זהויות יהודיות מצריות קהילתיות, נוסטלגיות (אנ')

1/15/2000 EGYPTIAN JEWISH IDENTITIES COMMUNITARIANISMS, NOSTALGIAS Joel Beinin In July 1954, Israeli Military Intelligence ordered an espionage network of Egyptian Jews it had formed three years earlier to launch "Operation Susannah" -- a campaign to fire bomb the main Alexandria post office, the United States Information Agency offices in Cairo and Alexandria, the Cairo train station, and several movie theaters in Cairo and Alexandria. The saboteurs (today we would call them terrorists, especially if they were Arabs or Muslims acting against Israel or the United States) were quickly apprehended and brought to trial in December 1954. The verdicts and sentences delivered in January 1955 spanned the range of options. Sami (Shmu'el) Azar and Musa (Moshe) Marzuq were sentenced to death along with the Israeli handlers of the network -- John Darling (Avraham Dar) and Paul Frank (Avraham Seidenwerg) -- who were not apprehended and tried in absentia. Me'ir Meyuhas and Me'ir Za`fran received seven years in prison. Victor Levy and Philip Natanson were sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Marcelle Ninio and Robert Dassa were condemned to life in prison. Caesar Cohen and Eli Na`im were acquitted. Max Binnet, an Israeli spy apprehended with the network but not directly involved in its operations, committed suicide in jail.[1] Here, I do not propose to revisit the perennial question in Israeli politics, "Who gave the order?" -- the focal point of a still unresolved political scandal labeled the "Lavon affair" or, in the sanitized discourse of national security, "the mishap" [ha-`esek ha-bish].[2] Instead, I will use the apology for the operation offered in the name of four members of the network -- Marcelle Ninio, Victor Levy, Robert Dassa, and Philip Natanson -- to open a discussion of the identities and loyalties of Egyptian Jews. After fourteen years in Egyptian jails, the four reached Israel in the prisoner exchange following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Their presence in the country was an official secret until 1971, when Prime Minister Golda Meir announced her intention to attend Marcelle Ninio's wedding. Not until March 1975, when the four told their story publicly for the first time on national television, did an Israeli government acknowledge that they had been trained and directed by the Israeli army. Aviezer Golan compiled an authorized collective memoir, Operation Susannah (the code name for the bombing campaign), and explained that their actions did not constitute treason against Egypt because The foursome -- like all the other heroes of 'the mishap' -- were born and brought up in Egypt, but they never regarded themselves -- nor were they ever regarded by others -- as Egyptians. . . .They were typical members of Egypt's Jewish community. . . .It was a community with shallow roots. The Jews reached Egypt during the second half of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth. . . .[T]hey could not read or write Arabic, and spoke no more of the language than was necessary for the simplest daily needs. . . .All of Egypt's Jews could have been considered Zionists -- or, to be more precise, 'lovers of Zion.'[3] מטות מסעי • MATOT MASSEI Droits des femmes Les cinq filles de feu Zélofkhad protestent contre l'injuste répartition de l'héritage de leur père, en Terre Promise, en faveur de leurs cousins. Dieu répond à leur requête en leur permettant d'hériter de lui, à condition de se marier à l'intérieur de leur propre clan élargi. La loi juive s'avère donc accessible aux contestations bien des femmes discriminées. 14 נובמבר 1999 • כסלו תש"ס Golan, in the name of the four, emphasized the lack of Jewish affinity to Egypt. In contrast, at the press conference convened to announce the arrest of the saboteurs, Egyptian Minister of Interior Zakariyya Muhyi al-Din stressed that the majority of Egyptian Jews were loyal citizens like all other Egyptians. He claimed that some Jews approached by Israeli agents had refused to act against their homeland and that those who did succumbed to trickery or coercion.[4] He vowed that the government would deal harshly with the minority of Jews who committed espionage and sabotage on Israel's behalf while continuing "to treat the non-Zionists with the kindness and respect due to every decent citizen."[5] The prosecutor at the Cairo trial of the network summarized this official view in his concluding statement: "The Jews of Egypt are living among us and are sons of Egypt. Egypt makes no difference between its sons whether Moslems, Christians, or Jews. These defendants happen to be Jews who reside in Egypt, but we are trying them because they committed crimes against Egypt, although they are Egypt's sons."