“The Blood Libel on Trial: Jews and the Emergence of Colonial Law in Egypt”

• In Event: States of Legality: Law in Modern Jewish Life

Abstract

This paper focuses on a 1902 court case litigated in Egypt’s National Courts of Appeals. Tried by the Cairene Karaite lawyer and reformer, Murad Farag, the case involved a ritual murder accusation made by the family of a young Christian girl in Port Said against a Rabbinate Jew. The defendant had earlier been convicted and sentenced to one year of hard labor, from which he now sought exoneration. This ritual murder case was among the last of a string of similar charges against Jews in Egypt, most of them made by Christians in Egypt. Yet it differed from these prior cases in that the charge was resolved not through appeals to foreign consulates or the local government, but rather by way of the nascent National Courts, which were established under the British-dominated colonial regime. Further, the accused was defended not by a foreign institution or patron, but rather by a professional lawyer who was a member of one of the first classes to graduate from the Khedival School of Law—another colonial institution.

Scholarship on ritual murder charges in Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts has focused on anti-Judaism and/or the emergence of political anti-Semitism in the region, which has sometimes been presented to teleologically lead to Jews’ dislocation, particularly to Israel. Although analysis of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism remain germane to my analysis, I focus on the conscription of Jews to the courts, which was partly enabled by Farag’s role as a disseminator of legal knowledge through the Karaite communal journal, al-Tahdhib. I argue that the courts—institutions that constituted the colonial state—created conditions of possibility through which new forms of Jewish subjectivity emerged that fully belonged to Egypt of the era, even though they would be increasingly less available as Egyptian national institutions took form and the Jewish national project gained strength. In other words, the ritual murder trial, as a particularly evocative Jewish experience of the courts, did not divorce Jews from Egypt, but rather bound them to the colonial state. Broadly, the paper explores the intersection of Jewish subjectivity and colonial law in the particular context of Egypt.

author

• Jeffrey Culang, Graduate Center, CUNY