Egyptian Communism Reconsidered

Bustan: The Middle East Book Review 5 (2014) 36–43

brill.com/mebr

Contentious Comrades: Egyptian Communism Reconsidered

Joel Gordon University of Arkansas [email protected]

Rami Ginat A History of Egyptian Communism: Jews and Their Compatriots in Quest of Revolution (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2011), 431 pp. ISBN: 978-1-58826-759-7.

Rami Ginat’s study—a work that will quickly become the go-to source on the history of communism in pre-Nasserist Egypt—is really two books in one. It is first and foremost a detailed account of the origins and impact of communist movements from the 1920s through the end of the “liberal era.” At the same time, it is an exploration of the particular role played by Jews, native and adopted sons and daughters of Egypt, in founding, fostering, and, at times, fragmenting a movement that in most cases eventually disowned and disbarred them, much to their dismay. It is a story that is at once inspiring and, for them, ultimately, tragic. Ginat’s authority as the primary academic chronicler of the Egyptian left is rooted in exhaustive, innovative research undertaken over many years and in many places. He has already written important works on Egyptian-Soviet relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Marxist intellectual Lutfi al-Khuli, and the Nasser-era foreign policy approach of positive neutrality during the Cold War.1 His monographs and articles are informed by research that has taken him beyond the usual archival sites, and his reading of memoirs, periodicals, and secondary sources is comprehensive and current. For this study he has traveled to Moscow (Comintern and Communist Party archives), Washington, D.C. (Department of State records), London (Foreign Office records), Cairo

1 The Soviet Union and Egypt: 1945–1955 (London: Frank Cass, 1993); Egypt’s Incomplete Revo- lution (London: Frank Cass, 1997); Syria and the Doctrine of Arab Neutralism (Brighton, UK: Sussex, 2005).

(the contemporary press, including leftist newspapers, and key unpublished documents), and Amsterdam (where he read unpublished manuscripts at the International Institute of Social History). He has had the opportunity to read many relevant works published in recent years, which makes his work far more comprehensive than an earlier generation of formative studies of communism in Egypt and the Arab world.2 Not least, he has sought out and interviewed leading communist players in Egypt, France, and Israel. His archival reach lends his work a rare—and fresh—breadth of perspective. His personal contacts breathe life into his story enabling him to convey the mood of a country and of those who struggled so hard, and at great personal cost, on behalf of a more just society.

Nationalism or Internationalism?

The story begins in the aftermath of the 1919 revolution as Egyptians set out to define a constitutional order within the constraints of British imperial over- sight and a puppet monarch. Ginat reminds us that Egyptians, like others glob- ally, debated the virtues and vices of communism in the wake of the Russian revolutions and emergence of the Soviet Union—and often did so in the open. The key figure in the establishment of organized communist activity in Egypt was Joseph Rosenthal, an Ashkenazi Jew whose family migrated to Palestine when he was twelve. Rosenthal read Marx as a young teen in Beirut, then, after his family moved to Alexandria in 1897, became a devotee of the charismatic nationalist Mustafa Kamil. In early 1921 he founded the Confederation Gen- erale du Travail and, shortly thereafter, the Egyptian Socialist Party (ESP). Rosenthal was a pivotal figure, but he was always surrounded by controversy. He sparred publicly with Salama Musa, a major figure in Egyptian socialist circles, who claimed to have founded the ESP a year earlier. Rosenthal, nev- ertheless, was the face of the movement; it was he who met with Wafdist leaders Mustafa al-Nahhas and Makram ʿUbayd—as well as a British under- cover agent—in August 1921. The Comintern reported that both the “centrist” Wafd and the “radical nationalist” Watani Party treated the ESP “with marked respect for its revolutionary character” (p. 59). Nahhas in fact told Rosenthal

2 Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Working Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Selma Botman, The Rise of Egyptian Communism: 1939–1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988); Tareq Y. Ismael and Rifaʿat el-Saʿid, The Communist Movement in Egypt: 1920–1988 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Bustan: The Middle East Book Review 5 (2014) 36–43