History of the Jews in Egypt

Overview

Jewish communities lived in Egypt from the First Temple period into the twentieth century. Their history encompasses ancient settlements, a large Hellenistic community in Alexandria, medieval centers in Fustat and Cairo, and later communities in Mediterranean and canal cities. Egyptian Jews practiced Judaism through changing systems of government while contributing to commerce, scholarship and communal life. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century migrants joined a community whose roots were already ancient. By the mid-twentieth century, its population stood at about 80,000. Within a generation, violence, departures, state expulsions and confiscations had reduced it to a small remnant.

Egyptian Jewish history formed part of a wider Jewish history across the Middle East that long preceded the creation of modern Israel. Its surviving evidence is unusually rich. Ancient accounts describe Alexandria’s institutions and Roman-era upheavals; medieval records from the Cairo Genizah illuminate religious practice, family life and international trade. Modern communal registers preserve births, deaths and marriages. These records document both the depth of Jewish life in Egypt and the consequences of its twentieth-century collapse for families now living elsewhere.

Origins

A Jewish community functioned in Egypt from the First Temple period. Later Egyptian Jews connected their history with the era of the prophet Jeremiah. A major expansion followed Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BCE. Under the Ptolemaic dynasty, Jewish tradesmen, farmers, mercenaries and government officials settled in Egypt. Ptolemy I, who ruled from 323 to 283 BCE, forcibly brought Jewish prisoners of war into the country and settled them as mercenaries. Ptolemy II freed Jews taken captive by his father and placed some on Egyptian land or in Jewish military units. Egyptian Jews also associated Ptolemy II with the Septuagint, the translation of Jewish scripture into Greek.

Alexandria became the leading center of Hellenistic Egyptian Jewry. Jews settled there by the beginning of the third century BCE, first in the eastern part of the city near the sea. Many worked in crafts and commerce. Most were artisans, while prosperous members included merchants, moneylenders and alabarchs. Beyond Alexandria, Jews lived in provincial districts and worked as farmers, soldiers and officials. By the first century CE, Jews accounted for an estimated one-eighth of Egypt’s population. Ptolemy VI granted Onias IV land around 161 BCE to build a Jewish temple at Leontopolis. Political clashes involving Alexandrian Jews occurred in 145 and 88 BCE, although relations with Ptolemaic rulers were generally favorable.

Alexandria’s Jews developed an autonomous communal structure. Respected leaders were followed by ethnarchs and, in the Roman period, a council of 71 elders. The ethnarch supervised communal affairs, including legal matters and preparation of documents. Institutions included a bet din, or Jewish court, and an archion for drawing up legal instruments. Synagogues stood in several parts of the city. During Roman rule, Jews inhabited two of Alexandria’s five quarters, especially the fourth quarter, known as Delta. These institutions gave the community means to organize worship, settle disputes and conduct business while living within a predominantly Greek and Egyptian metropolis.

History

Roman rule sharpened disputes over civic status in Alexandria. Greeks held privileged citizenship, while Egyptians were treated as subjects and paid a poll tax. Jews sought citizenship rights that would give them the standing held by Greeks, but hostility toward Jews fueled opposition. In 38 CE, during Caligula’s reign, riots devastated the Jewish community. Jews were murdered, communal leaders were publicly scourged, synagogues were defiled and closed, and Jews were confined to one city quarter. The conduct of Roman governor Flaccus enabled the violence. After Caligula’s death, armed Alexandrian Jews attacked Greeks with support from fellow Jews in Egypt and the Land of Israel. Roman forces suppressed the fighting. Emperor Claudius restored Jews’ religious and national rights but barred any extension of their citizenship rights.

Further catastrophe followed in 66 CE, as war broke out in the Land of Israel. Alexandria’s Jews rebelled against Rome; Tiberius Julius Alexander crushed the revolt, killing 50,000 Jews. During the wider Jewish rebellion against Rome in 115–117 CE, Alexandria’s great synagogue burned. Repeated revolts and their suppression reduced the community’s population and damaged its economic position. Jewish life nevertheless continued in Alexandria through subsequent centuries, with rabbis, scholars, merchants and communal institutions maintaining ties to other Egyptian Jewish centers.

