Alec Nacamuli
From Exodus to Exodus: Jews from Egypt, Part 1

Alec Nacamuli - From Exodus to Exodus: Jews from Egypt, Part 1

- [Judi] Well, Alec, I can quickly read out… I just want to give you an introduction to those who don’t know you. Alec was born in Alexandria and left after the Suez Crisis in 1956. He’s now retired from International Korean IT. He chairs Sephardi Voices UK, an oral history project dedicated to capturing testimonies of Jews from the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran who have resettled in the UK. He’s also a council member of the Nebi Daniel International Association, which strives to project, protect, sorry, the Jewish heritage in Egypt, and a volunteer guide on ancient Egypt at the British Museum. So welcome, Alec, and over to you.

• Oh, so sorry.

• [Judi] That’s okay.

• I’m very, very sorry. I thought that Judi had already done the introduction. Well done, Judi, and thank you, and thank you to both of you.

• Well, thank you-

• [Wendy] Very good.

• Judi and Wendy. I’m very often asked, “Where does your accent really come from?” And one Jewish person, when I told him that I was born in Egypt, said to me, “But didn’t all the Jews leave with Moses?” In the meantime, most Egyptians will insist that no Jews ever lived in Egypt. But in fact, the two people have cohabited continuously for thousands of years. So we’re going to devote two sessions to the history of the Jews of Egypt. Today, the first, we will start with the biblical narrative very briefly and continue right up to the birth of the state of Israel. And then on Thursday, and I will concentrate on the life, Jewish life in Egypt during the first half of the 20th century and their contribution to the country’s political, economical, and artistic development. And then on Thursday, we will look at the decline after 1948, the forced departures following the Arab-Israeli conflicts and efforts to preserve the memory and heritage of this once vibrant community. Because, as a spoiler, from a community which peaked at about 85,000 after World War II, there are today eight Jews left in Egypt. So, let’s start. Right. I hope you can all see. Fine. The biblical narrative. I will not spend too much time on it ‘cause you probably know it better than I do.

But Wendy said that I was a volunteer guy at the British Museum. And if I were taking you around the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum, the first thing you would see as you came in is this statue of a Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who reigned around minus 1370, 1380. And we believe that he was the Pharaoh of Joseph and the dream of the seven fat cows and the seven skinny cows. Walking further down the gallery, we come to this gigantic bust of Ramses II, whose reign peaked at about minus 1250, and we believe that he was the Pharaoh of the Exodus. However, what we should know is that there is no mention of Israel or Jews in any hieroglyphic text up until then. But I suspect, you would ask yourself, would you mention a bunch of slaves or the fact that a good part of your army got drowned in the Red Sea? In fact, the first sort of mention of Israel-

• [Wendy] Okay, where’s Asher?

• Sorry, hello? The first mention of Israel in a Egyptian stele is here, you can see, is the Merenptah stele, or sometimes known as the Israel stele, which is today at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. It dates from about 1210. And Merenptah is the Pharaoh who succeeded Ramses II. And the stele actually lists a list of defeated people outside Egypt. And I’ll read you from it. “Their chiefs prostrate themselves and beg for peace. Canaan is devastated. Ashkelon is vanquished. Gaza is taken. Yenoam, annihilated. Israel is laid waste. Its seed exists no more. Syria is made the widow for Egypt and all lands are pacified.” You should also know that after the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel controlled the Sinai, every single professional and amateur Israeli archaeology rushed to the Sinai looking for traces of the Jewish tribe after the Exodus and they could not find any archaeological trace; not a shard of pottery, not a bone, which could have proven that there were a tribe who had gone round in circles there for about 40 years. So I apologise if I appear as blasphemous to some of you, but here is something you might wish to discuss over your seder in 10 days time. The first, let’s say, tangible evidence we have of a Jewish presence is a Jewish temple on the island of Elephantine next to Aswan, dating from this fifth century, before our era, when Egypt was under Persia domination. Then in minus 587, as we know, the first temple was destroyed and Jeremiah arrived in Egypt where he actually died. Then in minus 332, we have the Greek Macedonian conquest led by Alexander the Great and he left behind him a dynasty based on his generals, the Ptolemies. Greek became the official language, and Ptolemee Soter brought Jewish captives back to Alexandria.

The Torah would be read in Greek, and that is when you have the Septuagint Bible of the seventies. Two versions of how this happened. The official version is that the 70 rabbis were locked in different cells and by a miracle, all the translations came out identical when they emerged. The other version is that the 70 rabbis were locked into one cell and told that they will not be let out until they had agreed on a translation. So that is, I’ll let you decide which one you think is more realistic. The community was very large. It is rumoured to number about 180,000. And apparently the congregation, there is a passage in the Talmud, was so large that the shammash had to wave a flag every time the congregation had to respond amen, because not everybody could hear the prayers. It is also the time of Philo, who was a Jewish philosopher, who attempted to combine Greek philosophy, stoicism, the philosophy of Plato with the Torah. Then the last, and probably the most famous, of the Ptolemies was Queen Cleopatra. So we remember our Shakespeare. We have the Roman conquest, Mark Antony, Julius Caesar, followed by persecutions of the Jews. And Philo actually led a delegation to Rome in vain to plead for mercy. In 70, we have, as we know, the destruction of the 2nd Temple, and Romans bring Jewish captors back to Egypt. And this is a time of very severe oppression leading in 115 to a revolt of Jews in Egypt, which was brutally repressed.

