AS FAR AS ALBERT ARIE is concerned, only archaeologists and historians should be writing about Egypt’s Jews. “What is it about this Jew rush these days? Lately, everyone seems to be excited about the Jews of Egypt. Why? Did people just wake up and realize, now that there are no more Jews, that they should write about them? Journalists should write about current issues, and Jews are almost extinct in Egypt. So, why bother?”

As we locked in a tug-of-war, Arie slowly (very slowly) began to relent. The problem, he says, is that “we’re speaking about a sad and painful era about people who’re now resting in cemeteries. Bear in mind that the issue isn’t as simple as some would have it. It’s so complicated, with so many stories and so many versions of the same story, with those who exaggerate and those who marginalize certain facts.”

Arie was born a Jew in Cairo to a Turkish father at a time when Downtown was the playground of well-off foreigners and ethnic minorities. Like other converts to Islam, he has no interest in discussing the details of his conversion.

“I found out at an early age that I was among the privileged, living in a world different from many others,” he remembers. “I even didn’t know there was a place called Haret El-Yehud until late 1946, during the cholera outbreak. The socialists organized committees to go in and fight the epidemic and lead an awareness campaign, and I was assigned to Haret El-Yehud. We were students at the time and it was a shocking experience. I had never imagined there were poor Jews. I recall taking pictures of Jewish children and men in galabeyyas, not to mention Jewish women you could easily have mistaken for Omm Mohammed,” he says, smiling.

Egypt’s Jews were a reflection of the broader society, Arie recalls. There were those who had completely integrated, adopting the dress and language of their lower- and middle-class Muslim neighbors. Others, the urbane, foreign-educated polyglots, mingled little with the lower classes. They founded or managed major companies, served in parliament and became cabinet ministers. The Queen always had a Jewish lady-in-waiting.

“The regime considered the Jews part of the system, and they in turn were loyal and integrated,” Arie says. “In one of his books, Jacques Hassoun, the French psychologist of Egyptian origin, mentioned that when Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, came to Egypt, he requested a meeting with Cattaui Pasha [a Jew, cabinet minister and architect of the 1923 constitution], who turned him down; instead of receiving him, Cattaui sent his Nubian butler to tell Herzl that his master was too busy to meet.”

Mohsen Allam Youssef Darwish.

Unlike his friends, the majority of whom decided to study abroad, Arie attended Cairo University, earning his degree from the Faculty of Law in 1950.

“Jews are part of Egypt’s heritage,” he asserts. “If we go back in history, we’ll find that Alexandria had a Jewish community even before the Greeks arrived. But the golden period for Jews here was during the Arab invasion of Egypt. Jews enjoyed their rights under the Fatimids and Ayyubids. No one ever mentions today that Yacoub Ibn Qeless, who established Al-Azhar in the Fatimid era, was a court minister with Jewish ancestors. Salah El-Din’s physician was the Jewish philosopher Moussa Ibn Maymouna [Maimonides].

“Hassoun, this noted scholar from Tanta, wrote about the Jewish heritage. His father was very religious, as he explains, and sometimes, when he wanted to pray, he would go to a mosque since it’s a house of worship. As an adult, Hassoun went on to form an Egyptian Jewish heritage society, but many of the documents attesting to that heritage were lost before and after the Revolution.”

As Youssef Darwish, a 95-year-old Muslim who also converted from Judaism, sees it, the lack of respect for the nation’s Jewish heritage isn’t a conspiracy against Jews. “True,” he says, “some Jewish artifacts and documents have been smuggled out of the country, which is a shame. But for God’s sake, look at what’s happening to Pharaonic artifacts,” he says.

(One theft in particular continues to rankle the community: A large part of the archive of the Jewish Community of Cairo was spirited out of the country last century. Today, it is housed at New York’s Yeshiva University under the title “The Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection: Records of the Jewish Community of Cairo, 1886-1961.”)

Youssef Darwish’s favorite portrait of his grandfather

Darwish has always tried to practice the words of Saad Zaghloul: Al-Deen lel Lah wa al-watan lel Gamee (Religion is for God, the Nation is for all). It’s a slogan that sustained many of his generation, he explains.

“I was a Jew, but had a Muslim half-brother. His name was Ezz El-Din, and my mother breast-fed him. My best friends at school were Muslims. One was an orphan, and my Mom appointed herself his surrogate mother.

“There was no difference whatsoever between Muslims, Jews and Copts,” he continues. “I hope you’re already familiar with these names: Director Togo Mizrahi was a Jew, as were the composer Dawoud Hosni, the poet Murad Farag and the famous Castro, who was the technical secretary of Al-Wafd. Jews were involved in the nationalist movements. I myself was a Wafdist; at the time, they used to say that the people would elect a donkey if Al-Wafd nominated it.”

Unlike Arie, Darwish studied abroad, leaving for France in 1930 to read law and returning four years later. “At the time, I was only allowed to work for the Mixed Court [handling disputes between foreigners and Egyptian-foreigner suits], so in 1944 I did an equivalency diploma at the Egyptian Faculty of Law because I felt it was a shame not to work in the Egyptian courts.”

His political activism was born soon after his return to Cairo when he joined those “advocating peace,” he says, after the outbreak of the 1936 revolution in Palestine. “We used to distribute pamphlets in French speaking out against Zionism.”

Mohsen Allam Albert Arie at home.