[6] Photo essays on the trial in the weekly al-Musawwar and daily reports of the proceedings in al-Ahram reiterated that the accused were not being tried as Jews, but as spies and saboteurs, while loyal Jewish citizens continued to live peacefully and without discrimination.[7] These contradictory representations of the identity and consequent obligations of Egyptian Jews are products of the national narratives of Israel and Egypt. Both national projects required Jews to identify unequivocally with one or the other. Any ambivalence was an unacceptable betrayal of the nation state and its imperatives. But until the dispersion of the community after the 1956 Suez/Sinai War, Egyptian Jews maintained more complex multiple identities and loyalties than can be accommodated by either of the contending national narratives. Their responses to the demands for loyalty from the emerging national states of Egypt and Israel were inflected by differences of class, ethnic origin, religious rite, educational formation, political outlook, and personal accident. Yet few could embrace fully the options of official state-centered identities. Forced to decide between Egypt and Israel, most chose neither. Decades after the liquidation of the community, some Egyptian Jews have reclaimed their Levantine cosmopolitanism through nostalgic literary reconstructions of Egypt that challenge the canons of Zionist discourse and simultaneously resist the discourse of Egyptian nationalism. between two homelands: egyptian jewish representations of egypt The Jewish connection to Egypt, even if partly mythological, is ancient. The Biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph, and the Exodus incorporate Egypt into the sacred geography of the Jewish tradition, and these narratives were regularly invoked. The 1942 Yearbook of Egyptian Jewry, whose editor, Maurice Fargeon, openly declared his Zionist sympathies, proudly reviewed the Jewish bond to Egypt: The history of the Jewish people has been linked, since the remotest times, to that of Egypt. Already in the time of the pharaohs of the first dynasties we find Joseph sold by his brothers becoming, because of his great wisdom and profound judgment, a powerful minister in the valley of the Nile. . . . the children of Israel went to Goshen (a province of Egypt) at the call of Joseph. . . . Moses, the most sublime figure of Israel, the first legislator, emerged from the womb of Egypt. . . . Thus the first chalutzim [pioneers] of history were the Jews of Egypt led by Moses and then Joshua.[8] According to Fargeon, some Jews did not leave Egypt at the time of Moses but remained and moved עלון מורשת יהדות מצרים 15 were closed, and Zionism was declared illegal. The government did little to protect Egyptian Jews and their property from bombings and other attacks generally attributed to the Muslim Brothers during the summer of 1948, not necessarily because it was in sympathy with them, but because it sought to avoid a confrontation with its internal opponents on a complex issue. It would have been difficult to explain vigorously defending the Jews of Egypt to the public in the middle of a war against the Jews of Palestine. Between 1948 and 1950, 20,000 Jews left Egypt, of whom 14,428 reached Israel.[16] Conditions began to improve when Ibrahim `Abd al-Hadi became Prime Minister in early 1949. By the time the Wafd returned to power in January 1950, all the prisoners had been released from internment, and many Jews felt it would be possible to return to life as it was before the war. A Zionist activist who left Egypt in late 1949 reported to the Jewish Agency's Department for Middle Eastern Jewry that many of his compatriots felt there would be peace between Egypt and Israel sooner or later and that neighborly relations would be resumed. He affirmed the historic Jewish link to Egypt in the same terms used by the Yearbook of Egyptian Jewry: The Jewish people has taken root in Egypt and the most beautiful Jewish figures resided in that country or came there seeking refuge: Joseph, the first minister of supply in history, our great legislator Moses, Philo of Alexandria, Saadia Hagaon, Maimonides. . . . Our Torah, the most beautiful achievement of the spirit, the charter of humanity, was given to us on Mt. Sinai, land of Egypt.[17] A few months later Haim Sha'ul, a clandestine Zionist emissary who returned to his native Egypt to organize immigration to Israel, reported that an important Jewish community would continue to live in Egypt and that it was necessary to think about how to organize it.[18] Some 50,000 Jews remained in Egypt until after the 1956 Suez/Sinai War. As late as 1961, when less than 10,000 Jews remained in Egypt, long-time Zionist activist Félix Benzakein believed that "one day [Jews] . . . will come back in peace to resume our unalterable friendship with the [Egyptian] people."