However, this is 20 years before Bar Kokhba in Judea. And then we have Christianity coming down from Constantinople into Egypt. And by the year 400, 90% of the Egyptian population was Jewish. We do not know much about, let’s say, what happened to the Jews in that period, except that unsurprisingly it was pretty miserable for them and in 414 Jews were expelled from Alexandria by the Byzantines. But they gradually returned and in 642, we have the Arab Conquest led by Amr ibn-al-Asi. And I will read you a note he wrote to his general, the Caliph Umar. “I have taken Alexandria. It is an immense city. I cannot tell you how many marvels it contains. We can find 4,000 palaces, 4,000 baths, 400 theatres, 12,000 grain merchants, 4,000 Jews subject to tribute and taxes, 1,200 gardens.” So we might sort of, the figures might not be very exactly accurate, but what is interesting is that he mentions 4,000 Jews subject to tribute in the same breath as he talks about 400 palaces or baths, et cetera. And Islam became the official religion. A new capital was created in Fostat, close to today’s Cairo. And this is where we have discrimination against all Dhimmis. The monotheistic religions could continue to live, Christians and Jews, as long as they paid the tribute, the , but they were considered second class citizens. Could not build houses higher than Muslim houses or synagogues higher than mosques. Would only allowed to ride mules and not horses, et cetera, et cetera. And throughout this whole period, the fate of the Jews fluctuated depending on how much the local caliph or bey or sultan applied the rules of the Dhimmis. There are some emerging, some interesting figures who emerge. We have the Rabbi Saadia who compiles the Siddur and he translates the Torah into Arabic. He then later left Egypt and became the of the Academy of Sura in Babylon. And then in 970, we have the conquest by the Fatimids.

The Fatimids, who were a Shia tribe, coming from the West from Tunisia and claiming descendancy from Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Mohammed. And the capital moved to Cairo actually, and they encouraged immigration of Jews from Babylon, Tunisia, Israel, and we had alternating periods of prosperity and repression. For instance, in 1011, there was a caliph known as the Mad Caliph, al-Hakim, and he forced Jews into a Jewish quarter, the . That is probably the first example of Jews being forced into a defined geographical space. It is 400 years before the ghetto in Venice, but it is the only example of such a restriction imposed on Jews in Egypt. And then we have Maimonides who arrives from Spain via Morocco. He becomes the court physician to the Sultan, Saladin, and he died in Fustat, as we know, in 1204. That is where he wrote the “Mishneh Torah” and the “Guide for the Perplexed,” which he wrote in Arabic. And this is also the time of the Cairo Genizah. The Cairo Genizah, which was discovered in 1896/97 by Solomon Schechter in old Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat. And he bought back over 190,000 documents to Cambridge. It is the birth of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah collection, which now also includes the Jacques Mosseri collection. Strictly speaking, only documents containing the name of God or prayers or Talmuds cannot be destroyed and must be buried, or placed in a Genizah. But the Cairo Genizah can be considered as an early recycling depo, 'cause it contains not only prayer and religious documents. What you see here is a manuscript draught in his hand of Maimonides’s “Mishneh Torah.”

We also have fragments of the original “Book of Wisdom” by Ben Sira, a precursor to the Christian Ecclesiastics. But the Genizah also contains countless secular documents, which give us a unique view of Jewish life, mainly in the 10th and 13th centuries. 'Cause we find there legal documents, deeds of sale, debt recognitions, checks, letters of credit, payment records to labourers, private correspondence. There’s mothers writing to their sons telling them not to forget to eat kosher when they’re on their travels. And even exercises by students. And there’s one which has a page of lines, which was obviously given to some kid as a punishment. A lot of these documents are available online. And quite honestly, this is a amazing trove and you can see it at the Cambridge Online Genizah, and it might be worth having a session at the Lockdown University. Then in 1517, Egypt becomes an Ottoman province under the Sultan Selim I. And, like in 1492 after the Inquisition, they attract Jews and they nominate them to important positions. Mainly in Egypt, they were , which were head or directors of the mint, which would produce the coins. And also as tax collectors, which obviously didn’t make them very popular. Quite a few were lynched. And the Cairo community used to celebrate, what they called , to remember the fact that one of these tax collectors, a certain de Castro, just by miracle escape being lynched.

