines 569 and 623; in Chapter 2’s notes, “Nancy Reyonolds” (note 19, line 775), Krämer’s title truncated as The Jews in Modern (note 58, line 939), “Imprimairie Française” (note 62, line 955), Maccabi cited without “pp.” (note 74, line 1003), “Oct 15, 1949” without a period (note 46, line 890), misplaced closing quotation marks in the Rassun citations (notes 37 and 41, lines 849 and 866), and Dan Miron’s article title run together with its outlet and a stray closing mark (note 90, lines 1071-1072); in Chapter 3’s notes, Mizrahi’s title as Le temps revolu without the accent (note 13, line 1388), against révolu in Chapter 2 note 12, and the AJC report cited at “p. 24–32” (note 23, line 1429).
- Chapter 3’s body dates Dina Monet’s ma’abarot interviews to after the interviewees’ arrival in Israel in December 1956 (lines 1331-1334), but Chapter 3 note 84 cites her article, “Absorption of Egypt’s Aliya in Good Hands,” to the Jerusalem Post of Dec. 31, 1955 — a year before the arrivals the body describes. Both dates stand as printed.
- The emigration figures in Chapter 3’s note 83 (Cabasso et al., 1984) do not reconcile with the chapter’s other figures as printed: 47,000 emigrants to destinations other than Israel “cannot be reconciled with the Jewish Agency’s figures for ‘aliyah without assuming a Jewish community of at least 85,000 before 1948, a larger figure than most estimates,” and the same source claims only one-third of all Egyptian Jews emigrated to Israel, against the chapter body’s conclusion that between one-third and one-half of the community relocated in Israel (lines 1329-1330). Note 30’s Israeli census figures (14,895 immigrants from Egypt and Sudan in 1948–51; 15,872 in 1948–54) are likewise somewhat lower than Laskier’s Jewish Agency-based figures, the discrepancy attributed in part to those who died or left Israel. The text holds all of these side by side and warns that the available statistics “are incomplete and to some extent politically designed.”
- Armand Karmona’s death in interrogation in 1954 is left uncertain in Chapter 4 as in the Introduction: Egyptian authorities claimed he committed suicide, the Jerusalem Post charged the police with beating him to death, and “the exact circumstances of his death remain uncertain” (lines 1735-1745).
- Printed slips kept as printed in this part: “illusive” for elusive, of the hard data on former Nazis in Egypt (line 1744); in Chapter 3’s notes, “(Paris: Editions du Scribe 1984)” without a comma before the year (note 83, line 1685); in Chapter 4’s notes, “Dec. 22 1954” without a comma (note 17, line 2004), “350. 21” (note 39), “General Records(1955)” without a space (note 53), the conclusion based on Haykal’s documents 105 and 106 that “most be considered provisional” for “must” (note 54), the displaced closing quotation mark in Rowghani’s manuscript title (note 55), and a comma after the title in the citation of The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt, (note 50).
Coverage
lines 1-2172 of 5066 (parts 1-3 of 7)