In November 2018, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared, “Should the Jews wish to [re]establish a Jewish community in Egypt, the Egyptian government will build synagogues and religious institutions for them” (Al-Sharq, February 26th, 2019). The multi-million-dollar investment in the restoration of Jewish antiquities under the Sisi regime is accompanied by the concept of a return to a multicultural Egypt. This panel critically examines the contemporary resurgence of interest in an all but extinct Egyptian Jewish minority and places in scholarly conversation four papers that explore the sphere of visual media as a nuanced counterpoint to both recent government enterprises and cultural preservation initiatives by the Jewish community and its diasporas.
The first paper takes as its point of departure an iconic scene from Togo Mizrahi’s musical melodrama "The Straight Road" (1943) and the scene’s reprise in Paula Jacques’ novel "Kayro Jacobi Just Before Oblivion" (2010). This paper argues that Egyptian cine-writing, with its enduring attachment to melodrama, continues to shape the ways in which the Egyptian Jewish diaspora accesses historical memory. The second paper revisits the scene from Rami Imam’s "Hassan and Marcus" (2008) in which Muslim and Coptic characters tacitly lament the loss of their Jewish counterpart Cohen, a figure that first graced the Egyptian screen in Fu’ad al-Gazayirli’s 1954 film "Hassan, Marcus, and Cohen." With an eye toward an emerging body of television and film that grapples with the mass exodus of Egypt’s Jews, this paper shifts the focus away from Cohen’s absence and considers how Cohen, as both a cinematic icon and a broader allegory for Egyptian-Jewish exile, continues to haunt and disrupt the sphere of Egyptian visual production. The third paper looks at Jérémie Dres’ graphic novel "If I Forget Thee, O Alexandria" (2018) and explores its intertextual engagement with the quintessential expression of Jewish exile and return in Psalm 137. This paper also considers how the medium of comics lends both political and allegorical dimensions to the author’s journey thorough family history and collective memory. Drawing a connection between the political and the artistic, the fourth paper argues that current cultural production in Egypt interfaces with the shifting political rhetoric to allow for the widespread release and popular consumption of television and film that thematizes the decline of Egypt’s historic Jewish community. Together, these papers examine the complex and often self-referential ways in which contemporary visual media engages Egyptian Jewish exile and return.
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Dr. Hanan H. Hammad
In December 2012, ‘Issam al-‘Iryan, Muslim Brotherhood activist and the president of its ruling Freedom and Justice Party, called for Egyptian Jews who immigrated to Israel to return back to Egypt. He promised them full rights stipulated in the Islamic Sharia. Controversies about this surprising call witnessed unleashed anti- Semitic comments and rising hopes that Egypt would go back to the pre-Nasser “good old days”. On the other hand, a similar call by current president ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi in February 2019 faced silence inside Egypt.
Between al-‘Iryan’s and al-Sisi’s calls, Egyptian audiences watched with a great interest the TV series Harat al-Yahud (the Jewish Alley) in 2015. Aired during the prime time of Ramadan, the show provided a narrative on the daily life in 1940s. The show depicted a love story between a Muslim army officer who fought in Palestine in 1948 and the daughter of his Jewish neighbors. After the girl immigrated to Israel, she returned back home to Egypt.
This paper discusses the politics of calling Jews to return to Egypt since the Tahrir Revolution. I argue that despite the radical differences between the Muslim Brotherhood short-lived regime and the current regime, Egyptian ruling elites have manipulated the unlikely Jewish return to coverup the structural intolerance towards political oppositions and existing religious minorities, i.e. Copts and Baha’is. With the suffocating public sphere under al-Sisi’s dictatorship, popular culture has been a main vehicle for liberal Egyptians to imagine their past and refashion their Egyptian-self as tolerant and pluralistic.
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Dr. Deborah Starr
In the Egyptian musical melodrama al-Tariq al-Mustaqim [The Straight Road (1943)], a character played by Yusuf Wahbi drives a car off a cliff to erase his identity and disappear into oblivion. Togo Mizrahi, an Egyptian Jew of Italian nationality, wrote the scenario, directed, and produced the film. More than sixty years later, a fictional character modeled after Mizrahi drives his car off the Abu al-'Ala bridge in Cairo. A pivotal moment in Paula Jacques’ 2010 novel Kayro Jacobi, juste avant l’oublie [Kayro Jacobi Just Before Oblivio], this disappearing act casts the capital “O” Oblivion as a means of preempting the oblivion of exile. Written by Jacques as part of a broader effort to preserve Egyptian Jewish memory through literature, the novel leaves some ambiguity about the cause of the crash but draws a clear analogy between Jacobi’s demise and that of the Egyptian Jewish community: “Within a few years, the presence of Jews and their desire to live in Egypt would sink into oblivion” (Jacques 275).