However, the Ottoman power was diluted by the Mamelukim. The Mamelukim were sort of very often Christian children from Greece, from the Balkans, Circassian, who were taken by the Ottomans, circumcised, converted to Islam, and then either raised as elite soldiers, the Janissaries, or as local governors. And these local governors more or less sort of acquired more and more power, and therefore diluting the power of the Ottoman Empire out of Istanbul and Constantinople. So it is a rather weakened Egypt that Bonaparte met when he arrived in Egypt. This was the expedition of Bonaparte in 1799. He was really interested in blocking the road of England getting to India, and at that time there were 7,000 Jews. What is interesting is that Bonaparte bought with him not only a sort of a military army, but also a whole group of scientists, botanist, zoologists, archaeologists who went and produced a massive opus known as , the description of Egypt, a collection of 26 volumes which actually have drawings and depictions and descriptions of every single animal, every single plant, and every single archaeological site or Egyptian monument that they found. And to a certain extent, that created a sort of a cultural shock when Egyptian antiquity started coming up. Because until then in Europe, the received wisdom was that Greece was the cradle of civilization and fine arts, and people then realised that there was a much earlier civilization predating it for about 2000 years. Talking about Bonaparte’s expedition in Egypt, there is a story going that he destroyed, or his army destroyed, the synagogue in Alexandria.

There is very severe doubts about this. However, it is true that his army broke the nose off the Sphinx during some sort of target practise. Anyway, Bonaparte left Egypt in 1801, leaving behind him a couple of generals, but the French were defeated by Nelson at the Battle of Aboukir. And then in 1805, we have one of the Mamluk, Mohammed Ali, originally from Albania, who seizes power. He actually invited all his rivals, all the other Mamlukes in Egypt, into the Citadel in Cairo, where he slaughtered them all. And he seized power that way. And what is interesting is that he distanced himself from Istanbul. He actually reached an agreement with the Ottoman Empire that they will let him rule over Egypt as he wished in as long as he just paid the taxes. And so that was the beginning of Egypt’s distancing itself from the Ottoman Empire. And Mohammad Ali actually founded the dynasty, which went right up until the last King, King Farouk, who, as we will see later, was expelled in 1952. And he encouraged Jewish immigration from Italy, from Turkey, from Greece. And there was even an attempt in 1835 by Sir Moses Montefiore to establish, in discussion with Mohammed Ali, a Jewish buffer state between Egypt and Turkey, but however nothing came into it. Then in 1860, Egypt became a boom country. It was the time of the US Civil War, so the price of cotton quadrupled on the world markets, and everybody rushed to Egypt to sort of get their hands on Egyptian cotton, known as the long fibre cotton, which was actually of superior quality than the American cotton.

And then later on, we have the opening of the Suez Canal and Egypt became a Golden Medina. Everybody rushed into Egypt to take part into their boom. Italians, French, English, Maltese, Armenians, people from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Syria, et cetera. And it was a period of prosperity, and that’s where we had about 30,000 Jews in Egypt. However, the Khedive Ismail, who was reigning at the time, who had opened the Suez Canal and constructed it, he could not face the heavy debts that he had incurred. There was also a revolt, the Urabi revolt, against him and Britain, fearing that they would lose control over the canal, invaded Egypt. It was the be beginning of the British occupation in 1882, mainly to keep control, to secure the Suez Canal. And this was the beginning of the golden years of Jewish community in Egypt the first half of the 20th century. During World War I, there was Ashkenazi immigration expelled from Palestine by the Turks. And then in the 1920s, the Ottoman Empire, as you know, seized after World War I, 1918, 1920. And then we had the birth of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923 under Kemal Ataturk. But that is where you have this very bloody wars and exchange of population between Greece and Turkey, particularly after Ataturk retook he city of Smyrna, today Izmir. And a lot of Jews then moved from Turkey into Egypt. And at that time then, the Jewish population reached about 60,000. In 1917, we have, as we know, the Balfour Declaration and that was the birth of the Zionist Federation of Egypt. And then in 1922, mainly under the impulse of the Wafd Party under Saad Zaghlul Pasha, Egypt became independent. Not totally independent. They were actually a British protectorate.

And the Jewish community in Egypt was probably the most prosperous in the Middle East. The Jewish community contributed significantly in Egyptian political life. Jews were involved early in the drive to wrest independence from Britain. The journalist, playwright, and satirist James Sanua founded in 1877 the pro-independent newspaper Abu Nadara, Father of Spectacles, which became his pseudonym with the motto, , Egypt to the Egyptians. And they supported the Urabi uprising in 1882, which unsurprisingly, he was then driven into exile. But then you had notable personalities like the lawyer Felix Benzakein, Victor Sonsino, David Hazan, who was actually condemned to death in absentia by the British for fomenting unrest. And they were engaged in the national Wafd movement calling for independence. Leon de Castro, who was the founding editor of the El Horeya, Freedom, newspaper, was the Wafd’s itinerant ambassador in Europe, pleading with France, Italy, Prussia to allow East Germany to allow Egypt to become independent. And what would appear surprising today, the same people were also involved in the emerging Zionist movement, which seems, as I said, a contradiction today. But don’t let’s forget. They shared the same objective, which was to get rid of the Brits. You know, liberate from British occupation. And after independence, which came in 1922 under King Fuad, Josef Aslan Cattaoui Pasha entered parliament. He was appointed to the Constitutional Commission to draught the Constitution. He became the Minister of Finance and later Minister of Communications, and he was a senator. His wife was first lady in waiting to Queen Nazli, Fuad’s wife. Other Jewish parliamentarians were Felix Benzakein, Joseph Picciotto, Cattaoui’s brother, and his sons remained as deputies until 1956.

