Egyptian Jewry under the Nasser regime, 1956–70

Abstract

Jews have lived in Egypt ever since they established a small colony in Upper Egypt on the Island of Elephantine, before the Babylonian Exile. Many came to that country following the conquest of Judea by Alexander the Great in 322 BCE. There were waves of immigration after 1517 when Egypt was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. During the nineteenth century under the Muhammad Ali dynasty (1805-1952), Jews arrived from Middle Eastern countries, the Balkans, North Africa, Eastern Europe and Italy. They settled throughout the Nile Delta, and communities were established in Cairo, Alexandria, Tantah, Port Said, Mansura, Mahalla al-Kubra and Ismailiyya. In the 1850s the Jewish population of Egypt numbered 6,500. By 1948 the eve of Egyptian-Israeli fighting during Israel's war of independence it had reached 80,000. The Jews, like other minorities in Egypt Greeks, Italians, Syrians, Armenians did not make up a significant percentage of the total population of 19 million in 1948. Yet, like these minorities, they had made important contributions to the economic modernization of the country, particularly since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Some Egyptian Jews originated from Arabic-speaking countries Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq and were considered Oriental Jews. There were also Sephardim, descendants of the megorashim (exiles) from Spain and Portugal, as well as Italian Jews who settled in Egypt. The Sephardim were the most dynamic and largest segment of the country's Jewish population, constituting the financial and intellectual elite for a long period. They dominated the community's leadership, most notably in Cairo and Alexandria. This elite included the Cattawi, Cicurel, Mosseri, Suares, and Adeh families in Cairo, and the de Menasche, Rolo and Aghion families in Alexandria. There was also a Karaite community. A small communal nucleus of Ashkenazim was established as early as 1865; their numbers increased significantly in the wak of the pogroms in Russia and Romania. Perhaps a quarter of the the Jewish population held Greek, French, Austro-Hungarian (until 1917), British and Italian citizenship; another quarter of the Jewish population or perhaps less had managed to obtain Egyptian citizenship through the 1929 Egyptian Citizenship Laws.