Israel’s neighbor Egypt once had a thriving Jewish community dating back to ancient times. Today, only a handful of Jews remain — the result of mass emigration caused by the tumultuous events and changes of the 20th century, including the establishment of the State of Israel.
In the sprawling capital of Cairo, old Jewish synagogues are tended to by the few remaining community members and the Egyptian government itself. These buildings and the documents and Judaica preserved under their roofs are the subject of a new book, “Sacred Places Tell Tales: Jewish Life and Heritage in Modern Cairo,” published last month by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
The book’s author, Prof. Yoram Meital of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, was granted unprecedented access to the Cairo synagogues from 2017 to 2021 in his role as historical consultant to Cairo’s Jewish community.
One of the main goals of the book is to show how “the Jewish community was part and parcel of Egyptian society, culture and history,” Meital said, speaking with The Times of Israel from the United States, where he has been spending the year as a member of Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study.
Much of the book deals with what Meital calls “the Golden Age of Egyptian Jewry,” a period stretching from the late 19th century until the 1950s. This period largely coincided with British rule over Egypt, which brought greater rights and opportunities for minorities.
During the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish life in Cairo was transformed by an influx of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, who were distinct from the local Mizrahi and Karaite Jews. During the same period, new neighborhoods were being built, enabling Jews for the first time to set up new centers and synagogues beyond the confines of ancient Cairo.
Most of Cairo’s Ashkenazi community immigrated from Eastern Europe and Russia, “mainly escaping from very poor environments. Some of them were running for their lives and they ended up in Egypt,” Meital said, adding that in synagogue records he found “specific letters and testimonies” describing escapes from the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, among other calamities.
The “colonial regime” of British rule gave European minorities benefits and legal and economic rights if they immigrated, he said, and so “Egypt became a magnet… Egypt was a major commercial and economic hub at the turn of the 20th century, [so they could] find work and a safe place.”
Tycoons and ‘sons of the earth’
These new arrivals integrated themselves into “the very strong Jewish community that existed in Egypt” at the time, Meital said.
The Sephardic community, whose members spoke both French and Arabic, was run by close-knit families of “Jewish tycoons,” who were “pioneers in establishing modern Egyptian industry and agriculture. [They were] very rich. They ran a significant part of the Egyptian economy,” Meital said, though he stressed that the Sephardic community had a range of socioeconomic levels.
These wealthy families were also involved in the economy of Ottoman (and then British Mandate) Palestine, buying properties and sending donations to Jewish concerns there. In the various synagogue archives, Meital found “a lot of requests” for donations from the Jewish Yishuv, the pre-state Zionist community in Palestine, including a letter from Hebrew University leader Judah Magnes, asking the Egyptian chief rabbi to beseech the community for donations to the fledgling university.
The third Cairo Jewish community, the Karaites, rejected rabbinical rules and literature, including the Talmud, and therefore were “a completely different denomination from the rabbinic Jews, a schism that goes back to ancient times,” Meital said.
“The Karaite religious rituals are completely different. The Karaite calendar is lunar, and the names for the holidays are different. There are many customs totally different from what is commonly associated with halachic rabbinical Jews,” he said.
The Karaites mainly spoke and kept records in Arabic and “lived very similarly to their Egyptian fellows,” Meital said. “They saw themselves, and were perceived by Egyptians, as ‘sons of the land.’”
“The Karaites kept their beliefs and customs but they built a new synagogue. They also left their sections in the Jewish Quarter and settled in new neighborhoods, [so] the social dynamic became similar for the different denominations,” Meital said.
New communities, new buildings
In Cairo’s old Jewish neighborhoods, there are many ancient synagogues such as Ben Ezra in the Fustat neighborhood. The Ben Ezra synagogue is the source of the famed Cairo Geniza, a treasure trove of historical and religious documents.
However, “at the end of the 19th century, Jews began to leave the old quarters and settled in the new neighborhoods of Cairo. Until that time, the vast majority of Jews lived in the Jewish Quarter, there was this kind of segregation,” Meital said.
Wealthy families bought land and built villas in new upscale neighborhoods such as Maadi or Heliopolis, while families of modest means bought apartments in other areas, even as many Jews remained in the old Jewish Quarter where they had lived for generations.
