The seizure of two tonnes of Jewish documents by the Egyptian authorities last month has been widely reported in the international press - but few media have bothered to seek a reaction from Egyptian Jews themselves. This piece by Rachel Avraham for United with Israel is an exception, and contains useful context describing the last decades of Egyptian Jewry before extinction. The documents symbolise the terrible injustice done to this community.
These documents were reportedly stolen from the Institut D’Egypte on
December 16, 2011 during the public riots that erupted following the
overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak. Al Ahram asserted that a
senior member of former President Mubarak’s National Democratic Party
was involved in the efforts to smuggle the documents out of Egypt in the
service of a French Jewish woman and a Lebanese Jewish man named Robert
Khalil Sarsaq, both of whom the Egyptians believe to be linked to the
Mossad.
The Israeli government however denies that it was involved in smuggling these documents out of Egypt.
According to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, “We have this
great pool here of testimonies of the survivors who are still alive. All
of this information about blocking the documents has no basis, because
we have all the information here with us. With all due respect to
whether these documents exist or not, we have enough historical
information and testimonies right there,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
Ayalon has been actively involved in raising public awareness about the
issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries via his facebook campaign
page “I am a refugee.”
Jews first settled in Egypt during the reign of the Egyptian Pharoah
Amenhotep IV, 1375-1358 BCE, and by 1937, around 63,500 Jews were living
in Egypt. According to Egyptian born JIMENA founder Joseph Abdel
Wahed, “Mizrahi Jews are among the oldest indigenous people in
the Middle East. We are like the American Indian, natives of our
country. Our communities in Baghdad and Cairo predate the
Arab conquest by as much as 2,000 years and our contribution to Arab
societies is immense. Judaism was born there. Our sacred Torah and
great rabbis and philosophers, Maimonides and Philo, took root there.”
Nevertheless, despite the existence of deep Jewish roots in Egypt,
Egypt’s Nationality Code of 1926 deprived Jews of Egyptian citizenship.
In 1937, with the rise of Egyptian nationalism and anti-Jewish
sentiment, 10 Egyptian Jews were murdered, over 300 Egyptian Jews were
injured, and a synagogue, Jewish old age home, and Jewish hospital were
destroyed amidst anti-Jewish riots. Between June and November 1948,
bombs set off in Cairo’s Jewish Quarter resulted in the slaughter of 70
Jews and the maiming of nearly 200 Jews, which was accompanied by the
arrest and property confiscation of 2,000 Egyptian Jews.
Following Israel’s Independence, the Arab masses responded harshly
towards their Jewish subjects. Joseph Abdel Wahed asserted that across
the Arab world, “Hundreds were killed, maimed, women were raped and Jewish property looted and burned. In Cairo and other Arab capitals, crowds chanted ‘Al yahud Kelab el Arab/The Jews are the dogs of the Arabs’ and ‘Ebdah el Yahud/Slaughter the Jews.’
It was like hell in Dante’s Inferno.” However, after the dust of the
1948 war had settled, the situation did not improve. In 1956, the
Egyptian government used the Sinai Campaign as a pretext to expel and
confiscate the property of 25,000 Jews, while an additional 1,000 Jews
were held in detention camps. In November 1956, an Egyptian government
document declared, “All Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state,” and promised that they would soon be expelled.
As Egyptian Jewish refugee Lili Hazan Brode writes of this period on
Danny Ayalon’s facebook campaign page, “In 1956, my mother removed my
chain with the Jewish star and told me to be very careful about every
word I said in public or my father would end up in jail like many of our
friends and relatives. I knew many people whose young 18 and 19 year
old boys were jailed or hung because the Egyptians believed every young
and old Jew was a Zionist. In my Jewish school, which was attached to
the Eliyahou Hanavi synagogue, I experienced direct anti-Semitic
lectures about the Jews who stole Israel and humiliating discussions
about the Jewish people. I was often asked to repeat these awful slurs
against my Jewish people and I would start to cry or explain that I
didn’t understand the lecture which resulted in more punishments.”
By 1957, there were only 15,000 Jews left in Egypt and following the
Six Days War, there was a renewed wave of persecutions that caused the
Jewish community to dwindle to 2,500 souls. After Jews were given
permission to leave in the 1970’s, almost no Jews remained in Egypt.
Today, the once vibrant Egyptian Jewish community is on the verge of
extinction, as less than 100 Jews are presently living in Egypt and most
of them are very old.
Joseph Abdel Wahed declared, “Our homes, businesses, synagogues,
schools, hospitals, home for the aged and other community property are
gathering dust in Cairo, Alexandria, Baghdad, Aleppo, Tunis, Aden and
Tripoli. This region in effect is now judenrein. In the words of
Bernard Lewis, the renowned British Middle East expert, we have become
‘a shadow of history.’” The confiscation of documents that proclaim to
testify to what the Egyptian Jewish community lost demonstrates the Egyptian government’s efforts to hide from public view the fate of this “shadow of history.”
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