This paper examines the discursive trajectories of the cosmopolitan Egyptian Jew in the documentaries Salata Baladi (Nadia Kamel, 2007) and Jews of Egypt (Amir Ramses, 2012) in light of Youssef Chahine’s classic Alexandria…Why (1978). Undoubtedly, each of these films provides a complex story of Jewish life in Egypt and, taken together, these creative works offer an alternative to formulaic representations of the Jew in Egyptian cinema and television. Given the historically close association between the Jew and cosmopolitanism and taking into account the cosmopolitan nature of Egypt in the pre-1952 era, it stands to reason, as Deborah Starr (2009: 86) implies, that the Egyptian Jew of that period should epitomize cosmopolitanism. However, the analysis of the films at hand and an adumbrative review of scholarship on the topic may attenuate this often celebratory discourse which foregrounds cosmopolitanism’s inclusiveness and syncretism. Specifically, I argue that the films’ rendering of the cosmopolitan Egyptian Jew is fraught with a conspicuous absence of the poor, uneducated, monolingual, and religiously traditional Jewish residents of Egypt. For example, Ramses’s film, having the all-encompassing title of “Jews of Egypt” (or, in Arabic, “ʿAn Yahud Masr,” literally, “About Egypt’s Jews”), relies almost exclusively on Parisian-Jews expatriates to narrate the story of the Jews of Egypt. This paper broaches the dilemma of whether the filmmakers’ main interest in attending to the Jewish question has to do more with nostalgic views of Egyptianness as a cosmopolitan, multiethnic, and multi-religious identity, rather than with a genuine interest in Jewish life, history, and religion. Nearly two decades after the completion of Alexandria…Why, Chahine reflects on his film and the pre-revolution period it depicts, “All religions, all cultures, all kinds of ideas lived side by side in that Alexandria. There were no barriers between people: Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Jews, Russians and French were all friends... This melting pot of people and cultures has vanished today, and this is something I bitterly regret.” Ultimately then, this paper suggests that the limited and skewed view of the Jewish community, with its nearly exclusive focus on one group only of which this heterogeneous community comprises, is driven primarily by anxieties about Egyptian identity in which the cosmopolitan Jew is assigned a supporting role in the play of an idealized Egypt of the past and in challenging xenophobic sentiments at the present.