Zionism The
Cairo Bar-Kochba Zionist Society (1897–1904), founded by Zionist activist from
Istanbul, was the first
Zionist organization in
Egypt and in the
Islamic world. It was founded in 1897 by , a Zionist activist from
Istanbul who arrived in Egypt in 1896. It was the focal point of Zionist activity in Egypt at the turn of the 20th century.
al-Qudsiyyat is perhaps the most eloquent defense of Zionism in the Arabic language. Mourad Farag was also one of the coauthors of Egypt's first Constitution in 1923. In 1934,
Saad Malki founded newspaper
Ash-Shams (, 'The Sun'). The weekly was closed down by the Egyptian government in May 1948. In 1937, the Egyptian government annulled the Capitulations, which gave foreign nationals a virtual status of exterritoriality: the minority groups affected were mainly from Syria, Greece, and Italy, ethnic Armenians, and some Jews who were nationals of other countries. The foreign nationals‘ immunity from taxation (
mutamassir) had given the minority groups trading within Egypt highly favourable advantages. Many European Jews used Egyptian banks as a vehicle for transferring money from central Europe, not least those Jews escaping the Fascist regimes. In addition to this, many Jewish people living in Egypt were known to possess foreign citizenship, while those possessing Egyptian citizenship often had extensive ties to European countries. In 1943
Henri Curiel founded 'The Egyptian Movement for National Liberation', an organization that was to form the core of the Egyptian Communist party. Curiel was later to play an important role in establishing early informal contacts between the PLO and Israel. The impact of the well-publicized Arab-Jewish clash in Palestine from 1936 to 1939, together with the rise of Nazi Germany, also began to affect Jewish relations with Egyptian society, despite the fact that the number of active Zionists in their ranks was small. The rise of local militant nationalistic societies like
Young Egypt and the
Society of Muslim Brothers, who were sympathetic to the various models evinced by the Axis Powers in Europe, and organized themselves along similar lines, were also increasingly antagonistic to Jews. Groups including the Muslim Brotherhood circulated reports in Egyptian mosques and factories claiming that Jews and the British were destroying holy places in Jerusalem, as well as sending other false reports stating that hundreds of Arab women and children were being killed. The leader of the popular liberal
Wafd party Mustafa al-Nahhas led the movement against Young Egypt's radicalism, going so far as to promise rabbi
Chaim Nahum that if Egypt were to fall to Nazi Germany, Egypt would not enact any anti-Jewish laws. Nazi propagandist
Wolfgang Diewerge struggled to spread antisemitism in Egypt in the 1930s, complaining that "
The educational level of the broad masses is not advanced enough for them to understand racial theory. The awareness of the Jewish danger has not been roused here as yet".
Haj Amin al-Husseini was influential in securing Nazi funds that were appropriated to the Muslim Brotherhood for the printing and distribution of thousands of Anti-Semitic propaganda pamphlets. The situation worsened in the late 1930s, with the growth of what
Georges Bensoussan referred to as "Nazification," "propaganda," and "militant Judeophobia." In 1939, bombs were discovered in synagogues in Cairo. The Jewish quarter of Cairo was severely damaged in the
1945 Cairo pogrom. As the
Partition of Palestine and the founding of Israel drew closer, hostility towards the Egyptian Jews strengthened, fed also by press attacks on all foreigners accompanying the rising ethnocentric nationalism of the age. The legal nationality of the Jewish population at this period was and is a contentious point, as some authors have argued that most of the population were foreigners and not 'real' Egyptians. Egyptian censuses give the figures for the population of Jews as 63,550 in 1927, 62,953 in 1929 and 65,953 in 1947. Najat Abdulhaq (2016) argues that a previously accepted figure of 5,000 Jews with Egyptian nationality is a politically motivated underestimate. The 1947 census had counted 50,831 Jews as Egyptian nationals; this number counted those who had lived in Egyptian for two generations, spoke Arabic and identified as Egyptian, not necessarily if they had the papers to prove it. Ironically, Jews who felt comfortable in identifying as Egyptians, even 'foreign' Sephardic Jews, did not feel the need to register themselves, while Ashkenazi Jews who fled pogroms in Europe were more keen to possess papers. In 1947, the Company Law set quotas for employing Egyptian nationals in incorporated firms, requiring that 75% of salaried employees, and 90% of all workers, must be Egyptian. As Jews were often considered foreign or stateless persons, this constrained Jewish and foreign-owned entrepreneurs to reduce recruitment for employment positions from their own ranks. The law also required that just over half of the paid-up capital of joint stock companies be Egyptian. The Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi told the British ambassador: “All Jews were potential Zionists [and] ... anyhow all Zionists were Communists". On 24 November 1947, the head of the Egyptian delegation to the UN General Assembly,
Muhammad Hussein Heykal Pasha, said that "the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state."
Hasan al-Banna said on August 1st, 1948 "If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea ... We sympathize with the homeless Jews but it is not humane that they should be settled where they render homeless other people who have been settled for thousands of years".
