Youssef Darwish

Darwish was born in 1910 in Egypt to a Jewish jeweller, Moussa Youssef Farag Darwish, whose family belonged to the minority Karaite Jews, a community which comprised the rich and diverse mosaic of Egyptian Jewry. Karaite Jews were simultaneously multilingual and highly integrated in the Egyptian community at that time; most families spoke French and Arabic at home and sent their children to bilingual schools. Some families spoke Greek, Russian and Turkish as well. Darwish graduated from a prestigious French high school in Cairo, the École des frères, in 1929. He earned a degree in law from the University of Toulouse in 1932. In Toulouse, Darwish was first exposed to Marxist literature and became engaged in the local cell of the French Communist Party. ==Career==

In 1934, Darwish returned to Egypt and started his career as a labour lawyer and political organizer. Together with two other Egyptian Jewish activists - Ahmad Sadiq Sa'd and Raymond Douek- he cofounded a new secret Egyptian communist organization and a magazine known as Al Fajr Al Jadid () or the New Dawn, that was linked to many trade unions. By the mid-1940s, Darwish had become the legal representer to 67 of Egypt's then 170 labour unions, WCNL later turned to the "Workers and Peasants Communist Party (WPCP)" and then fused with other communist organizations at the time in the "Communist Party of Egypt (CPE)" (), which then split into CPE and HADETU. In 1958, the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser arrested and jailed all known communist activists, including Darwish. He remained in prison for 6 years, during which he was frequently beaten and tortured. ==Views on Zionism, Jews in Egypt, and Jewish exodus==

In 1947, Darwish joined a group called Jews against Zionism. In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly two years before his death, he told the reporter, "We denounced the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine but the government closed us down while Zionist organisations continued to function freely". he stated that there was no discrimination against Jews in Egypt prior to 1948. But as the State of Israel was established, many Egyptian Jews began to worry and the Jewish exodus began. He claimed that "sequestration wasn’t a general rule applied to all Jews, but a measure imposed after 1956 primarily on French and British Jews and those who were suspected of having ties to Israel" and that it wasn't until after the 1967 war that the majority of the 10,000 Jews who had stayed behind began to leave. ==Personal life==

The Egyptian actress Basma is Youssef Darwish's granddaughter. ==See also==