On 3 June 1916, a huge crowd gathered at the station Zizinia of Alexandria to take part to the funeral of baron Jacques de Menasce – one of the most prominent members of the city’s Jewish community. The funeral procession, wrote the newspaper La Réforme, was composed of men and women of the most diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds mourning, as if they all belonged to “the same family”, the loss of “a true Egyptian”. But who where these men and women and to what kind of family did they belong? And then, what did it mean to define as “a true Egyptian” a man that held Austro-Hungarian citizenship and whose brother was a personal friend of the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann? Taking this forgotten and apparently meaningless funeral ceremony as a starting point, my paper – which will be based on a range of sources derived from French and Israeli archives – will reconstruct the cultural and gender imaginary of turn-of-the-century Alexandria and of the local Jewish middle and upper classes in particular. I will illustrate how a modern Alexandrian Jewish identity was publicly displayed, and in which ways this reflected shifting approaches to gender, family, and nationhood. To do so, I will first concentrate on the introduction of an innovative ceremony of bat mitzvah by the city’s chief rabbi in 1901 in cooperation with the local branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Secondly, I will move to the analysis of the local consequences of World War One in terms of urban sociability, gender relations and philanthropic endeavours. While opting for a local and micro perspective, my paper would like to demonstrate that the city of Alexandria, and its Jewish milieu, were deeply embedded into a wider trans-Mediterranean space that included Jews, Muslims, and Christians and that – influenced by both Ottoman legacies and colonial modernities – extended from Alexandria to Salonika, Smyrna and Beirut.