After the Arab conquest, Fustat rose as Egypt’s administrative and commercial center. Jews settled there early in its development. In 882, Fustat’s Jews acquired the ruined Coptic church of Saint Michael, renovated it and made it the Ezra Synagogue. When the Fatimids founded Cairo after their conquest of 969, Jews also settled in the new city and built synagogues. Under Fatimid rule, from 969 to 1171, most Jews in the principal metropolis lived in Fustat. By the end of the tenth century, Cairo and Fustat together had become a religious and cultural center for Jewish communities across Egypt.

Medieval Cairo-Fustat contained Karaite Jews and two Rabbanite communities with distinct customs and synagogues. Shemariah ben Elhanan founded a Bet Midrash that continued after his death in 1011. Ephraim ben Shemariah and Sahlān ben Abraham led Jewish communities there during the first half of the eleventh century. At the beginning of that century, Caliph al-Ḥākim removed Jews from Cairo’s al-Jawdariyya quarter. They concentrated farther north in an area that became known as the Jewish Quarter; Karaites settled in its eastern section and remained there into modern times. Jewish life persisted through political change and episodes of coercion. In 1265, Sultan Baybars threatened to burn Cairo’s Jews and Christians alive unless they paid a large sum.

Maimonides lived in Fustat from approximately 1171 until his death in 1204. A major Jewish legal scholar and philosopher, he also served as a physician. His years there placed Fustat at the center of Jewish intellectual life. Alexandria likewise maintained a scholarly community and close ties with Cairo. Jewish refugees from Ukraine settled in Alexandria after the Cossack persecutions of 1648–49. Joshua of Mantua served as Alexandria’s rabbi in the 1660s and later became a follower of Shabbetai Zvi. The community contracted during parts of the later medieval and early modern periods, yet its institutions and connections endured.

Egyptian Jewish life expanded again in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Migrants from Yemen, North Africa and former Ottoman Empire lands joined established communities. Cairo and Alexandria remained principal centers, while Port Said developed a smaller community as its harbor and the Suez Canal grew. Its Jews included people of Adeni, Yemenite, Egyptian, Ashkenazi and Sephardi origin; most counted in 1907 were Adeni or Yemenite. The community maintained its own institutions while falling under the authority of Alexandria’s Jewish court.

Port Said’s records show the detail of this local life. A blood libel targeted its Jews in 1882, and the local governor protected them. In 1890, its Jewish court included Joseph Buskila, Rabbi Bechor Abraham Bitran and shohet Jacob Aaron Luria. Rabbis from Cairo visited in 1901 and published a new regulation on kiddushin, or Jewish marriage, there. Seven Port Said children studied at the Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Jerusalem that year. During the 1920s, Port Said had two synagogues and a school built by the Binyan family of Aden. Nissim Benjamin Ohana served as its rabbi from 1918 to 1935.

Persecution and survival

Modern Egyptian Jews encountered escalating political hostility before the community’s mass departure. Under Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood began an antisemitic campaign in the mid-1930s. In May 1936, it called for boycotts of Jews and Jewish-owned businesses. Brotherhood tracts combined hostile depictions of Jews drawn from Islamic texts with European antisemitic stereotypes. Its newspaper ran a regular column titled “The Menace of the Jews of Egypt,” publishing names and addresses of Jewish proprietors. Such agitation targeted Jews as a community and helped turn political conflict into pressure on ordinary families and businesses.

After Israel’s establishment in 1948, violence struck Cairo’s Jewish Quarter. Bombings between June and November killed more than 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200. Departures accelerated amid insecurity. More than half of Egypt’s approximately 80,000 Jews had left for Israel by mid-1950. Their movement was part of the wider Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, but Egyptian Jews did not all leave under identical circumstances. Some emigrated before the later state expulsions; others were driven out by direct government action. Describing the entire exodus as voluntary obscures the documented detention, confiscation and forced departure that followed.

The 1954 Lavon Affair concerned a small Israeli intelligence operation involving young Egyptian Jews. Egyptian police uncovered underground cells and arrested several members. Egypt hanged Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar in a Cairo prison. Marcelle Ninio and Robert Dassa received 15-year prison sentences; Victor Levy and Philip Nathanson received life sentences. The affair became a political scandal in Israel, where defense minister Pinhas Lavon resigned. Its participants were individuals in an intelligence operation, not representatives of Egyptian Jewry. Their actions did not define the loyalties or conduct of the wider community.