The chief Rabbi, Haim Naoum, who came from Istanbul, was a senator and would write most of the king’s speeches. And the king actually would regularly attend the Kol Nidre service on the eve of Yom Kippur at the main Shaare Shamayim Synagogue in Cairo to mark solidarity with his Jewish subjects. The Queen had two Jewish ladies in waiting. And needless to say, there were rumours that King Fuad had Jewish mistresses. And then at the other extreme, let’s say, of the political spectrum, we have Jacques Rosenthal, originally from Russia, Hillel Schwartz, and Henri Curiel who were founding members of the Egyptian Communist Party. That communist party at the beginning was mainly intellectual and only started really engaging with trade unions and workers movements after World War II. But ultimately after the Second World War, the active presence of Jewish members projected a negative perception of the party, which actually expelled all the Jews in 1948 in spite of their strong Egyptian nationalism and opposition to Zionism, which they considered a bourgeois movement. Jews also contributed significantly to economic development. The people I’ve named like Josef Aslan Cattaoui, Salvator Cicurel, Sir Victor Harari Pasha were on the boards of the National Bank, the Central Bank of Egypt, and on the Misr Bank, which was the main commercial bank. There were also several private banks, the Mosseri Banks, Suares, Rollo, Zilkha, de Menasce. One of my cousins was actually chair of the Cotton Exchange in Alexandria and the stock and cotton exchanges would close on Jewish holidays because there would not be been many people or trading there. Also, Jews active in obviously the cotton trade, whether it is growing the cotton or textile factors, spinning, milling, et cetera. Sugar cane. The sugar refineries in Kom Ombo were originally Jewish owned. Flour mills, food. And then of course there was a strong professional middle class of lawyers, journalists, doctors, but principally Jews were also very active in retail.

You had all the major department stores, Hanaux, Cirucel, Salon Vert, Ben Zion, Gattegno, Orosdi Back were Jewish. And in fact, what you can see here is the Cicurel department store, probably the Herods or the Selfridges of Cairo and Alexandria at the time, which you can see here. But what is interesting is that those names, the brand remains. If you go today to Cairo, Alexandria, you will still find Cicurel, Hanaux, Salon Vert, Oreco, and all those names remain. And I was actually in Aswan in 2001 or 2002, I can’t remember. And I saw a whole crowd gathering outside a shop called Ben Zion. And I was wondering, and I said, “What’s all this? Is this a riot?” He said, “No, no, no. They’re waiting for the doors to open for the first day of the sales.” So the brands remain even today. And Jews were also active in urbanisation. In Alexandria, the whole south of Alexandria was a swamp, which has seeped through from the Lake Hadra there. And that is when Joseph Smouha, who was actually born in Baghdad and then moved to Egypt after having lived for a while and having got married in Manchester, he arrived in Egypt. And in 1925, he bought land, drained the swamp, and he created the Smouha Garden City, of which you can see some examples there. It was probably one of the very nicest residential areas of Alexandria. There was also a club with a race course, tennis courts, swimming pool, et cetera. And it’s interesting to see the architectural style. It is actually quite close to Bauhaus, as we can see it. You see the one on the left up there. And then that was in Alexandria. So Smouha Garden City. And then in Cairo, it was a Jewish family, the Suares, who opened the first really public transports, the bus lines and the tramways. And in fact, people wouldn’t say, “I’m going to ride the tram.” tram. They would say, . “I’m going to ride the Suarez.” The name remained. And then Jews contributed significantly also to the cultural development in Egypt. Mourad Farag Licha, who was a prominent poet, philosopher, and grammarian, James Sanua, the one I mentioned earlier.

Before he left in exile, he pioneered the modern Egyptian colloquial theatre. He was known as the Egyptian Moliere. In sport, Salvator Cicurel, one of the sons of the Cicurel department store family, he captained the Egyptian Olympic fencing team, which won a silver medal in Amsterdam in 1928. And Jews, particularly from the Maccabi basketball club, would actually play in the National Egyptian team. There were also Jewish dancers, Sarina, Zaki Mourad, Daoud Hosi, whose real name was David Levi. But really where Jews’ influence in culture was the Egyptian cinema. Egypt was actually started producing silent films since 1896, and the first talkies is arrived in 1931. And since then, over 4,000 films, three quarters of the total Arab language production, came out of Egypt. This was the Hollywood of the Arab world. They were churning out one film a week. And this is why, incidentally, colloquial Egyptian Arabic is the one that’s most widely understood across the Arab world because of Egyptian cinema and now Egyptian television. And the impetus came from two people who we would, you know, in Hollywood, they would’ve been the moguls. There was Talaat Harb, a businessman and the Minister of Economy who founded the Misr Studios in Cairo. And then in Alexandria, there was a Jew of Italian origin, Togo Mizrahi, who started a studio in Alexandria. And that was the golden era of Egyptian cinema; melodramas, musicals, song and dance. A bit like what we see coming out of Bollywood today, always with a happy ending. And singers became regional stars: Farid al-Atrash, Abdel Wahab, Umm Kulthum.