[19] Ultimately, about one-third of all Egyptian Jews resettled in Israel; others reestablished their communities in Europe and the Americas. millet, minority and citizenship Aviezer Golan's desire to justify Israeli-inspired espionage and sabotage led him to overlook much that was significant, yet not easily contained by the Israeli national narrative. But the Egyptian national narrative is similarly flawed because the secular-liberal conception of the Egyptian nation invoked by Zakariyya Muhyi al-Din and other Egyptian officials during the trial of the perpetrators of Operation Susannah has never been fully realized. Until 1914, Egypt was a part of the Ottoman Empire, and its Jewish residents were juridically a religious community protected by a Muslim state. The community's affairs were governed by autonomous institutions in accord with the Ottoman millet system. Its members consisted of those who accepted the authority of Jewish law [halakhah] as interpreted and applied by rabbinical courts, though by the twentieth century few Jews resorted to these courts except for matters of personal status -- marriage, divorce, burial, inheritance. This millet identity can be termed communitarianism: the world-view and self-perception of Jews (and other non-Muslims) living in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. There was a high level of toleration, communal autonomy, and cultural symbiosis among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Individual Jews achieved high positions in the political and economic arenas in late Ottoman and monarchical Egypt. But Muslims occupied the leading military and political positions, and their עילון מורשת יהדות מצרים [UNCLEAR] 17 ight to do so was not seriously challenged. This is radically different from current American notions of multi-culturalism because the Ottoman political field was defined by a hierarchical relationship among religious communities and very few people believed that individuals could or should be detached from their religious communities. The installation of the formal apparatus of liberal democracy in Egypt reformed the citizenry into a "majority" and "minorities" and created new forms of hierarchy that were somewhat less transparent because of the liberal discourse of equality. The secularist slogan of the 1919 nationalist uprising – "Religion is for God and the homeland is for all" ["al-din li-llah wa'l-watan li'l-jami"] – invited Jews to claim their place as citizens of the Egyptian nation, and some did so. Yet even in the 1920s, the hegemony of secular territorial nationalism was challenged on two fronts by the persistence of colonial privilege and Islamic conceptions of the polity. From 1876 to 1949, the legal affairs of foreign citizens were adjudicated in mixed courts, which Europeans commonly regarded as more "advanced" and modern than the indigenous legal system. But preserving a zone of legal separatism reproduced elements of Ottoman-style community autonomy that undermined liberal notions of citizenship. The legal autonomy of non-Muslims was not solely a product of colonialism. Until 1955, Egypt recognized the communal courts of all its religious communities. The state colluded in undermining its sovereignty for over three decades because the authority of Islamic shari`a courts derived from the same conceptual order that sustained the non-Muslim religious courts. Until Gamal `Abdel Nasser, no political leader commanded sufficient authority to challenge it. By the late 1930s, the limited character of the independence achieved in 1922 and the inevitable reaction against it eroded liberal territorial conceptions of the nation. British collusion with the monarchy in undermining parliamentary democracy, the continuing British military occupation, the privileged position of Europeans, the intensifying Arab-Zionist conflict in Palestine, and the rise of fascism and communism in Europe led many Egyptians to reject liberal conceptions of the nation and to rearticulate their nationalism in either pan-Arab or Islamist terms, though these had long been elements in the cultural repertoire from which Egyptians drew their self-conceptions.[20] Such orientations implicitly excluded Jews from membership in the nation, either because they were not Muslims or because Jews were uncomfortable with militant pan-Arabist anti-Zionism and the pro-German sentiments of some Arab nationalists. At the turn of the twentieth century, autochthonous Jews entitled to Egyptian citizenship by the 1929 nationality law and its successors comprised at least half of the Jewish community.[21] But in 1948, only 5-10,000 of Egypt's 70-80,000 Jews held Egyptian citizenship. Some 40,000 were stateless, and 30,000 were foreign nationals.