By the last week of June 1967, practically none of the Jews who had lived in Egypt, some for decades and some for centuries, could be seen anywhere in the country. The exodus of the Jews of Egypt, the largest minority for close to a century, had already started in 1947 with a wave of “Egyptianisation”, followed by growing anti-Jewish anger over the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. In 1952 the monarchy was ousted by the Free Officers in the July Revolution, and then the Jews – along with other minorities of Egypt, notably the Greeks, the second largest – began to leave en masse. In the years after 1952 large businesses, whether owned by foreigners or Egyptian nationals, were nationalised.
According to Palestinian-German scholar Najat Abdulhaq, for over six decades prior to those developments at the end of the first half of the 20th century, the Jews and Greeks of Egypt, along with many other minorities were simply part of the Egyptian story. They had flocked to the country at different points, particularly since Muhammad Ali Pasha came to power, and they lived, established businesses and made fortunes in Egypt before they had to leave for one reason to the other – depending on the minority, the individual and the political and economic moment. In the 460-page Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt: Entrepreneurship and Business Before Nasser, first published by I.B. Tauris in 2016 and now available in Abdel-Rehim Youssef’s Arabic translation from Al Karma, she tells the story, or rather stories of the two biggest minorities in particular.
Abdulhaq’s is bookended by Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s nationalisation laws of 1961, six years before the June 1967 War, but as she agreed when she talked to Al Ahram Weekly on the occasion of the launch, it is now impossible to think of anything Jewish in Egypt or elsewhere in the Arab world without thinking of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories or the plight of the Palestinians: “This issue is highly politicised and it relates very much to the [Arab-Israeli] conflict – in a way that is partially emotional but also highly factual.” Close to six decades after the Israeli war on Egypt and its occupation of Sinai along with the entirety of historic Palestine and the Golan Heights, the story of the Jews of Egypt, be they natives, Sephardim or Ashkenazi, is still mostly perceived in the light of one of two narratives. The first is that the Jews had a marvellous life in Egypt where they were fully integrated and chose to turn their backs on their own country to go to Israel; the second is that the Jews never felt they belonged here and chose to leave as soon as Israel was integrated.
“In fact, the story of the Jews of Egypt is much more layered – far more layered than all the [post-1948] nationalist narratives and also the Zionist narrative that they were poorly treated in Egypt – just as they were in every other Arab country,” Abdulhaq said. Likewise the story of the Egyptian Greeks: it is a much more layered than the rosy picture of solidarity demonstrated by the Greek guides who worked for the Suez Canal Company and chose to keep their positions to help Egyptians after the British and the French pulled out their teams in the wake of the nationalisation. “This book is not designed to either induce nostalgia or bow to stereotypes,” Abdulhaq says. It is rather an academic exercise, originally designed for a PhD thesis, that aims to take a close look at both minorities in the light of on the theory of economist Joseph Schumpeter (1880-1950), which assesses the role of an entrepreneur on the basis of their ability to innovate, use their networks and create growth before their business finally succumbs to the disrepair that inevitably results from success. In the cases of both the Jewish and Greek communities of Egypt, Abdulhaq found that the Schumpeter parameters apply.
“Using the economy as a basis for the study and examining the issue through figures and accounts, as registered in the Egyptian National Archives, made it possible to argue the case on solid and dispassionate basis – away from any presumed sentimental ideas either in favour of or against any particular group,” Abdulhaq says. Herself the daughter of a Palestinian father and a German mother, Abdulhaq is no stranger to the narratives surrounding the Jews and the creation of Israel. Nor is she unfamiliar with Eastern Mediterranean history and the influences of the early 20th century collapse of the Ottoman Empire, especially in the case of the Greeks. All this has prompted her to show sufficient sensitivity to the cultural and political context of the times while examining the archives to take account of the new companies being registered and look into patterns of ownership in general.
As it came to be, the book creates a setting of parallel scenes: the entrepreneur in question, the political scene in Egypt, the wider political scene worldwide, and the history and evolution of the minority to which this entrepreneur subscribes. This means that in addition to tracing the growing business investments of the Jewish and Greek communities on the national economy, especially in relation to cotton cultivation and subsequent cotton industry and the banking systems, Abdulhaq is also reviewing the economic and cultural views of the rulers of the country, their relations with the Ottoman Empire, the position of the nation, minorities included, with regards to the national political trends, the British occupation, the two world wars, the creation of Israel and the rule of the Free Officers.
The findings of her archival research show a systematically stronger economic role of both Jews and Greeks, with the Greeks being the closest to cotton cultivation and industry and the Jews, especially those the book qualifies as native Egyptians, to the ambitious national project of Talaat Harb as represented in Banque Misr and associated economic schemes. It shows a smooth integration into the economic system by these two minorities who contributed to its evolution. “I think so much is overlooked with regards to the role of both minorities, at different points in the years between 1885 and 1960, in terms of establishing new companies either independently or in partnership with one another – or for that matter in partnership with other Egyptians,” Abdulhaq said. She added that it is interesting to observe the resilience that both minorities demonstrated against incidental intimidating influences which failed to hamper their growing business plans.