But many of the female stars were Jewish: Raqya Ibrahim, real name Rachel Levi, Camelia, Liliane Cohen, and the most famous of all, Leila Mourad. She was the daughter of Zaki Mourad, the musician and Composer and Hasan at the synagogue, or cantor. Her brother Mounir Mourad, also a famous singer and actor. And Togo Mizrahi launched her career as a film star with a sequence of five films: “Laila Bint El-Foqara'a”, “Laila, Daughter of the Poor,” “Laila Daughter of the Countryside,” et cetera. She was actually, in 1952, she was the one who was named Singer of the Revolution, not the iconic Umm Kulthum. She actually converted to Islam to marry her director and Costar Anwar Wagdi, but it was a unhappy marriage. She married twice. The end of her life was pretty miserable. She was a cabal against her. She was accused of supporting Israel and she died miserably, a lonely figure in 1995. Excuse me. And another very popular actor, Jewish actor, was Shalom, same screen and film name, also made famous by Togo Mizrahi in a sequence of comedies playing an explicitly Jewish character, “Shalom el Tourgman, "Shalom el Riyadi,” “The Athlete.” And what I have here, I can show you a film clip from one of Leila Mourad’s film. This is actually, I think it was “Leila the Flower Girl.” And she is singing “Who Wants to Buy My Flowers?” You see the style? I hope you noticed also that there were all… No woman was, they were all dressed more occidental, European style, and certainly no woman was wearing a veil or a scarf.

And also in terms of cinema, we had the Frenkel Brothers. Those were Jews who had actually came from Russia and they started this cartoon studio. They were the Walt Disney of the Arab world. Their main character was called Mish-Mish Effendi. Mish-mish means apricot. Mr. Apricot. Mish-mish and apricots is slightly, I wouldn’t say derogatory, but if you would say, this will happen . If this will happen tomorrow in daybreak, that means like, say like, when pigs will fly. So, but anyway, they were the main sort of cartoon studio of the Arab world. So what was Jewish life like in Egypt, you know, during the thirties and the forties? First of all, in terms of religious communities, you had three main religious communities. You had the Rabbinites, the Sephardi Mizrahi, and there was also an Ashkenazi minority who in Cairo, they had their own synagogue but in Alexandria they weren’t numerous enough so they integrated with the Sephardi Mizrahi. And then we also had, of course, the Karaite. The Karaite. They maintained their independence as a sect. They only, as you know, recognise the Pentateuch, the five books of the Torah. They, for instance, do not celebrate Hanukah. They repudiate oral law. They reject tefillin and mezuzots as amulets and also have very strict rules during niddah. Women would not sit at the table with men during menstruation. So the Jewish community, which peaked at about 85,000 after after World War II, were basically, fundamentally largely immigrants. So you had a sort of aristocratic layer of large landowners, rich bankers, and industrialists also involved in politics. There was then a prosperous middle business and professional class. And then also there was a layer of impoverished, mainly indigenous, Egyptian Jews concentrated particularly in Cairo, around the Haret el Yahud, the Jewish Quarter, who lived close to poverty and assisted through charity.

But for those in the sort of aristocrats and the prosperous middle class, it was an extremely good life. Up until 1950, Egypt was a model of convivial tolerance, religious and national groups living and working together. You know, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. An example from my family. You obviously have heard of Rudolf Hess, the Nazi war criminal. Well, you may remember from Trudy Gold’s lecture that he was born in Alexandria. And actually the Hess family at the end of the 1900s and the beginning of the 20th century ran the largest import export company in Egypt. And my grandfather, before he started his own business, worked for the Hess family. And supreme honour, he was invited to tea at the Hess family one Sunday afternoon. An even greater honour was given little Rudolph, little Rudy, to bounce on his knees. And he always used to say, if I’d known, I would’ve dropped him or thrown him down. Foreigners were protected by a system of capitulations. These were bilateral treaties between the Ottoman Empire and other countries, whereby they were subject to the laws of their respective countries. So they were exempt from local prosecution and they were judged by foreign judges in what were known as the tribunal mix, the mixed tribunals. So really, not living under Egyptian law. French was a lingua franca. Everybody spoke several languages. But if an Armenian met a Greek or an Italian, they would speak French despite the fact… I said French was a lingua franca in spite of the fact that, you know, Egypt was a British protectorate. And whichever store you would go to, like the ones I mentioned, if you spoke French, all the sales staff would speak French. We lived in spacious villas or apartments.

