Yoram Meital’s groundbreaking study Sacred Places Tell Tales investigates the changes in the Egyptian Jewish community from 1875 to the present through an examination of eleven synagogues still standing in Cairo. Meital, a professor of Middle East studies and the head of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, based this study on his work as a historical consultant for the Jewish Cairo Community organization. Through his work, which was made possible by President Sisi’s religious tolerance campaign, he became involved in projects documenting the past and preserving Jewish heritage in the present.
At one time, the Egyptian Jewish community consisted of rabbinic Jews who accepted the Torah and the rabbinic interpretations in the Talmud and Midrash, and Karaite Jews who recognized only the Torah. Most rabbinic Jews were Sephardim who’d lived in Egypt for many centuries and included famous scholars such as Moses Maimonides. Between 1897 and 1917, the population almost doubled, reaching 59,581 as new immigrants came from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. A smaller segment of the rabbinic Jewish community consisted of Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. The Karaite Jews lived in Egypt for over a thousand years and developed a way of Jewish life that was “deeply interwoven in Egyptian society and culture.”
The study of the eleven synagogues reveals the heterogeneous nature of the Jewish community in Cairo during this period. Meital’s examination of the synagogues’ architectural style, documents, religious texts, and the broad array of activities and social services they offered allows him to reconstruct a complex picture of Jewish life and identity. One of the significant findings of this study is that the “Jewish population saw itself and behaved similarly to the socioeconomic strata of Cairo society to which it belonged.” This contradicts interpretations of the history of Egyptian Jews as a history of foreigners.
Meital claims that the tensions that arose from the movement for Egyptianization and the creation of Israel led to the eventual demise of Egyptian Jewry. Given their lengthy history in Egypt, eighty percent of the Jewish population identified as Egyptian and renounced Zionism. However, at varying points in the conflict, the distinction between Jews and Judaism and Zionism and Zionism became blurred, and Jews became random targets and started to leave the country in large numbers after the 1956 Suez War.
Throughout the book, Meital provides examples of complex and nuanced portrayals of Egyptian Jewry in popular culture, literature, film, and history. However, he claims that this revisionism is still contentious.
Linda Kantor-Swerdlow is a retired Associate Professor of History Education from Drew University and the author of Global Activism in an American School: From Empathy to Action. She is currently freelancing and reviews books and theater.