[22] Many of the 10,000 poor, Arabic-speaking residents of the Jewish quarter [harat al-yahud] in the Gamaliyya district of Cairo or the 15,000 residents of the port district [harat al-liman] of Alexandria were among the stateless.[23] Jews with foreign citizenship typically acquired it in the colonial era, when the category of Egyptian citizen did not exist, and did not believe that it impugned their identity as Egyptians, though most Egyptians felt otherwise. Establishing citizenship, like many other transactions between the Egyptian state and its subjects, was a cumbersome procedure. Until the enactment of the Company Law of 1947 requiring firms to employ fixed quotas of Egyptians, those who did not travel abroad had no need for a certificate of citizenship and rarely bothered to obtain it. Chief Rabbi Nahum encouraged eligible Jews to apply for citizenship during the 1930s and 1940s, but despite the nominally liberal language of the law, their applications were often subjected to bureaucratic delay and rejection.[24] Such practices were not directed specifically at Jews; members of other non-Muslim communities long resident in Egypt 18 נובמבר 1999 כסלו תש"ס Egyptian Jews, like others trapped by the false promises of liberalism, blended elements of communitarianism and nationalism in practices and world views shaped by the European presence in the Middle East yet incompatible with the logic of the nation state. In what follows, I examine sectors of the Egyptian Jewish community -- the Karaites, the haute bourgeoisie, the Zionist youth movement ha-`Ivri ha-Tza`ir [The Young Hebrew], and, to a lesser extent because I have treated them elsewhere, the communists -- whose outlook and activities resist incorporation into the national narratives of Egypt and Israel.[25] the karaites: an arab-jewish community The Karaite Jews of Egypt, numbering about 5,000 by 1948, were part of a small minority within Judaism who reject the validity of the Talmud as a source of Jewish law.[26] Karaites have lived in Egypt for over 1,000 years, mainly in Cairo's harat al-yahud. They were fully integrated into Cairo's ethnic division of labor and typically worked as goldsmiths and jewelers. Remnants of their historic role persist in the Karaite family names of firms in Cairo's gold market, like al-Sirgani, though no Karaites remain in the trade, and few Egyptians are aware of the origin of these names. In the twentieth century, wealthier Karaites began to move to `Abbasiyya and Heliopolis and to adopt elements of bourgeois, francophone, cosmopolitan culture. But in all respects except religious practice, the daily life of the Karaites of harat al-yahud was indistinguishable from that of their Muslim neighbors. In March 1901, the Karaite communal council was reorganized and recognized by the Egyptian state.[27] The somewhat archaic Arabic name of this body (majlis milli) expresses the Karaites's self-conception as a communal-religious Ottoman millet.[28] The editor of the community newspaper explained, "Our community's existence is based on religion so it is our first duty to preserve our religion and to behave in accord with the law of our lord Moses" [shari`at sayyidina Musa].[29] When the shaykh of al-Azhar died in 1945, Karaite Chief Rabbi Tuvia Levi Babovitch attended the funeral, and the community newspaper extended condolences "to the Egyptian nation and the Eastern countries" [al-umma al-misriyya wa'l-aqtar al-sharqiyya] -- a formulation implying that Egypt was a Muslim country, not a liberal secular state in which religion was irrelevant to citizenship.[30] The same conception motivated the congratulations offered to "the Egyptian people" on the Muslim feast of `id al-adha.[31] Similarly, the community greeted "the Christian peoples" [al-umam al-masihiyya] on the occasion of "the foreign new year" [ra's al-sana al-ifranjiyya].[32] The Karaites's historical narrative legitimated their presence in Egypt with reference to its Islamic history and the protected status of Jews according to Islamic law. One account claimed that Karaites resided in Egypt when it was conquered for Islam by `Amr Ibn al-`As, who gave them a plot of land at Basatin (near Ma`adi) as a communal cemetery and exempted them from paying the jizya tax. Another traced the Karaite presence in Egypt to the eighth century, the time of Anan Ben David, whom Rabbanites consider the founder of the Karaite sect.[33] Both versions affirmed that, except during the reign of the Fatimid Sultan al-Hakim, Karaites enjoyed good relations with their Muslim neighbors.