How does Arabic literature inform our understanding of the depiction of Jews in Egypt? Does it reflect a deeply anti-Jewish culture? Or does it illuminate an insufficiently acknowledged side of Jewish history? Although the overwhelming majority of Jews in Egypt left the country in waves from 1948 to 1967, representations of them never vanished from Egyptian culture. During the second half of the twentieth century, portrayals of Jews appeared in a period of time marked by turmoil and conflict between Egypt and the nascent state of Israel. Representations of Jews in contemporary Egyptian literary works, however, mark a shift from negative Jewish stereotypes. In past works, a few clusters of traits were common. Jews were seen as powerful and manipulative, as dividing their loyalties between Egypt and Israel, and as materialistic and aggressive. Through a close reading of six Egyptian novels — Santa Teresa (2001) by Baha’ Abd al-Majid, Hadd Al-Ghiwayyah (2004) by Amr ‘Afiyyah, Ayyam Al-Shatat (2008) by Kamal Ruhayyim, Akher Yahud Al-Iskandariyyah (2008) by Mu’tazz Fetihah, Toyur Al-’Anbar (2008) by Ibrahim Abd al-Majid, and Yahud Al-Iskandariyyah (2016) by Mostafa Nasr, I argue that contemporary depictions of Jews challenge previous Jewish stereotypes and represent more realistic aspects of Jewish character. The representations of Jews — which, I should stress, tend to be overwhelmingly positive — within both historical and contemporary discourse concerning Egyptian-Jewish relations have three objectives. First, they more fairly represent Egyptian society by denouncing stereotypes. Eager not to be misunderstood, writers have taken the initiative to adopt a just treatment of Jews by exploring various aspects of their personality. Second, they invoke the Jewish character to restore its place in the Egyptian society as a manifestation of pluralism and cosmopolitanism. On a social level, the Jewish character is brought up to challenge fixed stereotypes that found homage in previous literary works. Among these images is one of the Jew as liberal, wealthy, and stingy. This misconception is challenged by depicting the Jew in Egyptian society as just as poor and moderate as Muslims and Christians. On an economic level, the Jew is said to contribute to economic life in Egypt. Third, the Jew is used to discuss possible ways by which the Arab-Israeli conflict could be solved and peace could triumph. This goal is expressed through the trope of love between a Muslim male and Jewish female.  

Moroccan Jews' life and memories among Muslins have been absented from official history and "tabooed" in social memory for a long time. As a result of the Arab-Israeli struggle and the internal political strife in Morocco throughout the post-independence period (1956-1999), a multilevel silence was imposed on the memory of the departed Jews. Generations of Moroccans grew up ignoring the fact that that until fairly recently (1967) their cities and villages were teeming with a vibrant Jewish population whose lives were entirely entangled with the Muslims' (Rosen). Moreover, the Hebraic dimention of Morocco was simply "forgotten" until recent ethnographic scholarship (Boum, Semi and Hatimi) rehabilitated part of this memory and recorded fragments of these occulted histories. Despite being a site in which the complexity of Muslim-Jewish mnemonic "entanglements" (Rosen), literature, written both in Arabic and French by Muslim authors, is entirely overlooked by scholarship. Based on a reading of four novels authored by Moroccan Muslims (Ait Moh, al-Hajri, Miliani and Chaoui), I argue that these novelistic works use memory to recreate a world inhabited by both Jews and Muslims in order to account for Moroccan society's loss of its Jews. In recreating the ersthwhile Jewish neighborhoods, city-scapes and toponyms, literature makes a case for a new citizenship, emerging from a new reading of Moroccan history and memory. Because of their provocative nature, these crafted works interpellate both their readers and the state to clarify their position vis-a-vis a human hemorrhage—some 250.000 Jews emigrated from Morocco—that cost Moroccan society dearly. Finally, the positive portrayal Jewish-Muslims relations and the literary representation of the multiple degrees of intimacy between Muslims and Jews as well as the depiction of the permanent negotiations involved in Jewish-Muslim unity within difference (Hammoudi) both humanize and complicate Jewish-Muslim existence in Morocco. Literarture has, as a result, become a locus in which historiographical forgetfulness is actively contested and a space in which a bygone world is reactualized through the force of memory.

This paper examines contrasting narratives of the twentieth-century Jewish departure from Egypt and the place of historiography within contemporary formulations of Egyptian national identity. If Egyptian scholarship on Egyptian Jewish history in the post-Camp David period was ‘antagonistic and tendentious’ (Beinin 1998), recent years have witnessed the emergence of a sympathetic revisionist historiography amongst liberal-minded Egyptian intellectuals. Highly nationalistic in tone, it presents the departure of the Jews as a violent and regrettable rupture of an idealised earlier past, instigated by clearly recognisable villains—specifically Islamists and Zionists. Non-Zionist Jews, meanwhile, are redeemed by their patriotism or Egyptian-ness, in a case of ‘exclusionary incorporation’ by which ‘abject beings become subjects, but in a way that preserves and even depends on their position as outsiders’ (Partridge 2008). Professed tolerance towards Jews—which remains abstract in the absence of a significant Jewish population—becomes an index by which Egyptian intellectuals may stake claims to modernity, whilst simultaneously dismissing similar claims by Islamists, and formulate a model of Egyptian identity which explicitly excludes the Muslim Brotherhood. This project has clear strategic significance in the contemporary Egyptian political context, where the vilification of Islamists unites those of disparate political persuasions. The paper concludes by placing this project into dialogue with a number of Jewish narratives of the the 1967-70 period, when Jewish males were arrested, imprisoned and deported—an episode which is conspicuous by its absence from Egyptian accounts. These ambiguous and ambivalent narratives, I argue, directly challenge both nostalgic visions of coexistence and binaristic views of enlightened tolerants and villainous anti-Semites, highlighting a number of historical and ethical points which are elided in nationalist Egyptian historiography.