Searching for Mary in Haret El-Yahud (Jewish Alley), near the Khan El-Khalili’s Al-Moski district, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. All we wanted was to put a face to Mary, a woman often heard of, but rarely seen.

Mary is said to be the last Jewish resident of the Hara, one of Cairo’s most famous neighborhoods and once a center of the capital’s thriving Jewish community, which numbered as many as 70,000 early in the last century, accounting for the majority of what most scholars agree were 100,000 Egyptian Jews in 1948, the year Israel was founded.

“Mary is ancient, she’s been here forever,” says Entessar Badr, a researcher and long-time resident of the alley who works with El-Taggamuah party. “The poor woman has no children, though,” she continues, explaining that Mary might be spotted in the afternoon sitting next to the vegetable vendor, her life-long neighbor, who would be grilling her a sweet potato, or perhaps chatting up the grocery store owner for a cigarette.

“Mary used to own a building,” Badr adds, “but it seems some Saeedis got the better of her and fooled her into selling it for peanuts. She wound up with a room up on the roof, then she had to move to the odessh.”

In a bygone era, the odessh, a type of almshouse, served as residences for the aged poor, virtually all of them local Jews. Today, the two remaining odessh retain an architectural character distinct from the Hara’s other buildings, but are called home only by Muslims and Christians.

Ahmed Abdel Hamid, 58, lives in one now. “It used to be a shelter for poor Jews,” he says, pointing to his residence from his seat at the nearby coffeeshop, “a clean place for those who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. There was a Jewish hospital nearby, and Haret El-Yehud was the cleanest hara. You wouldn’t have found garbage here in those days as you do now.”

Mohsen Allam A view of Haret El-Yehud today

It seems no one really cared Mary was a Jew; instead, she was simply Mary, and she was more than happy to keep it that way. Journalists who occasionally approached her for an interview would have to fight to get so much as a word out of her mouth.

“Start talking to her about the Jews and suddenly she loses focus,” Badr says. “I’ve always suspected that she would intentionally fall into amnesia, because the moment the journalist would disappear, Mary would sit down next to the vegetable seller and chit chat about the old days.”

Mary’s paranoia is contagious in Haret El-Yahud. Most of the people we approached were reluctant to speak. Some would say only that if we wanted to know more about the Jews of yesteryear, we would do better to go consult history books. Others were less polite. Only a handful offered simple sentences or snippets of stories passed from one generation to the next.

“We never had a problem living together. Those were good days.” Nothing else, no details. A quick sentence interrupted by younger residents of the alley who aggressively suggest the old-timer go have coffee with them instead of speaking with us.

Either way, no one has seen Mary of late. “She no longer passes by,” says the owner of a local store. “Maybe she’s dead, maybe she’s alive. God knows.”

Mohsen Allam Ancient Jewish sites in Haret El-Yehud have yet to be preserved.

“We heard she was admitted to the Italian Hospital,” another man says.

Strolling through the serpentine alley, combing the buildings for traces of the past, it quickly becomes clear the hara has become a run-down commercial district. There are few tourists here discovering the history of the nation’s Jewish minority, no preservation efforts underway.

Of the three distinct groups that made up the Egyptian Jewish community, the Sephardim, descendants of the Spanish Diaspora, were the largest, joined centuries later by Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. The Karaites, the smallest sect, lived for centuries in Haret El-Yehud and were almost completely assimilated, separated from their co-religionists by their use of Arabic, Egyptian dress and conservative traditions.

While affluent Egyptian and foreign Jews preferred Downtown, Haret El-Yehud was home to mostly poorer community members. Middle class artisans, tradesmen and managers preferred the precincts of El-Daher.

“Some of my favorite childhood memories are of my mother taking us to Mme. Marcelle [once the local Jewish seamstress] to have new dresses made. Start any conversation with my mother and she’ll find a way to bring up some fact about cooking she learned from her Jewish neighbors, who taught her how to pickle anything and everything,” she laughs, then turns quiet as she says, “They were good companions; we lived together as one family.”

A moment later, Badr continues, a smile in her eyes as she remembers, “As for my father? He was in love with the sister of Layla Murad The Gorgeous, he used to call her. Murad, originally Jewish, was a role model. Many Jewish girls at the time used to dream of becoming as lucky as this singing diva who went on to become a movie star.