[34] These linguistic usages and historical narratives are imbedded in the categories of Arabo-Muslim culture. By the 1940s most Karaites had only partially assimilated the liberal notions of citizenship and nationality recently introduced to Egypt. They saw themselves as a protected religious minority in a Muslim country, employed concepts and institutions derived from the Islamic cultural and עליון מורשת יהדות מצרים 19 political tradition, and explained their Egyptian identity in those terms. At the same time, educated Karaite youth, responding to the mass murder of European Jews and the widespread hopes for a new world in the post-World War II era, began to feel constrained by the limits of communitarianism. Some were not particularly interested in religion, did not pray regularly, did not observe the Sabbath scrupulously, and used Passover matzah [unleavened bread] baked by Rabbanite Jews.[35] The Young Karaite Jewish Association (YKJA) was formed in 1945 by educated youth seeking to establish a modern identity for their community. They published an Arabic bi-monthly, al-Kalim [The Spokesman], which appeared regularly until 1956 and promoted a program of communal reform including the study of Hebrew and modern forms of sociability such as the Karaite boy scout troop, the Karaite youth orchestra, theater performances, sports activities, and outings of young men and women to the Pyramids, Saqqara, the Barrages, and Ma`adi. Al-Kalim also campaigned to improve the status of women.[36] This orientation demonstrated considerable strength when the YKJA challenged Rabbi Babovitch and the community council by supporting a slate of candidates in the council elections of 1946. Seven of its ten candidates were elected.[37] Except for the particularity of Hebrew (which has its parallel in Muhammad `Abduh's efforts to reform the study of Arabic), the activities encouraged by the YKJA were the same as those embraced by liberal Egyptian nationalists seeking to create modern, bourgeois citizens, though conducting them within the Karaite community reinforced communitarianism as much as it promoted nationalism. In this spirit, an editor of al-Kalim, Eli Amin Lisha`, criticized the Karaites's social isolation. He reproached Rabbi Babovitch for failing to visit the newly appointed shaykh of al-Azhar in 1946 or to greet King Faruq when he returned to Cairo from Alexandria and urged the community to participate in Egyptian national holidays "because our Egyptian citizenship requires this." This would win the affection of "our Egyptian brothers" and increase their sympathy for the community.[38] Lisha`'s appeal to assume the responsibilities of national citizenship acknowledged that Karaite practices and outlooks were still largely communitarian. Moreover, his concern for the community's image in the eyes of other Egyptians is itself a form of communitarian sentiment. The editors of al-Kalim linked the project of communal reform to the Egyptian national revival and regarded Karaite Jews as Egyptians in all respects. The newspaper's front page often featured the cartoon figure of "Abu Ya`qub" -- the Jewish counterpart of al-Misri Effendi," who symbolized the modern, educated, Egyptian nationalist.[39] Sometimes the two were shown walking arm in arm; sometimes Abu Ya`qub appeared alone, accompanied by an article on his Egyptian character. Al-Kalim repeatedly referred to Karaites as "abna' al-balad" [sons of the country], a populist term connoting authentic Egyptians. Language, dress, and gender relations were commonly cited as markers of the Karaites's authentic Egyptian identity. The language of instruction in the Karaite communal schools was Arabic. Even today, many Karaites who live in Israel speak Egyptian Arabic as their daily language. Al-Kalim proudly noted that Karaite dialect and usage was indistinguishable from that of other Cairenes.[40] Even in referring to contested localities for which Jews and Arabs used different names, al-Kalim used Arabic not Hebrew terms -- "Nablus" [Shkhem], "al-Quds al-sharif" [Jerusalem], and "Filastin" [the Land of Israel].[41] Karaites were fully integrated into Arabo-Egyptian culture. Al-Kalim often published poetry in colloquial Egyptian [zaga], an art commonly considered a marker of cultural authenticity.[42] The poet laureate of the community, Murad Farag, composed both zagal and standard Arabic qasidas. 20 נובמבר 1999 כסלו תש"ס His style was said to resemble that of Ahmad Shawqi, a leading twentieth-century Egyptian poet [43], Al-Kalim's editor-in-chief, Yusuf Kamal, was the son of Da'ud Husni (1870-1937), a major figure in modern Arabic music and composer of the first Egyptian opera, "Samson and Dalilah." Each year on the anniversary of his death, al-Kalim celebrated Husni's artistic accomplishments, sometimes reprinting articles from other Arabic publications affirming the nationalist contribution of his music.