After the foundation of Israel in 1948 in 1955 for their Confirmation service, a ritual similar to a
Bat Mitzvah After the foundation of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent
1948 Arab–Israeli War, in which Egypt participated, difficulties multiplied for Egyptian Jews, most of whom were
Mutamassirun (
Egyptianized European immigrants), and who then numbered 75,000. That year, bombings of Jewish areas killed 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200, while riots claimed many more lives. Anti-Jewish riots became increasingly common from 1948 to 1952. During the Arab-Israeli war, the Cicurel department store near Cairo's Opera Square was firebombed. The government helped with funds to rebuild it, but it was again burnt down in 1952, and eventually passed into Egyptian control. Amidst the violence, many Egyptian Jews emigrated abroad. By 1950, nearly 40% of Egypt's Jewish population had emigrated. About 14,000 of them went to Israel, and the rest to other countries. The 1954
Lavon Affair was an Israeli
state-sponsored terrorist operation designed to discredit and overthrow the then Egyptian president
Gamal Abdel Nasser and to end secret negotiations with Egypt being pursued by then Israeli prime minister
Moshe Sharett, who did not know of the operation. Sharett did not learn the truth until after he had denounced the charges by the Egyptian government in a speech in the
Knesset as a
blood libel, which caused him to feel deep humiliation that he had lied to the world, and was one factor in Sharett's resignation as prime minister. The operation blew up Western targets (without causing any deaths), led to deeper distrust of Jews—key agents in the operation had been recruited from the Egyptian Jewish community—and led to sharply increased emigration of Jews from Egypt and the
State Security Investigations Service increased its surveillance on Jewish neighborhoods across Egypt, sometimes raiding homes of Jewish families. In his summing up statement
Fu’ad al-Digwi, the prosecutor at the trial of captured operatives, repeated the official government stance: "The Jews of Egypt are living among us and are sons of Egypt. Egypt makes no difference between its sons whether Muslims, Christians, or Jews. These defendants happen to be Jews who reside in Egypt, but we are trying them because they committed crimes against Egypt, although they are Egypt's sons." Two members of the ring, Dr.
Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azzar, were sentenced to death. In 1953, a cousin of Marzouk,
Kamal Massuda, was killed, and the authorities did not make arrests. Other members of the sabotage rings had families who lost their livelihood after the
1947 Company Laws were implemented, which severely restricted the right to work and to own companies of non-Egyptian citizens. (Jews were not in general allowed citizenship.) In the immediate aftermath of trilateral invasion on 23 November 1956 by Britain, France, and Israel (known as the
Suez Crisis), some 25,000 Jews, almost half of the Jewish community left for Israel, Europe, the United States, and South America, after being forced to sign declarations that they were leaving "voluntarily" and to agree to the confiscation of their assets. Some 1,000 more Jews were imprisoned. Similar measures were enacted against British and French nationals in retaliation for the invasion. In Joel Beinin's summary: "Between 1919 and 1956, the entire Egyptian Jewish community, like the Cicurel firm, was transformed from a national asset into a
fifth column." Hundreds of Jews were arrested or detained without charges, imprisoned, or interned in Jewish schools. Jews were also denaturalized, i.e. deprived of their Egyptian citizenship, and had their assets sequestered. Some Egyptian and stateless Jews were expelled from Egypt, creating a refugee crisis. After 1956, prominent families, like the Qattawis, were left with only a fraction of the social clout they had once enjoyed, if they could remain in Egypt at all. Ironically, Jews like
Rene Qattawi were in full support of establishing an Arab-Egyptian nationalism, and were opposed to the rise of Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel. Nonetheless, even this social elite of the Jewish population was not believed to have any place in the new Egyptian regime. From 1956 to 1970, under the Nasser regime, the military government of Egypt and its agents monitored the Jewish population, implementing measures such as police detention, and arresting suspects. Jewish families in Cairo and Alexandria were held in confinement at their homes for lengthy periods of time, often without funds, food, or other supplies, and were under surveillance by building concierges who had police authority to control Jewish tenants The
SSIS perpetrated much of these acts. The last chief Rabbi of Egypt was
Haim Moussa Douek, who served from 1960 until he left Egypt in 1972. After the
Six-Day War in 1967, more confiscations took place.
Rami Mangoubi, who lived in Cairo at the time, said that nearly all Egyptian Jewish men between the ages of 17 and 60 were either thrown out of the country immediately, or taken to the detention centers of
Abou Za'abal and Tura, where they were incarcerated and tortured for more than three years. The eventual result was the almost-complete disappearance of the 3,000-year-old Jewish community in Egypt; the vast majority of Jews left the country. Most Egyptian Jews fled to Israel (35,000), Brazil (15,000), France (10,000), the US (9,000) and Argentina (9,000). A letter published by the Jerusalem Post from
Dr. E. Jahn, of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees stated: "I refer to our recent discussion concerning Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries in consequence of recent events. I am now able to inform you that such persons may be considered prima facie within the mandate of this Office."
21st century According to a 2009 report by the
Anti-Defamation League, anti-semitic and anti-Israel sentiments continued to run high. Israel and Zionism were frequently associated with conspiracy theories of subverting and weakening the state. The Jewish population continued to dwindle. In 2007, an estimated 200 Jews lived in Egypt, less than 40 in 2014, but by 2017 this dropped to 18: 6 in Cairo, 12 in Alexandria. In 2018, the estimated Jewish population was 10. In 2019 three Jews in Egypt applied for Spanish citizenship In April 2021, one of the last members of the community, Albert Arie, died aged 90; he had converted to Islam, married an Egyptian Muslim woman, and was buried as a Muslim. One of the four remaining Jews in Egypt, Reb Yosef Ben-Gaon of Alexandria, died in November 2021. In 2022 there were a reported 22 Jews in Egypt In March 2022, part of the Jews of Cairo archives were confiscated by the Egyptian government. As of December 2022, there are only 5 Egyptian Jews living in Egypt, all women, of whom the youngest
Magda Haroun (born 1952) is the community leader, who is an
anti-Zionist and married to a Catholic. Her two daughters are not living in Egypt. Her sister Nadia, the former deputy leader of the community and one of its youngest remaining members, died in 2014. In 2020, the
Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria was restored, and in April 2022, restoration work began on the
Ben Ezra Synagogue, as part of government efforts to resurrect Egypt's dwindling Jewish heritage. == Works by Egyptian Jews on their communities ==