We had servants, cooks, chamber maids, et cetera. We would go to social and sporting clubs. So the Alexandria Sporting Club, the Smouha Sporting Club, the Gazera in Cairo where you would play polo, tennis, golf, swimming pool, et cetera. In Alexandria, obviously we were by the sea, so beach life was very active. And most of Cairo actually, to escape the heat of the summer, would come to Alexandria during the summer. And there were regular visits by French theatre groups. The Comedie-Francaise would come regularly. Italian operas, also Italian opera companies, not necessarily perhaps La Scala of Milan, but the sort of very good, second tier ones from Palma, from Naples, from Genoa. From a religious point of view, the Cairo and Alexandria communities operated independently. There was no, let’s say, overarching body such as the Board of Deputies in England, the caliph in France, the AJC. Each community managed independently. There were 18 synagogues in Cairo, 12 synagogues in Alexandria, plus quite a few of the rich families had their own private oratories. There was of course a whole network of charities, old people’s homes, orphanages, hospital. There was two interesting one. One was known, and we’ll talk about it later again, the Goutte de Lait, The Drop of Milk, which looked after disadvantaged children. There was also a charity to provide dowries to impoverished girls who could not bring a dowry when they got married. There was a whole network of schools. The Aghion School, the Qata'i School, the Menashe School. My grandfather, who was actually honorary president of the Cairo Jewish community, also founded some schools. And those were really dedicated to teaching French or Italian or English to Jews from families who would only speak Arabic, to give them a better professional chance for working and also perhaps thinking in case they would’ve had to immigrate and go to Europe or somewhere else.

There was in Alexandria also the , which was created by the following accusation of ritual murder in a Catholic school. There had been schools from the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the IIU, but they were taken over by the community, except there was still one alliance school in Tanta, a city in the Delta halfway between Cairo and Alexandria. But you must say that most of the comfortable families would send their kids to French or English schools. I went to the Lycee Francais. Others went to the Victoria Colleges. There were three Lycee Francais, two in Cairo, one in Alexandria. There were two Victoria College British boys schools where a lot of Jewish families sent their kids, or some of them even sent them to Catholic schools. There’s Jesuit College Saint-Marc. Or girls would go to the Notre Dame De Sion convent school. Indigenous Jews were generally more religiously observant. One of the very famous rabbis in Alexandria was Rabbi Prato, who originally came from Florence. And in 1927 he wrote to one of his friends, “I am surrounded by a community going to pot from a spiritual point of view.” There were few strictly kosher immigrant homes. I mean, my family, I’ll be honest, we did not eat pork, but we ate shellfish.

And after the Shabbat service, the Eliahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria, there was no Kiddush, but everybody would meet at the Brazilian coffee store and we would have coffee and cakes and obviously pay for them. And as you probably know, we would eat rice at Pesach. And the matzo at Pesach were baked at the synagogue. So we have the classical matzo, but there were also some very, very fine matzo which could be used like filo pastry so we could have kosher . In terms of bar mitzvah, first of all, very important was the . The redemption of the first born was considered a very important event. And when it came to bar mitzvahs, actually, laying tefillin was considered most important. The most important, let’s say, event during the Bar Mitzvah was when the young boy would lay tefillin for the first time on the Thursday before the Shabbat of his bar mitzvah. And in fact, we wouldn’t say, for instance, Samuel or Daniel is going to do his bar mitzvah this year. We would say Samuel or Daniel is going to lay tefillin this year. In terms of weddings, they would most often take place in the house of the groom, the . The bride would bring a . She would bring a dowry. And very often the husband would deposit a counter dowry in case there was a divorce against him, or in case he all of a sudden sort of lost his fortune so that the family could continue to live. In terms of, let’s say, family structure, it was a very patriarchal dominated society, the father taking all the major decisions. The authority of the father was unchallenged. The mother would run the household and supervise the children’s education. Mothers were generally totally ignorant of financial affairs. Whenever, you know, the mother said, you know, what is our financial situation?

The classical answer was, have you ever wanted for anything? And my parents were perhaps quite typical if I would say that my father could hardly boil an egg and my mother would be unable to sign a check. And the relationship also… So it was a very patriarchal society. The relationship with the servants, so cooks, maids, et cetera, was rather paternalistic. But however, Egyptians would generally prefer to work for Jewish families. If anything, for instance, they ate the same food as we did and they were generally better treated. And we would keep close relationship. Obviously a lot of the families were scattered, you know, across Europe and we would keep close relationships with the family abroad. We would have monthly phone calls, you know, which had to be ordered through the exchange known as the trunk. But there was censorship that was reigning, so we had to declare when we booked a call in which language we would speak. And so we would say we were going to speak in French and we would start speaking in French. And then, as happened in those days, we would switch to English or Italian and we would hear a voice coming through the telephone shouting down . “Speak French, speak French!” Because you know, the conversations were heard. So here we have, for instance, an illustration of the Jewish life. So on the left, you have Aslan Cattaui Pasha in full regalia as a senator and a minister.

