The recent attack on prominent actress over her Jewish ancestry is a denial of the rich contribution of Egyptian Jews to the country's heritage, writes Faiza Rady Addressing actress Ahmed in a recent article in the Arabic-language press, journalist Ola Al-Saadani admonished her for allegedly planning to boycott the press after they discovered that her grandfather was an Egyptian Jew. " said she fears such a finding would bring her under fire," wrote Al-Saadani, suggesting should have "kept such a fact secret". In response to Al-Saadani's allegations, went public and dismissed these assertions as "fabrications". Referring to her grandfather, the late communist labour lawyer Youssef Darwish (1910-2006), a Karaite Jew who converted to Islam in 1947, said she loved and admired him and was proud to be his granddaughter. Darwish was an iconic figure of the nation's progressive forces. Recently, Egyptian labour historian Joel Beinin paid tribute to him by dedicating his latest book The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt, "to the memory of Youssef Darwish, a tireless fighter for the rights of Egyptian workers". The 1919 Revolution played a significant role in Darwish's political formation: early on he became an ardent nationalist and Wafdist, adopting as his own the revolutionary slogan "religion is for God and the homeland for all". In the secular Egypt of the 1920s, 30s and 40s there was no room for racism, Darwish always maintained. An anti-imperialist who participated in Egypt's struggle for independence, Darwish was also a committed anti-Zionist. He viewed the Zionist project in Palestine as settler colonialism and denounced it as such. In 1934, Darwish went to work as an attorney and began his career as a political organiser. In the early 1940s he was regarded as one of Egypt's most effective labour lawyers and by the mid- 1940s had become legal counsel to 67 of Egypt's 170 trade unions. In 1946, Darwish, Raymond Douek and Sadek Saad, two other young Jewish intellectuals, co-founded the Workers Vanguard for National Liberation, the first formal Marxist organisation in Egypt. As membership grew the group decided in 1957 to turn the Vanguard into a political party, the Workers and Peasants Communist Party (WPCP). Like many communist cadres, Darwish paid dearly for his politics. He was regularly jailed for daring to be a communist in Egypt, spending some 10 years of his life behind bars. He never repented and continued to work. "I am still a communist and I'm proud of it," he repeated in innumerable interviews. "Marxism will survive as long as there are the exploiters and the exploited." To get back to Al-Saadani's slurs, it is evident that this isn't about Darwish at all. Rather, it is about a distorted perception of Egyptian Jews as a fifth column in the service of Israel. It is about equating Judaism with Zionism and denying the Egyptian Jews' rich contribution to the nation's heritage, a heritage that isn't taught in schools and which has been erased from people's collective consciousness. This is, perhaps, what motivated Darwish to translate Jacques Hassoun's Histoire des Juifs du Nil into Arabic, a text that was published posthumously in 2007. A close friend of Darwish's, Hassoun left Egypt for France in 1956 but remained, in his words, "deeply part of this soil, this earth, these landscapes, and the Nile traversing a space that has henceforth become out of reach". Hassoun's aim in writing Histoire des Juifs du Nil was to recreate and document a lost history. He dedicated his book to "Egyptians -- Copts and Muslims -- who may be tempted to forget that among them lived many who are still referred to as the Jews of Egypt, and who continue to define themselves as such." They constituted a multiethnic, multi-denominational, politically and socially diverse community that was represented in all class cross-sections of society -- their Egyptian Jewish identity being their only common reference. Most prominent among them were the entrepreneurs who established the country's first department stores and whose names remain inscribed in Egypt's urban landscape: Hannaux, Ades, Benzion, Chemla, Gattegno and Cicurel, among others. The cosmopolitan Egyptian Jewish capitalist class did not, as a rule, support political Zionism -- it wasn't in their interest to do so. Fully integrated into Egypt's financial and industrial sectors, they weren't about to compromise their wealth and class position for the sake of emigrating