Egypt

The Jewish community of Egypt is old, damaged and dying. Once a thriving population of several million Israelites, the Egyptian Jewish community has dwindled to several hundred Jews, most of them elderly and infirm.

This is a sad end to a glorious tradition of Egyptian Jewry which stretches back three millennia to Biblical times when Israelite tribes first moved to the Land of Goshen during the reign of the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1375-1358 B.C.). The Bible tells the story of Ramses II (1298-1232 B.C.), his enslavement of Jews and their subsequent revolt and Exodus across the Sinai desert to Canaan. Jewish traders traveled back and forth across the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt for centuries thereafter, often using Egypt as an escape route to flee invading armies like those of the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Romans. Often these Jews failed to return to Palestine, remaining in Egypt to found Jewish communities in cities like Cairo and Alexandria. A substantial Jewish spiritual community developed in the 5^th century B.C. at Elephantine, a powerful military port from which the Egyptians fought Babylonian expansion, around a controversial Temple which mixed Jewish ritual with the worship of Egyptian gods; local marauders destroyed it in 410 B.C. In the time of Ptolemy Jews comprised almost a quarter of the population of Alexandria and remained a substantial force in the Egyptian community for more than a millennium in the face of increasing Muslim persecution.

At the turn of the 20^th century there were more than 25,000 Jews in Egypt, mainly concentrated in Cairo and Alexandria. This population had tripled by 1945, when the rise of Egyptian nationalism led to anti-Jewish riots that killed Jews and laid waste to a synagogue, a Jewish hospital, and an old-age home. A substantial number of Jews fled further anti-Jewish riots in the late ’40s and early ‘50s, most racing across the Sinai for the relative safety of Israel; emigration increased in direct proportion with the escalation of Egyptian-Israeli tensions. By 1957 only 15,000 Jews remained in Egypt; after the 1967 Six-Day War there were less than 2,500. The Jewish population dwindled further in the 1970s, leaving only a handful of Jews in the major Egyptian cities. The community may have disappeared altogether had President Anwar Sadat not signed the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1979 and allowed Egyptian Jews to once again establish ties with world Jewry. Relations between Jews and Arabs in Egypt since the peace have been tense but the Egyptian government has protected the Jews’ right to maintain their faith.

Most of the hundred or so Jews who remain in Egypt live in Cairo, though a handful remain in Alexandria. Most of them are elderly; there is no rising generation to replace them.

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