[44] According to al-Kalim, Karaite men wore sharawil [baggy pants] and tarabish [fezes] like other Egyptians, and there was "almost no difference in outward appearance between the Karaite woman and her Muslim friend."[45] The Karaites, unlike their Rabbanite brothers, were "Eastern" and "conservative" in their social customs. Karaite women did participate in mixed cultural and sports clubs, but this was legitimate because it encouraged marriage and did not violate propriety, as women of other communities had already done the same.[46] This comment acknowledged changes in Karaite gender relations while affirming the norms of Middle Eastern patriarchy and a communitarian outlook. The author of this article in al-Kalim emulated the Egyptian nationalist movement in assigning to women the burden of cultural authenticity while promoting moderate reforms in their status so that they could become proper companions for male citizens. The relationship between the Karaite community court and the Egyptian state illustrates the unstable amalgam of communitarianism and the demands of citizenship informing Karaite practices by the 1950s. Like all the non-Muslim religious communities, the Karaites opposed the abolition of religious courts despite nationalist criticism of this institution. Al-Kalim reprinted an article in al-Ahram arguing that these courts were not an Ottoman innovation (hence not properly Egyptian), but a valid Islamic institution established in the time of the Prophet.[47] Each year the link between the Karaite court and the state was renewed when the governor of Cairo confirmed its members, who were required by law to be Egyptian citizens. In October 1949, the judges who had served the previous year were reappointed by the community council. An official of the governorate sent to certify the citizenship of the judges rejected their claims to be Egyptians and demanded that they obtain certificates of citizenship. This official admitted that he, like most Egyptians, did not have such a certificate. Jacques Mangubi, the head of the communal council and a senior employee of Bank Misr, then explained, "It is known that we are foreigners or Egyptians. And as long as we are not foreigners, then we are Egyptians." Yusuf Kamal affirmed that the members of the court were Egyptians, but that it was difficult for them to obtain certificates of citizenship "for reasons not hidden from anyone." He advised the government to expedite the procedures for certifying citizenship and to facilitate granting certificates to all Egyptians regardless of religion.[48] This was an unusually bold criticism of the government and a departure from the loyalist quietism typical of the Karaite community. Most Karaites were entitled to be and wanted to be Egyptian citizens, but met with official resistance to their claim. Yet a low-level state official might well be uncertain about the identity of communities. As Eli Amin Lisha` acknowledged, "some [Karaites] have French or Russian citizenship even though they and their fathers have never left the country, and this is because citizenship used to be sold, and a Karaite may have bought it though he is 100 percent Egyptian" [wa-huwa masri lahman wa-daman].[49] This incident indicates, in a small but crucial way, that non-Zionist Jews were not treated exactly like other Egyptians, as the government and press claimed during the trial of the Operation Susannah conspirators, even though they might have wished to be. There is probably a measure of defensiveness in al-Kalim's representation of the Karaite community, עלון מורשת יהדות מצרים 21 because articles stressing its Egyptian character appeared after events threatening the status of Jews in Egypt, such as the anti-Zionist demonstrations on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on Nov. 2, 1945 that degenerated into anti-Jewish riots and the start of the first Arab-Israeli war on May 15, 1948. But many such articles were unconnected to any crisis. [50] Even if its insistence on the Egyptian identity of the Karaites was strategically motivated, al-Kalim was an Arabic publication and the only organ of the Karaite community from 1945 to 1956 giving substance to the claim. The Karaite community was deeply imbued with Egyptian Arab culture while remaining fully Jewish in its own terms. This included a religiously based love of Zion but no organized involvement with political Zionism. [51] The he-Halutz [Pioneer] Zionist youth movement (see below) tried to organize Karaites and Rabbanites in harat al-yahud, but with limited success. The Cairo Zionist Federation had no ties with Karaites, and few residents of harat al-yahud belonged to Zionist youth movements. [52] Murad Farag, the leading intellectual of the community, had long advocated closer relations