to some "Jewish homeland" in Palestine. Rather, many of them were Egyptian nationalists. Businessmen like Cicurel and politicians like Cattaoui Pasha -- president of the Jewish Community, minister of finance in 1925, and later minister of communication -- both promoted the idea of developing a national banking system separate from British and other foreign financial institutions. To that effect, Cicurel and Cattaoui invested in Talaat Harb's Bank Misr in 1922 -- the first Egyptian bank that contributed to the development of a national industrial project. Cattaoui Pasha was also among the founding members of the first secular Egyptian university (now Cairo University), the Royal Society of Geography and the Royal Society of Political Economy. The Egyptian Jewish contribution to Alexandria's development was remarkable, says Hassoun. Joseph Smouha established the elegant Smouha neighbourhood, with its renowned Smouha Sporting Club. A family of wealthy bankers, the Menasce built the first Jewish Hospital in Moharam Bey. They also donated the palace that housed Alexandria's Municipal Library. And the Adda family donated Alexandria's ophthalmological hospital. Other less privileged Egyptian Jews were fully assimilated into the national fabric of the working class and the poor. They lived in squalid conditions in Haret Al-Yahud and numbered approximately 20,000 of the 75,000- 80,000 Egyptian Jews in 1948. Indigenous Arabic-speaking communities -- like the Rabbanites and Karaites -- were indistinguishable from their Muslim and Coptic neighbours in appearance, dress, manners and speech. Al-Kalim, a Karaite Arabic-language publication, "referred to Karaites as abna al-balad (sons of the country), a populist term connoting native Egyptians," writes Beinin in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry. The contribution of the Karaites to Egyptian culture was exceptional, says Beinin. Jurist Murad Bey Farag helped write the first Egyptian constitution of 1922. He was also an accomplished poet who composed colloquial zagal and qasidas in classical Arabic . Dawoud Hosni (1870-1937), a relative of Youssef Darwish, was a talented composer and musician who worked with the celebrated nationalist musician Sayed Darwish. The Karaites had no ties to the Cairo Zionist Federation. Though generally underprivileged, they considered themselves thoroughly Egyptian. However, with the intensification of the Palestinian conflict in the mid-1940s things began to change. It was at this point that the Muslim Brothers and Young Egypt began to define the Palestinian conflict in religious terms, linking Egyptian Jews to Zionists in Palestine. Among the events that contributed to create a climate of fear in the community was the pogrom that took place in Haret Al-Yahud in November 1945. The massacre was the work of the Muslim Brothers who went on a bloody rampage, burning down the neighbourhood and killing people in their path. "It was this massacre, in addition to the hysteria that prevailed prior to, and during, the creation of the state of Israel that ultimately drove the Karaites out of Egypt," Youssef Darwish explained. He was one of the very few who remained. Although the Egyptian government regularly condemned these events and prosecuted the Muslim Brothers for inciting the riots, they failed to protect the Egyptian Jewish community. By demonstrating that Egyptian Jews were no longer safe in their country, the government played into the Zionists' hands. A mass exodus followed. Between 1948 and 1951, 16,514 Egyptian Jews left Egypt for Israel, while some 6,000 headed to other destinations. The exodus continued following the 1956 and 1967 wars. Between November 1956 and March 1957, roughly one third of those residing in the country before the war went into exile. "They were subjected to unofficial pressures to renounce their citizenship and leave the country," says Beinin. Emigration continued as a result of political uncertainty until only 7,000 Egyptian Jews remained in Egypt prior to 5 June 1967. The 1967 war marked the end of the Jewish community in Egypt. But then again, it didn't. Not in the imaginary of those who went into exile, unwillingly. Beinin cites an incident that poignantly expresses the continuity of Egyptian Jewish identity. An Egyptian Jewish immigrant who arrived in Israel in 1956 naively told a Jerusalem Post reporter that, "Egypt is our country; we have no other. Our fathers were here [in Egypt] as long as any Muslims."
