The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry Page 1 of 182 Preferred Citation: Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2290045n/ The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry Culture, Politics. and the Formation of Modern Diaspora Joel Beinin UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · London © 1998 The Regents of the University of California To Miriam, my life partner Preferred Citation: Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2290045n/ To Miriam, my life partner Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to the many Egyptian Jews in Egypt, Israel, Paris, and San Francisco who shared their memories, papers, and hearts with me in the course of my research for this book. Without their assistance, this book would have been an entirely different and inferior product. Their names are listed in the Bibliography. Many Egyptian Jews as well as other friends and colleagues saved clippings from the Israeli and Egyptian press for me, allowed me to copy personal papers, or gave me books, magazines, and other materials that were invaluable sources for this book. Among them were Raymond Aghion, Ada Aharoni, Shlomo Barad, Esther and Gilbert Bar-On, Henriette Busnach, Yusuf Darwish, Marcelle Fisher, Karim al-Gawhary, Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren, David Harel, Anda Harel-Dagan, Jacques Hassoun, Reuven Kaminer, Mourad El-Kodsi, Yoram Meital, Doris and Henry Mourad, Remy and Joe Pessah, Sami Shemtov, Ted Swedenburg, and Robert Vitalis. Ninette Braunstein and Gabi Rosenbaum suggested the names of people I should speak with. Roger Kohn, curator of the Judaica collection at the Stanford University Library, was always willing and often successful in acquiring materials I needed. He kept my research interests in mind during the course of this project and passed on to me several items I might http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft2290045n&chunk.id=0&doc.view=print 8/6/2006 The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry Page 2 of 182 otherwise have missed. Saba Mahmood, Remy Pessah, Aron Rodrigue, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed, Robert Vitalis, and Jane Zimmerman graciously read and commented on portions of the typescript and made many valuable suggestions. Zachary Lockman and Nancy Reynolds each painstakingly read a late draft of the book and offered incisive, detailed critiques. I have not been able to respond adequately to all of their points, but the text has, nonetheless, been significantly improved because of the attention they lavished on it. Much of my thinking and development as a scholar is inextricably bound up with my long friendship and collaboration with Zachary Lockman. It is an enormous source of satisfaction and pleasure to be able to benefit from the intellectual acumen of Nancy Reynolds, the first doctoral student in Middle East history at Stanford University in many decades. This project was conceived and came to fruition during the period of my association with Stanford University's Program in Modern Thought and Literature, an interdisciplinary doctoral program in cultural studies. Teaching the first-year graduate students the required course in “The Modern Tradition” has been a welcome challenge that provided me the opportunity to think systematically about many issues I might otherwise have avoided. My colleagues in Modern Thought and Literature and in the faculty seminar in cultural studies that met for several years in the 1980s and early 1990s have influenced my thinking in ways too numerous and subtle to catalog. The interdisciplinary Seminar in Empires and Cultures sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, which Richard Roberts and I co-convened for three years, has also been a source of stimulating discussion of the ideas that have shaped my approach to this book. I also wish to acknowledge my debt to Stanford's Department of History. In addition to providing supplementary financial support for this project at critical points along the way, the department has long fostered an atmosphere that has allowed me to take many intellectual risks without a second thought. This is as it should be but is, unfortunately, all too rare. Research for this project was funded by a Fulbright Research Grant in 1992–93 and a Social Science Research Council Advanced Research Grant in 1994. The Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University hosted me when I was a Fulbright grantee during 1992–93. As always, my wife, Miriam, and son, Jamie, have been supportive and tolerant of my physical and emotional absence for extended periods during my work on this book. My debt to them can never adequately be redeemed. 1. Introduction Since the conclusion of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, subjects that transverse the border between the two countries have become feasible research agendas as well as new sites of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Egyptian Jewish community is situated in this cross-border zone. This book examines the history of this community after 1948, pursuing three areas of inquiry. Part 1 examines the life of the Jews who remained in Egypt after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (mainly until the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai War). Part 2 explores the dynamics of the dispersion and reestablishment of Egyptian Jewish communities at selected sites in Israel, France, and the United States. Part 3 surveys contending revisionings of Jewish life in Egypt since Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the subsequent conclusion of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979. The best comprehensive work on the history of Egyptian Jewry in the twentieth century, Gudrun Krämer's The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952, demonstrates that no single experience was shared by all Egyptian Jews because differences of class, ethnic origins, rite, and political outlook all tended to erode Jewish communal solidarity without completely effacing it. Krämer challenges the tendency of Zionist historiography to view the state of Israel as the teleological fulfillment of the history of Egyptian Jewry as well as the traditional Egyptian nationalist argument that all would have been well were it not for Zionism. She concludes that “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 http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft2290045n&chunk.id=0&doc.view=print 8/6/2006 The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry Page 3 of 182 terror nor uninterrupted harmony.” [1] These judicious assessments are the point of departure for this book. According to Krämer, some 50,000–55,000 Jews remained in Egypt at the time of the Suez/Sinai War in 1956. Nonetheless, she unwittingly reinforces the prevailing assumption that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked the end of the Egyptian Jewish community because, despite the nominal end date of her book, it contains only a minimal discussion—a mere six pages—of events and issues after 1948. The continued existence of this community in Egypt after 1948 apparently contradicts the Zionist assumption that there could be no normal life for Jews anywhere but Israel, all the more so in an Arab country in a state of war with Israel. The ultimate departure of the great majority of the remaining Jews after 1956 seems to confirm this assumption, albeit belatedly. This book begins on the uncertain terrain delimited by these two moments. ••• The Jews of Egypt The Egyptian Jewish community was formed by a distinctive process of historical accretion. At its core were indigenous Arabic-speaking Rabbanites and Karaites with a Judeo-Arabic culture, including some who claimed to trace their residence in the country to the pre-Islamic era. They resided primarily in Cairo's Jewish quarter, in the port district of Alexandria, and in several provincial towns. Indigenes composed perhaps 20,000 of the 75,000–80,000 Jews in Egypt in 1948 (only 65,639 were recorded in the 1947 census, but this is commonly regarded as an undercount). Because the Karaites are a relatively unknown group, I say a bit more about them in introducing the Egyptian Jewish community than I say about its other component elements. The Karaite Jews of Egypt were part of a small minority within Judaism who reject the validity of the Talmud as a source of Jewish law.[2] Karaites date the beginnings of their community to the late second temple period and identify with non-Pharasaic (Essene and Sadducee) currents of religious thought and practice of that era. The term Karaites (kara’im) was first applied to followers of ‘Anan ben David (ca. 754–75), who broke with the leadership of the Jewish community in Mesopotamia and established himself in Jerusalem. By the ninth century, when the Karaite rite was consolidated, the community was well established in Fustat (subsequently incorporated into Cairo). The Karaites have had a difficult and often antagonistic relationship with Rabbinic Judaism since the Egyptian rabbi and scholar Sa‘adya ben Yosef al-Fayyumi (882–942) declared their doctrines heretical. However, before the modern era, disputes between the two rites were regarded as internal to the Jewish community. Egypt has long been an important Karaite center. During the medieval Tulunid (868–969) and Fatimid (969– 1171) periods, the Karaites were a particularly robust and vibrant community, at times even stronger than the Rabbanites. Subsequently, their numbers dwindled sharply. There were only some 5,000 Karaites in Egypt in 1948. In the modern era, the estrangement between Karaites and Rabbanites intensified after Lithuania and Crimea, where Karaites had settled since the twelfth century, were conquered by the Russian empire.