Public order has served as a critical component of the ability of sovereign power to reach into the lives of its subjects and citizens. Recent literature in anthropology and history of the Middle East has described the translation and actualization of this concept within various legal regimes of the colonial Middle East, particularly Egypt, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Public order has worked along the fissure between the public and the private, authorizing the state to intervene in the seemingly sacrosanct realm of the private when and wherever it deemed such intervention necessary for the common good. One outcome was and continues to be the state’s increasing ability to regulate religion especially when particular practices seem to transgress the perceived sensibilities of an assumed majority. Recent cases point to the relevance of public order to the shifting constitution of religion in the region as well as processes of societal exclusion. This paper turns to a set of other translations of public order in Egypt that occurred prior to and after its initial appearance within Egyptian law codes. It attempts to connect the legal manifestations of this concept to intellectual ones that, as I show, were themselves embedded within broader projects of translation. My focus is on the lawyer and Jewish reformer Murad Farag and his defense of a coreligionist who was accused of this act in the Port Said National Court of Appeals in 1902. During the case and after, Farag denounced the blood libel profusely and powerfully in the press, partly in terms of public order. He understood this concept as part of his broader project of reform through the translation of liberal concepts into his religious tradition and other religious traditions in Egypt. In recuperating this vision, which was eventually erased by the extension of pubic law in Egypt, I juxtapose it with two other articulations of public order: the first embedded within local translations of the European blood libel accusation and, by extension, European anti-Semitism; and the second by the courts and within Egyptian law. Providing a historical genealogy of public order beyond the legal and constitutional domains, the paper reveals the complex layers that characterized its initial articulations in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Egypt and the material and political modes that partly determined them.