You have the second photo shows you the in Cairo, probably in the late 1930s. So not quite the same style of, let’s say villas that you saw in Smouha City. The white building at the back, and I’ll come back to it on Thursday, is the Rabbi Moshe synagogue, which is where Maimonides held his yeshiva and there was a synagogue built later on. Then we have a photo of a Jewish wedding. And then you have the last photo is important, it’s the , the civil registers, at the Alexandria Jewish community. Because according to the Ottoman system of millet, they would devolve the administration to the local religious communities. So births, marriages, and deaths were registered with the local religious communities. For instance, I was born a Greek citizen, but my birth certificate was not issued by the Greek consulate or by the, let’s say, municipality of Alexandria, but was issued by the Rabbinite of Alexandria. And this perhaps, remember that until Thursday, because this has taken a lot of importance later. Here we have a photo of a bat hai ceremony in Alexandria. This was a sort of communal ceremony for girls when they reached the age of 12 or 13. And then there was also quite a prosperous and flourishing Jewish press, either of Zionist tendencies, such as or the , as well as general news such as , which was published in Arabic and in Judeo-Arabic, so Arabic written with Hebrew letters. And then there was L'Aurore in French. And those papers were particularly active in the 1930s, attacking German and pro-Nazi activities and sympathy, and I’ll come back to that, amongst King Farouk and several ministers before World War II.

And Jacque Manet, who was the editor of L'Aurore, was actually taken to court for defamation by the German ambassador for criticising Hitler and the Nazi regimes. However, few papers survived beyond the late 1940s. Jacque Manet, the editor of L'Aurore, left Egypt and actually joined the London Jewish Chronicle and became their Paris correspondent. And then we are beginning to see in the 1930s the situation started already worsening. You could argue the beginning of the end. King Fuad died in 1936. His son, King Farouk, was crowned. He was a very young man. I can’t remember. He was 16 or 18. But we also saw a rise of antisemitism and in particularly the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood, the , under the leadership of Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. It was also perhaps a good thing, the end of the Capitulations, which enabled a lot of foreigners from escaping Egyptian law. But however, Farouk and some of the officers were pro-Nazi during World War II. I can read you here a telegram which was found in the German archives, a telegram that King Farouk sent to Hitler. So he expresses his highest respect and offers the support of 90% of the Egyptian people. He was filled with highest respect for the fuhrer and the German people whose victory over England he was fervently wishing for. He knew himself united with his people in the wish to see German troops victorious in Egypt as liberators from unbearable, brutal English yoke as soon as possible. And actually, there was a group of officers who were sort of linked up with German spies and were actually going to hand over military secrets, particularly the position of the British troops. They were however arrested in July, 1942, so a few months before El Alamein.

They were arrested in a houseboat with some German spies. And one of them was no other than Anwar Sadat, who was imprisoned until the end of the war, but actually was the Anwar Sadat who, as we know, later sort of flew to Israel and made peace with Begin. And then in 1942, the victory of Montgomery over Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein. It was very close. You ought to know that El Alamein is no more than 40 kilometres for Alexandria. A lot of Jewish families had started to leave, moving south either to Sudan or to South Africa. And my grandfather and uncle lived across the road from the British Embassy in Cairo and the sky was dark because they were burning all papers. It was really very, very close. And I actually was born nine months exactly after El Alamein, obviously during the general relief and celebration of the victory. And then after the war, November ‘45, we had the first of very serious riots on the day marking the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. The Ashkenazi synagogue was actually destroyed. It was burnt, but however the Egyptian government offered to rebuild it. Then in 1947 we have the nationality laws. 75% of staff in companies had to be Egyptian as well as 51% of the capital. And this is when a lot of Jews took up Egyptian nationality. And we will see later that this was obviously a good move at the time, but proved pretty disastrous later. And then in December, 1947, we had the partition vault at United Nation, which was surrounded by very violent riots. And then in May, 1948, the Declaration of Israel independence. And during that time, there was pressure on the Jewish community to renounce Zionism. There was pressure on the Jewish community to renounce Zionism. And the Chief Rabbi Nahum Effendi was actually forced to, wrote a letter to the prime minister, which I shall read to you. He expressed in this note the desire of Egyptian Jews to be recognised as loyal citizens of the Egyptian homeland to form an integral part of this noble nation.

The Egyptian Jews do not only consider this a sacred duty, but hope to make their feelings, the conduct to be followed in the entire world in settling the Jewish question, supported and reinforced by a demand to the allies to find the homeless Jews a refuge other than narrow Palestine. With regard to the Palestine issue, there is, as they have already recommended, no other solution but close cooperation between Arabs and Jews in an atmosphere of complete agreement imbued with confidence and mutual understanding. So this was sort of the Jewish community trying to sort of distance itself from the Zionist movement. But then in 1948, we have Israel independence and the start of the first Arab-Israeli conflict. So this is where I will stop for this evening. On Thursday, I hope you will join me. We will look at the decline of the Jewish communities after 1948, the Suez crisis, the Six Day War. And then we will look at what is left in Egypt in terms of religious and cultural heritage, efforts to preserve it. And I will also show you images of a trip in February, 2020, just before the COVID, of 180 Egyptian Jews and their families and descendants who returned to Alexandria to reconsecrate the Alexandria synagogue after it was restored by the Egyptian government. Thank you very much and if you have anything-

• Thank you, Alec. That was outstanding. In-depth. I dunno how you’re going to manage to do all of what you just said in one session. That really was so… It was such an in-depth run through history. I was shocked when I heard about Hess. Unbelievable.

