Download or read book The Lost World of the Egyptian Jews written by Liliane S. Dammond and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews lived in Egypt without interruption since Biblical times. The community knew an apogee in the first half of 20th century. Political events during the second half of the 20th century caused the Jews to leave Egypt and disperse throughout the world. This book contains 28 interviews of middle class Egyptian Jews describing their life in Egypt in their own voices just before their final departure. They bring to life the charm and diversities of the lives they led with its many contradictions. A cosmopolitan life they shared with many other groups living in Egypt at that time. "As a professional historian, I found the material of immense potential scholarly value. As a Jew who left Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis, it touches me in a deep and personal way. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the forces that affect cultural dynamics, political conflict and, last but not least, human nature." -Jean Marc R. Openheim, PHD Teachers College, Columbia University "We have been given an extraordinary gift in this compilation of poignant memories of an Egypt of long ago. These oral histories not only capture the rich way of life of Egyptian Jews, but they also inform of their caring for this land and its people." -Nimet Habachy Author, Broadcaster (WQXR)
Download or read book Egypt The Lost Homeland Exodus from Egypt 1947 1967 written by Alisa Douer and published by Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, the political Zionist movement and Egyptian rulers completely uprooted the country's thriving Jewish community - a goal the Pharaohs tried to realize as early as 3500 years ago. Mostly comprised of descendants of Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula, the world's oldest Jewish community totaled 85,000 members in 1948. No more than 100 to 200 Jews live in Egypt today. This book tells the story of Egypt's Jewish history from Biblical times to 1967, the year of one of the last major Jewish emigration waves from Egypt. It highlights the First Exodus in ca. 1500 BCE and the Second Exodus, which was triggered by the foundation of the State of Israel and three successive wars in 1948, 1956, and 1967. Throughout the narrative, it becomes evident that the Jewish community consistently was subject to the arbitrary will of Egyptian rulers. Starting in 1948, members of this community were forced to leave the country without any of their belongings on short notice. Like other Jews from the Arab world, Egyptian Jews were not Zionists in the Eurocentric, Ashkenazi sense. Their arrival in Israel was met with prejudice and disdain. Even though they were discriminated against in matters of housing and education, they still managed to integrate well into Israeli society and are now members of the country's upper and middle class. The evidence presented in this book is based on interviews with ninety-six Egyptian Jews in Israel and the United States.
Download or read book Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt written by Najat Abdulhaq and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years following Nasser's rise to power, the demographic landscape and the economy of Egypt underwent a profound change. Related to the migration of diverse communities, that had a distinguished role in Egyptian economy, from Egypt, these shifts have mostly been discussed in the light of postcolonial studies and the nationalisation policies in the wider region. Najat Abdulhaq focuses instead on the role that these minorities had in the economy of pre-Nasser Egypt and, by giving special attention to the Jewish and Greek communities residing in Egypt, investigates the dynamics of minorities involved in entrepreneurship and business. With rigorous analysis of the types of companies that were set up, Abdulhaq draws out the changes which were occurring in the political and social sphere at the time. This book, whilst primarily focused on the economic activities of these two minority communities, has implications for an understanding analysis of the political, the juridical, the intellectual and the cultural trends at the time. It thus offers vital analysis for those examining the economic history of Egypt, as well as the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth century in the region.
Download or read book Histories of the Jews of Egypt written by Dario Miccoli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up until the advent of Nasser and the 1956 War, a thriving and diverse Jewry lived in Egypt – mainly in the two cities of Alexandria and Cairo, heavily influencing the social and cultural history of the country. Histories of the Jews of Egypt argues that this Jewish diaspora should be viewed as "an imagined bourgeoisie". It demonstrates how, from the late nineteenth century up to the 1950s, a resilient bourgeois imaginary developed and influenced the lives of Egyptian Jews both in the public arena, in institutions such as the school, and in the home. From the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Cairo lycée français to Alexandrian marriage contracts and interwar Zionist newspapers – this book explains how this imaginary was characterised by a great capacity to adapt to the evolutions of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt, but later deteriorated alongside increasingly strong Arab nationalism and the political upheavals that the country experienced from the 1940s onwards. Offering a novel perspective on the history of modern Egypt and its Jews, and unravelling too often forgotten episodes and personalities which contributed to the making of an incredibly diverse and lively Jewish diaspora at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East, this book is of interest to scholars of Modern Egypt, Jewish History and of Mediterranean History.
