From Pillars of the Community To Compradors

The Jewish community as a whole was identified with the cosmopolitan culture, international business connections, and foreign citizenship of many of its wealthiest and most prominent members. Many Jews, in addition to the business elite, were passive beneficiaries of or active collaborators with colonialism. Insofar as Jews, like other mutamassirun, were identified with foreign interests and culture, their status was undermined by decolonization. In addition, from the late 1930s on, the increasing intensity of the Arab-Zionist clash in Palestine also generated a dynamic that affected the Jewish community specifically. Most members of the mutamassir communities left Egypt after 1956, which suggests that a large proportion of the Jewish community might have left Egypt in the 1950s whether or not there had been an Arab-Israeli conflict and regardless of any specific measures the Egyptian authorities directed against Jews.

Asking if the emigration of the Jews was inevitable or assuming that it was are not particularly fruitful points of departure for a history of the Jews of Egypt. Therefore, I propose a more open-ended, critical approach to the demise of the Egyptian Jewish community rooted in three propositions: (1) Only a small minority of Jews were active Zionists, even after 1948. (2) Most Jews who left Egypt after 1948, especially those with enough resources to have a choice, did not go to Israel. (3) Wherever Egyptian Jews did go, including Israel, many of them reconstructed forms of communal life and collective practices that preserved a link between them and Egypt. This approach contests the Israeli nationalist narrative, which situates the experiences of Egyptian Jews wholly within the trajectory of the Zionist project and insists on their absolute and total alienation from the land of their birth.

Nonetheless, it does not conform to the Egyptian nationalist narrative, which accounts for the demise of the Egyptian Jewish community in terms of Zionist machinations. Any critical account of the emigration of the Jews and other mutamassir communities must take into account the development of the Egyptian political economy and political culture in ways that excluded Jews and other minorities from the political community. For example, the Company Law of 1947 required that 75 percent of all salaried employees, 90 percent of all workers, and 51 percent of the paid-up capital of joint stock companies be Egyptian. To monitor compliance, firms were required to submit lists of their employees stating their nationalities and salaries. They were thus forced to answer the question: “Who is an Egyptian?” There can be no unequivocal, transhistorical answer to such a question. Both the question and its answer are historically and socially constructed cultural categories, as the fate of the department store chain of Les Grands Magasins Cicurel et Oreco, owned by the prominent Jewish Cicurel family of Cairo, illustrates.

To protest the rearrest and deportation of Sa‘d Zaghlul to the Seychelles, the Wafd called on Egyptians to purchase only at “national stores” in 1921–22. The Cicurel department store near Cairo's Opera Square was specified as an approved shop.^[36] In a 1948 memorandum submitted to the Ministry of Commerce, the Cicurel firm described itself as “one of the pillars of our [Egyptian national] economic independence.” ^[37] Nonetheless, the Cicurel store was firebombed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, probably by supporters of the Society of Muslim Brothers, and it was burned as a symbol of European influence in the Cairo fire of January 26, 1952. Both times the store was rebuilt with the support of the government. The Cicurel store did have a European cultural character because of its largely Jewish staff, its expensive and largely imported merchandise, and the use of French by employees and customers on the shop floor. Even many of the Egyptian-born Jewish members of the Cicurel staff did not hold citizenship papers and were classified as “stateless.” Cicurel's contradictions could not be balanced indefinitely. At the outbreak of the 1956 Suez/Sinai War, unlike in 1948, the Cicurel firm was placed under sequestration. The Cicurel family soon ceded its majority holding to a new group headed by Muslims, and in 1957 Salvator Cicurel, who had managed the firm, left Egypt for France. Between 1919 and 1956, the entire Egyptian Jewish community, like the Cicurel firm, was transformed from a national asset into a fifth column.