It remains true, Abdulhaq said, that both minorities worked to make money and that for the most part they made considerable fortunes, to the extent that a chair of the Greek community in Alexandria, George Averoff, was wealthy enough to build schools in the city, donate money for the construction of a new Olympic stadium in Athens and leave a huge fortune on his death towards the end of the 19th century. For Abdulhaq, Averoff is like the famous Greek Alexandrian poet Constatine Cavafy, himself the son of a prominent Greek Alexandrian merchant, in as much as they both perceived Alexandria as their home. Similarly, the book follows a certain parallel between the lives of Joseph Cattaui, the Jewish entrepreneur who was closely associated with Talaat Harb, and Mourad Farague, a Jewish lawyer and poet, who equally perceived Egypt as their homeland.
“Some of these names are overlooked today as we talk about the history of both the Jewish and Greek minorities of Egypt in the last decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, but I think it is very important that we examine the story from all possible angles even if the core is one related to business dealings,” she said. The core is Abdulhaq’s examination of 759 companies that were registered between 1885 and 1960. However, this research is not done independently of the history of Egyptian Jews and Greeks and the memoirs written by those Greeks and Jews who lived in Egypt till the moment they started to leave at the end of the 1940s. In addition to deconstructing stereotypes of both Jews and Greeks of Egypt, Abdulhaq’s work also disputes the simplistic assumption that members of these minorities left Egypt following a wave of hatred and persecution of foreigners that came with the rule of Gamal Abdel-Nasser starting in the mid-1950s.
The book shows that the first big blow to the presence of most minorities, including those of the Jews and Greeks, was the adoption of the 1947 companies’ law that demanded a high “national component” of the makeup of the administration and the workforce of each company. This, she shows, was quite a challenging moment in the long-established assumption about who is and who is not considered Egyptian – irrespective of paperwork. In one incident, Abdulhaq shows the perplexity that faced the administration of the Cicurel Department Stores, owned by members of the prominent Jewish Cicurel family, when the government contested the company assessment of a majority of Egyptian workers based on the citizenship documents. Inevitably, the book shows how the company ended up being sold off before it was nationalised in the early 1960s.
Abdulhaq’s analysis of the growing trend of Egytianisation and then nationalisation proceeds in the light of the impact of the British occupation and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, growing nationalist sentiment as expressed in the Orabi movement and the 1919 Revolution, the quasi-independence of Egypt in 1922 and the subsequent drafting of the 1923 constitution. Political Zionism was essentially a European movement not originally interested in the Jews of the Arab countries. But, acknowledging its impact and that of the Nakba on public sentiments towards the Jews of Egypt, as opposed to any other minority group, Abdulhaq also underlines the fact that, five decades before May 1948, Jews were far from being excluded from the wider society – even as some of them, essentially from the working classes, lived in a neighbourhood that carried their name. The book argues that, since most Jews of Egypt, of all classes, had a good command of Arabic, if not a native speaker’s proficiency, business cooperation was easier than it was for the Greeks who never, as an entire community, managed to break the linguistic barrier. Similarly, while Greeks were not associated with any Egyptian political parties and confined themselves to trade unions, the Jews of Egypt, especially those prominent entrepreneurs, were involved with Al-Wafd Party and took part in the bras de fer between Talaat Harb and his key rival Ahmed Aboud. Other Jews, the book notes, were heavily involved in the socialist and communist parties of Egypt.
For the most part, Abdulhaq said, scholarly work on Egyptian Jewry appeared after the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979. In the previous two decades, no serious studies were published on the matter. And prior to the establishment of Israel there was simply no Jewish question in Egypt per se – even with the growing Arabist and Islamist sentiments of the late 1920s. Abdulhaq acknowledged that the establishment of Israel as “a Jewish state” inevitably implicated Jewish communities as potential agents. However, she stressed that the attacks against Jews and Jewish interests in the late 1920s and beyond was essentially part of wider anti-foreign sentiments that were growing and, seeing all minorities as foreigners, especially since it was not uncommon for some Jews of Egypt to hold foreign passports, like Nessim and David Adès, founders of the Adès department stores, who held a British citizenship. Clearly, both the Greeks and the Jews benefited from the capitulation system and the mixed courts that granted specific privileges to the foreigners.
The sentiments that spiked in the 1940s are recalled in the book with parallels to declining tolerance towards non-Muslims in Egypt after the Crusades and later after the Napoleon invasion of the country – in the 12th and 18th centuries, respectively. The developments of the late 1940s and beyond, Abdulhaq argued, do not change the fact that both the Greek and Jewish communities have histories in the Nile Valley of more than 3000 years and that with the Arab Conquest of Egypt, Jews and Christians of Egypt had a prominent role in the financial system. With Egypt being part of the Ottoman Empire until the early 1920s, the book explained, Jews and Greeks who lived in the lands of the empire were Ottoman subjects who were treated according to the Millet system, which gave their religious leadership the upper hand in managing their religious and secular affairs. With the liberal age of Egypt, a more secular attitude prevailed to which the Jews and Greeks subscribed just like all other Egyptians. With support from Muhammad Ali, in the early 19th century, the Greeks were the first community to be able to manage their affairs away from their religious leadership.
Tolerance and the economic contribution of minorities, essentially the Greeks and Jews, were always interdependent, Abdulhaq wrote. Equally, she argues, economic prosperity always encouraged higher levels of tolerance. In the final analysis, Abdulhaq says, the Jewish and Greek communities of Egypt had achieved incredible success stories that served the interests of the individuals concerned and of the dynamic of the national economy at large. This, she said, was highly contextual just as the end of the role of those two, and other minorities in the Egyptian economy and in Egypt in general, was also largely contextual.
One could’ve guessed as much, perhaps, but that doesn’t make the book any less thrilling to read.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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