between Karaites and Rabbanites. He encouraged some of the educated youth around al-Kalim who were unsatisfied by the communitarianism of their elders to seek contacts with the Rabbanites, who were considered more "advanced." Stepping beyond the boundaries of their community exposed these Karaite youth to the full range of political orientations of the post-World War II era, and some became Zionists. Farag's closest disciple, Maurice Shammas, wrote for the Rabbanite Arabic newspaper, al-Shams [The Sun], between 1946 and 1948 and then for al-Kalim before he emigrated to Israel in 1948. Several hundred young Karaites emigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1956 against the advice of Chief Rabbi Babovitch. [53] The best-known Karaite involved in organized Zionist activity was Moshe Marzuq, who was executed for his role in Operation Susannah. He was a member of he-Halutz and the underground self-defense [Haganah] organization established by emissaries from Palestine in 1946 before becoming a spy and saboteur for Israel. As a physician in Cairo's Rabbanite Jewish hospital, the son of a wealthy family, and a French citizen, his social and cultural milieu was not limited to harat al-yahud, and this explains his receptivity to Zionism. Marzuq's arrest and execution had a chilling affect on the community. Yet a significant proportion of the community remained in Egypt until the 1960s. Because most Karaites were thoroughly Arabized and defined themselves in terms rooted in their experience as an Ottoman millet, they tended to remain in Egypt longer than Rabbanites. Ultimately, they could not resist the forces reshaping the Egyptian political community in ways that effectively excluded Jews. [IMAGE] 22 נח • NOE Si l'on ne réussit pas du premier coup Frustré par l'imperfection morale de Sa propre création, Dieu détruit le monde sous un déluge de quarante jours. Mais Il surmonte Sa déception, et décide de sauver Noé et ses trois fils. Après le Déluge, les êtres humains se voient accorder une nouvelle chance d'apprendre à vivre ensemble en paix. Chacun des fils va fonder une race - les races africaine, européenne et sémitique. נובמבר 1999 כסלו תש"ס to Asyut, where they formed a tribe of warriors. They w prophet Jeremiah and his secretary Baruch, fleeing the the Babylonian conquest of Judea.[9] The 1945-46 edition of the Yearbook of Egyptian Jewry reite Egypt, and risked offending religious sentiment by sugg was the ancient Egyptian cult of Ra. The anonymous au Fargeon) claimed that many Jewish rituals, symbols, an the altar, the design of the pillars of the Temple, even se from ancient Egypt.[10] These assertions are probably d People of Israel, a popular text among rationalist franco supporting them does not diminish their significance in t self-presentation of Egyptian Jews. As Renan himself no being a nation."[11] Recapitulating these stories affirmed the ancient bond of their residence there. This history implicitly disputed the of Muslim Brothers who were, by the late 1930s, antagon Zionist goal of "negation of the diaspora." Referring to E the Zionist settlement project in Palestine. Fargeon certa Egyptian Jews supported political Zionism. Perhaps by n effort 3,000 years ago, he tacitly excused then for neglec Moreover, since even in the time of Moses some Jews re to expect all of Egyptian Jewry to emigrate to Palestine in Between the two world wars, many Jews felt no contradic commitments. In an open letter to Haim Nahum Effendi, Arabic/French pro-Zionist periodical Isra'il/Israël, Alber explain to our brothers that one can be an excellent patrio perfect Jewish nationalist. One does not exclude the othe anti-Zionist throughout his tenure in office (1924-60), did Several Egyptian Jews did participate in both national mo propaganda for the Wafd party in Europe after the 1919 n a pro-Wafd French language newspaper, La Liberté, after the head of the Zionist Organization of Cairo and the repr Palestine in Egypt. Félix Benzakein was a member of the the Alexandria rabbinical court, and president of the Zion Zionist commitments, Benzakein remained in Egypt until States.[13] The intensification of the Arab-Zionist conflic 1936-39 strained such dual commitments, and they becam Arab-Israeli war. Yet as late as 1965 Shlomo Kohen-Tzid to Israel in 1949 and eventually became a member of the Shmu'el Azar -- one of the two Egyptian Jews executed fo whose central argument, in contrast to prevailing opinion understanding between the Egyptian and Israeli national m For Zionist historiography, the creation of the state of Isra Egyptian Jewish community. Some 500 Zionist activists w al-Tur (along with several hundred communists, including The property of those suspected of Zionist activity was seq 16 נובמבר 1999 כסלו תש"ס