This paper offers a reading of Kayro Jacobi as a point of departure for examining the role of cinema in shaping and, at times, constituting the memories of the modern Egyptian Jewish diaspora. I particularly explore the idiom of melodrama, a much-loved genre of classic Egyptian cinema, as a vehicle for representing Egyptian Jewish memory—both as a means to evoke heightened emotion, and as a means to fend off the feared slide into oblivion.
Other examples of this idiom to be explored include Dina Zvi-Riklis’s musical melodrama Shalosh Imahot [Three Mothers (Israel, 2006)], and Yizhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandria Trilogy: Kayitz Alexandroni [Alexandrian Summer, 1978]; Blanche [1986]; and Ba-Derekh le-Itstadiyon [On the Way to the Stadium, 2003].
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Mr. Eyal Sagui Bizawe
The title of the Egyptian film "Hassan and Marcus" (Rami Imam, 2008) nods to the title of an older Egyptian film, "Hassan, Marcus and Cohen" (Fu'ad al-Gazairli, 1954). This older film features three partners - Muslim, Coptic and Jewish – who run a pharmacy together, and is based on the play "Hassan, Marcus and Cohen" that came on the stage of the theater in the early 1940s. In the newer film Cohen's name is conspicuously absent, marking the absence of the Jew from the Egyptian social landscape
The absence of the Jew in the film is not only expressed through the deletion of his name, but rather through his presence. In one of the most emotional scenes, when the Muslim family and the Christian one sit together in the living room and watch TV, Hassan and Marcus are nostalgically reminded of Egypt's "good old days" when nobody was stopped and asked about their religion. In a moment of metatextuality the film that airs on television is an old Egyptian movie "Flirting of the Girls" (Anwar Wagdi, 1949), starring Naguib al-Rihani, the comedian who put on the show "Hassan, Marcus and Cohen", and the Jewish singer and actress Laila Mourad. As the camera faces the TV screen, Laila Mourad rises from the darkness and sings her famous song "I Have No Hope in this World".
Although there are fewer than ten Jews living in Egypt today, it seems that in recent years Jewish figures are increasingly making appearance in Egyptian television and film. Jewish figure is largely cast as an Egyptian patriot who demonstrates his fidelity to the homeland.
The return of the Jew to the Egyptian screen is reflected in the film "Heliopolis" (Ahmad Abdullah, 2009), the TV drama series "Ana Qalbi Dalili" (Mohammad Zahir Ragab, 2009) and "Harat al-Yehud" (Mohammad Gamal al-'Adl, 2015), in documentary films such as "Salta Baladi" (Nadia Kamel, 2007) and "Jews of Egypt" (Amir Ramses, 2012).
Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, my paper examines the nostalgic dimension of these visual works. I argue that while the Jew in these works becomes a signifier of another era, a lost paradise, this signifying gesture is not an attempt to restore the past in order to return to it, but rather a means of critically assessing the present with a restorative eye toward the future.
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Dr. Michal Raizen
The epigraph to Jérémie Dres’ 2018 graphic novel "If I Forget Thee, O Alexandria" evokes the Greek myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur but recasts Ariadne’s thread—a golden filament used by the hero to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth—as a thread of memory entangled with “words in forgotten languages” and set against a “horizon strewn with small holes.” This opening meditation on the pain of departure sets the stage for the author’s discovery of a photo album, which inspires an investigative report detailing the history of his grandparents’ exile from Egypt in 1967. "If I Forget Thee, O Alexandria," the third installment of a trilogy that includes "We Won’t See Auschwitz" (2011) and "Exile to Babylon" (2014), nods self-reflexively to the narratological world of bandes dessinées (comics in the Franco-Belgian tradition). In the opening sequence of the novel, Dres visits his deceased grandparents’ apartment and sits facing their ghostly figures. The reader then learns that they never spoke of their traumatic departure. The story of the “nearly total forced exodus of Jewish communities of the Arab world,” as the text box indicates, was eclipsed by the weight of the Holocaust as a focal point of Jewish collective mourning (12). With the photo album as his guide, Dres traces his grandparent’s history and embarks on a journey that takes him to Alexandria, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Paris.
My paper explores two salient moments of intertextuality in the novel: first, the title and thematic arch as references to Psalm 137 (If I forget thee, O Jerusalem) and, by extension, the vast body of rabbinical and literary commentary on the themes of Jewish exile and return; and second, the color scheme and ‘stripological’ sequence as a visual reprise of Riad Satttouf’s critique of pan-Arabism in "The Arab of the Future" (2014). My reading of the novel considers the ways in which Dres weaves together his encounters with real-life preservers of cultural memory—Amir Ramses, director of the film "Jews of Egypt" (2012), and Magda Haroun, president of Cairo’s Jewish community—with the extended metaphors and moments of literary intertextuality that course through his documentation. With an eye toward metatextuality, my paper looks at how the novel reflects on its own narrative form, the bande dessinée, as a powerful artistic and political medium for representing multiple layers of traumatic loss.
