“It’s the pound that talks”: Progressive Youth and Dowry Reform in the Karaite Jewish Community in 1940s-50s Cairo

• In Event: Jewish Youth and Social Change: From Colonial Expansion to Modern Multiculturalism

Abstract

During the 1940s and 50s in Cairo, the Arabic-language Karaite newspaper al-Kalīm revealed a Karaite community deeply divided over the question of marriage. Published by a reform-minded youth group, the Young Men’s Karaite Israelite Association (Jamʿiyyat al-Shubbān al-Isrāʾīliyyīn al-Qarrāʾīn), al-Kalīm serves as an important barometer for understanding changing discourses about gender relations amongst Karaite Jews in mid-century Egypt. In the pages of al-Kalīm, debates about marriage centred around the dowry (dōṭa) system in particular. As I argue in this paper, Young Karaite Jews used these debates to establish new modes of interaction between the genders, debate changing ideals of wifehood and masculinity, and set out their vision for their community’s future—much as like-minded non-Jewish Egyptian commentators had done in preceding decades. As Hanan Kholoussy has shown, discourses about marriage, divorce, and bachelorhood had served as a prime forum for Egyptians to express anxieties over the well-being of the nation amidst the upheavals of the first three decades of the twentieth century (For Better, For Worse, 2010). In the Karaite case, I argue that the concern over marriage reflected anxieties specific to their community, whose position within Egyptian society was by this time becoming increasingly precarious. Nevertheless, the vocabulary used to articulate these anxieties also reveals that Karaites consumed and adapted nation-wide discourses regarding cultural and social change. Moreover, it reveals that Karaite youth continued to envision a future in Egypt for their community—provided it was willing to reform outdated marriage practices and embrace new modes of sociability between the genders—despite the worsening circumstances. This study of discourses surrounding marriage and gender not only contributes to our historical knowledge of Jewish social life in Egypt, but offers a corrective to top-down frameworks which begin by questioning the national, political, and cultural affiliations of Middle Eastern Jews rather than by attending closely to contemporary sources.

Author

• Katharine Halls