• Yeah.

• Gosh. Absolutely wow. I’m really taken aback. I didn’t expect that. Alright, Judi, will you take care of the questions please?

• [Judi] Yes, I will. We can ask a few to go through.

• [Wendy] Brilliant.

• So Alec, I dunno if you can see them on your screen as well.

• [Alec] I can’t see.

Q&A and Comments:

Q - [Judi] Okay, so there’s one from Jackie. Has there been any DNA research between Palestinians, diaspora Jews, Egyptian Jews, and other descendant from one another?

A - Sorry, I would not know.

• [Judi] Okay, thank you. All right, I’m just going to… And Clive was saying that his aunt left in 1956. He asked her as a child if she built the pyramids as she was Egyptian. Let’s see if I can find some questions for you.

Q - Crystal is, they’re heading to Egypt on the 11th and they’ll be visiting the Ben Ezra synagogue. Is there anything they should look for?

A - Well, the Ben Ezra synagogue today is no longer a synagogue. It has been, let’s say, deconsecrated. It is a monument which you visit in Fustat. It is also the Ben Ezra, reputedly, is where the princess found Moses floating down the Nile. So there’s a location there. And you cannot actually see the room where the Genizah was found because it is on the sort of first floor and rather acrobatic, but it’s certainly a visit. And I also recommend if you want to visit the main Cairo synagogue, to get in touch in Adly Street, the Shaare Shamayim, is to get in touch with the community and you have to send a copy of your passport ahead of time because there is security.

Q - [Judi] Thank you. Heather is asking, can you please elaborate on what you said about the Jewish babies being abducted and raised by Muslim families when the Mamluk came into power.

A - There was not Jewish, no. They were generally Christians. The Ottoman Empire, as you know, stretched right across Greece and the Balkans. And they were not Jewish kids they took, but they were mainly Christian kids. I’m sorry if it was a misunderstanding.

Q - [Judi] Okay, thank you. What was the main language spoken by Jews and why? And that’s from Ruth.

A - Basically French. I mean the indigenous Jews would speak Arabic, but the lingua franca was French across the whole of Egypt.

• [Judi] Thank you.

• But you know, coming back to that, a lot of the Jews from the Harat Al-yahud, from the Jewish Quarter, would only speak Arabic and of course the Hebrew they learned at the heder or the Talmud Torah. But that is why there were all those schools that were established to teach them foreign language so that would give them a better future.

Q - [Judi] Thank you. I have a question from Gayle and Alan. Where did the Nacamulis come from?

A - Oh, wow. My family originally comes from Venice. There are Nacamuli names at the ghetto in Venice. And also there’s some Nacamuli tombs in the Jewish cemetery in Venice. But then my branch of the family went to Kofu and then it was my great-grandfather in about 1860 who moved from Kofu to Egypt.

Q - [Judi] Was Hebrew taught out of school? That was from Janice.

A - Hebrew was taught in the Jewish schools. But as you know, a lot of Jewish kids like myself went to the Lycee Francais or the English schools. But for Bar Mitzvahs, there was not actually a formal heder. You would normally get a coach or rabbi who would come and coach you for your bar mitzvah and teach you Hebrew and your parashah.

Q - [Judi] Was there a Hungarian Jewish community in Alexandria or Cairo? That’s from Louise.

A - I mean, there was not as such perhaps a community. There might have obviously been some Jews originating from Hungary, but I wouldn’t say there were significant numbers. Also, as you can imagine during the 1930s, we had a lot of Jews who came from Germany and Austria. I mean, the chief surgeon at the Alexandria Jewish Hospital was a Dr. Katz who came from Germany.

• [Judi] You mentioned the name Picciotto.

• Picciotto.

Q - [Judi] Who were they?

A - They were actually quite a prosperous family. I think they originally came from Syria, but if anybody on the course is a Picciotto, but they got this Italian name because a lot of the Jews from Egypt managed be to get honorary titles from, you know, Hungary like the , or whatever, although they were Egyptian.

• [Judi] Right. There aren’t as much questions, just loads of thank yous and thank you so much for a fabulous presentation, and everyone’s looking forward to seeing you for part two on Thursday.

• Well, thank you very much and thank you in particular to the Lockdown University team for the help they gave me.

• [Judi] Thank you. And we look forward to seeing everybody back on Thursday. And thank you once again.

• Bye.

• Bye bye.

• [Judi] Bye bye.

• Bye bye, everybody. Thank you.