Egypt, Egyptian Jews, and the Embodiment of Memory

• In Event: On the Move: Travel, Migration, and Modern Jewish LIteratures

Abstract

In the years following the end of WWI, after the dissolution of Ottoman rule and at a time when Egypt believed itself independent of Britain, Egyptian intellectuals (the Territorialists) began considering the question of identity. For the greater part of the next three decades, the rising effendya and educated classes found compelling the narrative that framed Egyptian identity around Egypt’s unique geography and its illustrious Pharaonic past. Egyptian Jews —thinkers, writers, as well as ordinary men and women— would not have found it difficult to reach back into their biblical past to lay claim to an identity both Jewish and Egyptian. I draw on the works of Jacqueline Kahanoff, Edmond Jabès, Paula Jacques, and Tobie Nathan, all four Jewish Egyptian writers, to argue that being both Jews and Egyptians, and living in times of political transformation and upheaval, the biblical past served to confirm their belonging. It did this not by way of a nostalgic return. Rather Jewish memory served as building blocks for rewriting narratives to reassert such belonging in the present. Egyptian Jews are exemplary models of what Jacques Hassoun, a Jewish Egyptian psychoanalyst, has described as the successful operation of Transmission, memory deployed in the present from where it gains purchase and vitality. For these writers, Egypt, past and present, maps unto a diasporic existence connecting with and restoring a Jewish narrative whose living memory Egyptian Jews embody and reenact. For Nathan, modern-day Egyptian Jews are, quite literally, the Jews referenced in the biblical account, only they fled from Nasser and not Pharaoh. Memory has roots and can be transplanted. When attended to, roots grow strong. The work of Kahanoff, Jabès, Jacques, and Nathan evoke a rootedness so ancient and tenacious that no force of inhospitality, including expulsion and exile, can erase its existence. Their work seeks to reinscribe Egyptian Jews in the history of modern Egypt from which they have been left out and to dramatize the process by which Jewish Egyptian memory, transplanted to the soil of France, recreates the material necessary for sustaining Jewish (Egyptian) identity and memory into the future.

Author

• Aimee Israel-Pelletier, University of Texas at Arlington