Download or read book Without Return written by Jacques Sardas and published by Thebes Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspiring story of finding hope in frightening times, of exodus and determination, and of timeless questions shared among generations
Download or read book When We Were Arabs written by Massoud Hayoun and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.
Download or read book Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in America written by Saba Soomekh and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2015-12 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in America includes academics, artists, writers, and civic and religious leaders who contributed chapters focusing on the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience in America. Topics will address language, literature, art, diaspora identity, and civic and political engagement. When discussing identity in America, one contributor will review and explore the distinct philosophy and culture of classic Sephardic Judaism, and how that philosophy and culture represents a viable option for American Jews who seek a rich and meaningful medium through which to balance Jewish tradition and modernity. Another chapter will provide a historical perspective of Sephardi/Ashkenazi Diasporic tensions. Additionally, contributors will address the term "Sephardi" as a self-imposed, collective, "ethnic" designation that had to be learned and naturalized--and its parameters defined and negotiated--in the new context of the United States and in conversation with discussions about Sephardic identity across the globe. This volume also will look at the theme of literature, focusing on Egyptian and Iranian writers in the United States. Continuing with the Iranian Jewish community, contributors will discuss the historical and social genesis of Iranian-American Jewish participation and leadership in American civic, political, and Jewish affairs. Another chapter reviews how art is used to express Iranian Diaspora identity and nostalgia. The significance of language among Sephardi and Mizrahi communities is discussed. One chapter looks at the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish population of Seattle, while another confronts the experience of Judeo-Spanish speakers in the United States and how they negotiate identity via the use of language. In addition, scholars will explore how Judeo-Spanish speakers engage in dialogue with one another from a century ago, and furthermore, how they use and modify their language when they find themselves in Spanish-speaking areas today.
Download or read book To Egypt With Love written by Viviane Bowell and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was written primarily as a legacy to the author's family. She was born in Egypt and grew up in Cairo in the 1950's in a secular Jewish community which had its own unique customs and traditions. In its apogee, the community numbered 80,000 people. They all left or were expelled between 1948 and 1967 and there are now only a handful of Jews still living in Egypt. In the book, she shares memories of her childhood and describes in great detail a way of life which no longer exists. She evokes the scents snd smells of the busy Cairo streets and describes the local people she came into contact with every day. Jewish and Muslim festivals, mores, customs and superstitions are recounted anecdotally. She also talks about her experience as a refugee in England, initially living in a hostel in Gloucestershire and then settling in London. Apart from her father, her family did not speak English, so learning a new language, battling with the harsh English winter and adapting to a new culture had its difficulties. Her family, like most refugees, surmounted all these with a great deal of resilience and determination. She describes herself as British, but confesses to still feeling somewhat uprooted, even after all these years.
Download or read book On the Mediterranean and the Nile written by Aimée Israel-Pelletier and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aimée Israel-Pelletier examines the lives of Middle Eastern Jews living in Islamic societies in this political and cultural history of the Jews of Egypt. By looking at the work of five Egyptian Jewish writers, Israel-Pelletier confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust. She illustrates that the Jews of Egypt were a fluid community connected by deep roots to the Mediterranean and the Nile. They had an unshakable sense of being Egyptian until the country turned toward the Arab East. With Israel-Pelletier's deft handling, Jewish Egyptian writing offers an insider's view in the unique character of Egyptian Jewry and the Jewish presence across the Mediterranean region and North Africa.
Download or read book The Lost Archive written by Marina Rustow and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer. Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology. Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.
Download or read book Sacred Trash written by Adina Hoffman and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST WINNER OF THE 2012 AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S SOPHIE BRODY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN JEWISH LITERATURE Sacred Trash tells the remarkable story of the Cairo Geniza—a synagogue repository for worn-out texts that turned out to contain the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried communal treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other modern heroes responsible for the collection’s rescue with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting religious tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of almost a thousand years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole bring contemporary readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography, part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed in the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
Download or read book From Catalonia to the Caribbean The Sephardic Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times written by Federica Francesconi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Catalonia to the Caribbean is a polyphonic collection of essays in dialogue with Jane S. Gerber’s seminal contributions to Sephardic Studies. The essays present new sources and new perspectives that challenge our perceptions of the Sephardic experience from Medieval to Modern Times.