This change was part of “facing modernity,” Meital said, where “religious affiliation was no longer the criterion for where you lived.” Other minorities, including the Coptic Christians and Armenians, went through a similar process.
The Jews “established new synagogues close to the places where they moved,” Meital said. “If you look at the architecture and items that these synagogues stored, if you look at the nonreligious activities they hosted, all this reveals the social heterogeneity and the diverse ways in which modern Jewish social-cultural identity was constructed.”
For example, in less affluent synagogues, each seat would have a plaque with a number, not a name, because community members couldn’t donate enough to afford a permanent seat. But in well-off communities, “you have a metal plaque with specific names, and if you look into the names carefully, you have a social map of the Jewish elite of the time,” Meital said.
His research into synagogue records enabled him to reconstruct how the different Cairo Jewish communities would hold weddings and other life-cycle events, offering a window into “social and class divisions, through the synagogues.”
The last generation
This “Golden Age” would end within a generation after the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.
“The 1948 war was a major event in the history of the region, of course. But Egypt was directly involved in the war with newborn Israel. The Jewish community found itself in an extremely difficult situation,” Meital said.
As the war began, “several hundred Jews were arrested, some properties confiscated, and the rhetoric against Jews got much worse,” he said.
As a result, thousands of Jewish families left Egypt. Between 1948 and 1951, “about a quarter of the total community emigrated. Less than half of those decided to arrive in Israel,” Meital said.
A 1952 military coup deposed the monarchy and brought pan-Arabist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Four years later, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and the resulting crisis led to the 1956 Suez War with Israel, France and Britain.
“Thousands of Jewish men aged 18 to 60 were imprisoned and many properties were confiscated,” Meital said, which led to more Jewish emigration.
In the period from 1956 and 1962, the Jewish community in Egypt “emptied out… Only a few thousand remained after 1962, and they suffered after the 1967 war. Many men were imprisoned and tortured, marking the end of the community. Most of those still in Egypt eventually left the country,” he said.
“In general, in the 1950s and ’60s, only a small portion of the community, mainly the younger generations, were Zionists. The vast majority were not. But they saw they had no future in Egypt. About half of the community ended up in Israel, others went all over, [mostly] to France and North America,” Meital said.
Egypt today
“The historical context in our time is that very few Jewish communities are left in the Middle East and North Africa, and these were very rich, historic communities, some millennia old. In the middle of the prevailing focus on the Israel-Gaza war and the geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East, it’s easy to forget that it hasn’t always been this way,” Meital said.
Encouraged by its military rulers, Egyptian society, especially since the 1967 war, has regarded Israelis and Jews alike as enemies, but recently there has been a “fascinating” renewed interest in this rich history, he said.
“In recent years Egyptians conversed about the Jewish past to make a point in a highly contested political debate in Egypt about social, political and cultural issues,” Meital noted. “And this debate is one of the significant outcomes of what is known as the Arab Spring.”
After the Arab Spring mass protest movement of 2010-2012, which in Egypt toppled longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak from power, “millions of Egyptians were exposed to revisionist representations of the Jewish past” through a series of Jewish-focused TV series, documentaries, novels and books produced in Egypt, Meital said.
These new works provided “a different, highly positive description” of Egyptian Jewry that differed from the “hegemonic nationalist narrative” of the government and was also in contrast to the “widespread Islamic narrative,” Meital explained.
Additionally, during the post-Arab Spring period, the Egyptian government and the Cairo Jewish community sponsored the restoration of several historical synagogues and cemeteries, some of which had been deeply neglected for decades. The grand Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in Alexandria, which dates from the 14th century, was officially inaugurated in 2020 with a gala ceremony that received extensive media coverage.
However, the current war and regional turmoil have completely halted what had been a “positive trend of reevaluation of the Jewish past of Egypt during the first two decades of the 21st century,” Meital lamented.
This reevaluation had enabled the Egyptian public to begin to see Egyptian Jewry as part of their own culture, and to distinguish between Jews, Judaism, and Zionists, something that wasn’t always possible in previous periods, he said.
But since October 7, he said, general “anti-Jewish voices and sentiments within Egyptian society, unfortunately, have significantly increased.”