During the Sinai Campaign of 1956, Egypt expelled almost 25,000 Jews and confiscated their property. Approximately 1,000 more Jews were sent to prisons and detention camps. On November 23, 1956, a government proclamation declared all Jews enemies of the state and promised their expulsion. Thousands were ordered to leave. Departing Jews were restricted to one suitcase and limited cash and were compelled to sign documents surrendering their property. These measures tore families from homes, businesses and communal institutions. Port Said’s community also largely disappeared after 1956. The state’s treatment of Jews as a group made the exodus a matter of coercion as well as migration.

Further losses followed during the Six-Day War in 1967, when Jewish homes and property were again confiscated. By then, decades of violence, departure and state action had reduced a once substantial community to a fraction of its former size. Its disappearance did not erase the history of Jews born in Egypt or the claims of descendants to family records and communal heritage. It did, however, leave synagogues, cemeteries and archives in a country where few members of the community remained to use or maintain them.

Religion and culture

The Cairo Genizah, housed in Fustat’s Ezra Synagogue, is among the most important archives of medieval Jewish life. A genizah stores writings set aside rather than discarded. Cairo’s genizot preserved religious works alongside secular records: bankers’ accounts, merchants’ lists, legal documents, correspondence and even children’s notes. Partnership agreements document international Jewish commercial networks from the mid-tenth to the mid-thirteenth century. Together, these materials show how Jews conducted business, resolved disputes, supported institutions and maintained family and scholarly connections across distant communities.

Knowledge of the Genizah developed over generations. Simon van Geldern visited it in 1752 and recorded the visit in his diary. Its historical importance became clear in 1896, when Solomon Schechter recognized a Hebrew manuscript of Ben Sira among pages brought to Cambridge. He traveled to Cairo and recovered thousands of Genizah pages for Cambridge. The discovery transformed study of the medieval Middle East by preserving voices from daily life as well as formal religious writing. Documents from Fustat illuminate trade, scholarship, medicine, worship and relations among Jews in Egypt and beyond.

Egyptian Jews sustained several religious traditions. Alexandria’s ancient bet din and document office reflected communal autonomy; Fustat’s Rabbanite and Karaite communities maintained separate customs and synagogues. Cairo’s scholars established houses of study and corresponded across the Jewish world. Legal instruments preserved in Genizah collections show the practical importance of written agreements. Their clauses recorded parties, dates and obligations, while documents could be drawn up in languages used by Jewish communities. The religious and secular material together makes Egyptian Jewish history more than a history of rulers and persecutions: it also records work, education, family obligations and communal cooperation.

Present day

In 1979, following the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, Egypt’s Jewish community became the first Jewish community in the Arab world to establish official contact with Israel. The relationship created opportunities for renewed attention to Jewish sites even as the resident community remained very small. In 2005, Cairo Jewish community leader Carmen Weinstein and Israeli ambassador Shalom Cohen arranged the reopening of a Cairo synagogue. Preservation of places of worship became increasingly important as the number of people able to sustain regular communal life declined.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi approved measures to clean and protect Cairo’s historic Bassatine Jewish Cemetery and to make Jewish communal registers available. Registers from Cairo and Alexandria preserve births, deaths and marriages. For Egyptian Jews and their descendants, these can be essential records of family history and Jewish identity. El-Sisi also expressed hope for renewed Jewish life and offered government support for synagogues if more Jews returned. At the same time, Egyptian state television continued broadcasting a program promoting Jew hatred, showing that preservation measures and hostile public messaging coexisted.

A Jewish history survey counted approximately 16 Jews in Egypt: ten in Alexandria and six in Cairo. That figure captures the scale of the community’s decline from its mid-twentieth-century population, while its surviving records and buildings preserve evidence of much longer continuity. The history of Egypt’s Jews extends from First Temple origins through Ptolemaic Alexandria, Roman persecution, medieval Fustat, modern migration and twentieth-century expulsion. Their descendants and archival legacy remain connected to Egypt even though almost none of the community’s former population lives there today.