Download or read book Forgotten Millions written by Malka Hillel Shulewitz and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-10-27 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the situations of the long-established Jewish communities of the Arab world, the forces that led them to immigrate to Israel, and the conditions that shaped their new lives in a Jewish state led by Jews of a different heritage
Download or read book A City Consumed written by Nancy Reynolds and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though now remembered as an act of anti-colonial protest leading to the Egyptian military coup of 1952, the Cairo Fire that burned through downtown stores and businesses appeared to many at the time as an act of urban self-destruction and national suicide. The logic behind this latter view has now been largely lost. Offering a revised history, Nancy Reynolds looks to the decades leading up to the fire to show that the lines between foreign and native in city space and commercial merchandise were never so starkly drawn. Consumer goods occupied an uneasy place on anti-colonial agendas for decades in Egypt before the great Cairo Fire. Nationalist leaders frequently railed against commerce as a form of colonial captivity, yet simultaneously expanded local production and consumption to anchor a newly independent economy. Close examination of struggles over dress and shopping reveals that nationhood coalesced informally from the conflicts and collaboration of consumers "from below" as well as more institutional and prescriptive mandates.
Download or read book Sacred Places Tell Tales written by Yoram Meital and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred Places Tell Tales is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo’s synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo’s synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The synagogues still stand in Cairo, and they shed new light on the social, cultural, and political processes that Egyptian society and the Jews underwent from 1875 to the present. Studying old and new synagogues in the Egyptian capital, their locations, the items they stored, and the range of religious and nonreligious activities they hosted reveals the social heterogeneity and the diverse ways in which modern Jewish sociocultural identity was constructed within Cairo’s Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite communities. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues reveals the local Jewish community’s customs, cultural preferences, socioeconomic gaps, and class divisions. Sacred Places Tell Tales narrates not only the past but also the unprecedented transformations that have occurred in recent years in Egypt. While only a handful of Jews live in Egypt, the preservation of Jewish heritage, first and foremost synagogues and cemeteries, enjoy a growing interest in public discourse and popular culture. This new desire to preserve Jewish heritage is inseparable from the ongoing public debate about Egyptian society, its characteristics, and its identity, past and present. By contextualizing Jewish heritage preservation in a longer Egyptian and Jewish history, Meital opens a window into one of the most significant political discussions dividing Egyptian society today.
Download or read book A Sephardi Sea written by Dario Miccoli and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sephardi Sea tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of Zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible? Dario Miccoli examines how the memories of a bygone Sephardi Mediterranean world became preserved in three national contexts—Israel, France, and Italy—where the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa and their descendants migrated and nowadays live. A Sephardi Sea exploreshow practices of memory- and heritage-making—from the writing of novels and memoirs to the opening of museums and memorials, the activities of heritage associations and state-led celebrations—has filled an identity vacuum in the three countries and helps the Jews from North Africa and Egypt to define their Jewishness in Europe and Israel today but also reinforce their connection to a vanished world now remembered with nostalgia, affection, and sadness.
Download or read book Zikrayat written by Nayra Atiya and published by American University in Cairo Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish women exiled from Egypt to New York share glimpses of a lost world, by the author of Khul-Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories Between 1948 and 1957, a period that witnessed two wars between Egypt and Israel, 60,000 members of Egypt’s 75,000-strong Jewish population left the country, compelled by growing hostility to them because of their presumed links to Zionism, economic insecurity, and after 1956, overt expulsion. Decades later, during the 1980s and 1990s, the personal reminiscences of eight Egyptian Jewish women, presently residents of New York who had left Egypt, were meticulously collected by Nayra Atiya. While Atiya’s sample of eight narrators represents only a tiny percentage of the Jews who left Egypt, their accounts tell us much about the middle- and upper-class Jews who migrated to the Americas and Europe, giving us a vivid sense of their lives in Egypt before their departure and the dynamic role they played in Egyptian society. They were the children or grandchildren of generations of Jews who migrated to Egypt from around or near the Mediterranean to escape economic hardship and persecution or, in one case, a family conflict. With one exception, Atiya’s interlocutors resided in relatively upscale neighborhoods in Egypt near other Jewish families. They lived in elegant apartments, with servants, fine foods, memberships in elite clubs, and summers spent near Alexandria or in Europe. In Zikrayat, Atiya movingly captures the essence of these women’s characters and experiences, the fabric of their day-to-day lives, and the complex, many-layered mood of those times in Egypt. In doing so she brings to life the ties that bind all Egyptians, offering a glimpse into a now vanished world—and the heartbreak of exile and migration.