“As my father always told us, most of the operators at the telephone centrale were Jewish girls because they had mastered foreign languages,” Badr says. “and Jews were well known for their skills in certain lines of business including jewelry, grocery stores, watchmaking and department stores.”

And just as many large Downtown department stores, including Cicurel and Ades, kept the names of their one-time Jewish owners, a number of shops in Haret El-Yehud retain their Jewish names. Take Sayed Mohamed Abu El-Kheir, for example, who is better known to the Hara’s residents as Bessah, the name of the shop he now owns, a shop in which he became an apprentice at the age of 17. Now 70, he is still selling cheese, halawa and basterma from the premises the last (Jewish) owner sold to him before he packed his bags to leave Egypt for the last time.

“The Jews were indisputably the kings of retail,” El-Kheir recalls, “and I kept the name of Ibrahim Moussa Bessah [on the store] because he had a good reputation. He taught me the trade and how to deal with customers. I have good memories of my Jewish neighbors. I remember their Eid [Passover]; they used to have such a good time and they made their kashir (unleavened bread). There were never tensions between us; and how could there have been? We led nearly the same lives.”

As for the original Bessah? First arrested after Nasser came to power, the shopkeeper finally left Egypt in 1968 after the war with Israel. “Bessah and his wife left, and I bought the shop. Some Jews left by choice before 1956, others were arrested afterward and deported. Other than Mary, I don’t believe there are any left,” El-Kheir says.

There are almost as few synagogues as there are Jews in the Hara. Once home to a dozen synagogues, only two (the ancient Maimonides Synagogue and the Haim Kappuci) survive here, silent testimony that the alley has deep roots in a different past. Some have simply fallen into disrepair, others, we later discover, were sold decades ago by members of the Jewish community themselves.

“There were many synagogues, but they were sold,” says one resident. “There was a synagogue behind my father’s shop, but it was sold for LE 20,000 in 1970. The marble they took out of it alone was worth more.”

Other Jewish property in the area has been leased out, including the Al-Adawi and Al-Nasr public school buildings.

Egypt was home to many foreign communities until 1948, and when Egypt started to grant citizenship, it encouraged anyone who lived on Egyptian soil to apply for it if they so desired. Many, though, didn’t take citizenship. “They didn’t realize how important it would become,” says Badr of her neighbors. “They believed they were Egyptians, with or without it.”

But as Abdel Hamid notes, some Jews gave in to Zionist pressure. “You know,” he says, “the spies,” a reference to the Lavon Affair of 1954, when Israeli intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to blow up American and British targets, planning to blame Nasser’s regime and isolate it from the two powers.

As the second exodus continued through the 1950s and 1960s, “Some in the media played a negative role, particularly during the worst times of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many conflated the words ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew.’ Islamists used slogans like ‘Khaibar, Khaibar ya yehud!’ in their demonstrations. [A reference to Caliph Omar’s 640 CE expulsion of the Jews.]”

Still, Badr says, Egyptians should have no problems with Jews. “How could we? Historically, we’re cousins.”

Jews helped build the nation’s financial system, served in Parliament, were artists and patrons of the arts even noted athletes. Many were active in the pre-revolutionary political movements that helped develop the modern concept of Egyptian nationalism. One, Youssef Aslan Qattawi Pasha, was a cabinet member and an author of the 1923 Egyptian constitution.

Prejudice, Badr says, just isn’t a natural component of the Egyptian national psyche. “Egyptians are by nature accustomed to dealing with every nationality on earth. We’re genetically programmed to accept ‘the other,’ regardless of his race, creed or religion. Few Jews were ever harassed by their neighbors, though the security apparatus of the former regimes was a different story.”

With that, Badr’s history lesson is over as she sums up her thoughts on the matter with a sweetly naive anecdote:

“After the revolution, the Hara’s name was unofficially changed to Haret El-Muslimeen,” she explains. “Once, someone asked me, ‘Is this Haret El-Muslimeen, ya bint?”

“I found myself replying, ‘No, Sir, you’re in Haret El-Yehud. I think the hara you’re looking for is some distance from here’.” et