“One of the leading symbols of the nationalist movement was Jewish,” Arie recalls. “Yacoub Sanou’a, who was the first to declare the slogan ‘Egypt is for the Egyptians.’ He was a colleague of the famous Abdullah Al-Nadeem and is generally considered the father of Egyptian journalism.”

Still, he admits, most Egyptian Jews had little interest in politics and were happy to lead their own lives in peace. When the Arab-Zionist conflict intensified, it led radical voices in the Muslim Brotherhood and others in society to denounce the Socialist movement that had attracted so many Jews to its banner as “just another face of the Zionist coin.” The Communist movement, he says, had always stressed that Jews were part of society and belonged in Egypt.

“I remember reading books warning that the Jewish octopus was spreading its tentacles everywhere into the nation’s social, economic and political life,” recalls Arie. “That the Zionists had planted their eyes and ears in Communist cells and were seeking control.

“Unfortunately, the Zionists’ activities were legitimate at the time; the government allowed them in and tolerated their headquarters on Emad El-Din St. The authorities allowed them to launch propaganda campaigns and raise funds.”

What’s more, then-Prime Minister Mahmoud Nuqrashy Pasha banned the Society of Egyptian Jews Against Zionism soon after it was founded in 1947.

Arie and Darwish also agree that there was no discrimination against Jews in Egypt prior to 1948. But as the State of Israel was established and Arab forces prepared to enter Palestine, many local Jews began to worry; as tensions broke into violence that claimed dozens of lives, the exodus began.

“The Brotherhood’s activities against the Jews and its equasion of Judaism with Zionism worsened the situation. The Jewish Community Council was loyal to the regime. Cattaui and Cicurel tried to hold the pieces together until the last minute,” Arie says.

Other Jews openly supported the revolution: Grand Rabbi Haim Nahoum Effendi, appointed in 1925, was a prominent member of the Arabic Language Office, novelist and member of the Turkish delegation that signed the Lausanne Agreement. Nahoum expressed open support for the revolution and was photographed shaking hands with revolutionary leader Gen. Mohammed Naguib, the first president of the republic. When the populist Sheikh El-Baqouri attacked Jews in a radio interview, he was forced by the regime to apologize to the Rabbi for the insult.

Darwish notes that the political pressure brought to bear on the community after the revolution was “not persecution. Other than the 1947 incidents when members of the Muslim Brotherhood attacked the Jews of Haret El-Yehud, one can’t say that a Jew was ever killed in the street.”

“My old friend Jacques Hassoun once came to me with a Parisian journalist [of Egyptian descent] who wanted an interview,” Darwish continues. “I gradually found out that she wanted me to say that what happened to the Jews in Egypt was similar to what happened to them in Germany. So, I told her, ‘Absolutely not!’ She was so upset she left. ”

It was after 1948 that the first wave of immigration came.

“Some Jews got worried and decided to leave for Europe,” Arie remembers. “Most Egyptian Jews who left didn’t go to Israel; there were a few people who did and, unfortunately, they were the most loyal and integrated in Egyptian society the Jews of Haret El-Yehud, because there was no place for them in Europe. They didn’t speak foreign languages and they were too poor to afford to live there. So many of them left for Israel, despite the fact that Egyptian Jews are among the smallest demographic group there.”

Some, including the respected historian Joel Beinin of Stanford University, author of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, estimate that as many as 45% of Egyptian Jews who left ultimately resettled in Israel.

“It was in 1956 that the situation worsened,” Arie continues. “The Israelis invaded Sinai and the first countermeasure the authorities took was to arrest people and sequester property. Some people panicked and declared they felt they had no place here.

“I was a big supporter of Nasser, but his regime had a narrow outlook. In his day, the official line was, ‘We have nothing against the Jews,’ but unofficially and on the ground, there were procedures taken against them. People stopped hiring Jews, and job opportunities dwindled. In 1961, the nationalization and sequestration of property was a blow not only to Jews, but to foreigners, as well. But many of the Jews didn’t really constitute a threat to national security or the economy. Like Scabino, the tie shop, which was nationalized despite being a tiny emporium that posed no threat to anyone.

“It was all about political pressure,” Arie concludes.

Darwish looks at it in a slightly different light, saying Jews faced problems in part because the Egyptian government itself was scared. The effect, he admits, was the same: intimidation of the Jews.

“I used to have a Karaite friend, an engineer, who had a good post at the Telephone Authority. One day, he was handed his salary and asked to leave as ‘a precautionary move.’ He got upset and left not only his work, but the whole country. Then my relative, Tawfik Abdel Wahed see, Karaite names are similar to yours came to me, stating that he was leaving for France because he could no longer live here. I asked him why, and he said, ‘They took me to the police station and they slapped me.’ I stared at him in disbelief and told him, ‘Are you nuts? You’re leaving your home because someone slapped you?’

Moreover, Darwish claims, sequestration wasn’t a general rule applied to all Jews, but a measure imposed after 1956 primarily on French and British Jews and those who were suspected of having ties to Israel.

“It was Egypt’s right at the time,” he says. “We were in a state of war and they [the UK and France] were considered enemies. The procedures weren’t taken exclusively against Egyptian Jews; stateless Jews were treated as foreigners, and their situation was complex.”

Again, Arie has similar memories, saying, “In 1956, many of our neighbors in this building sold their furnished houses for as low as LE 350. At the time, the authorities demoted all the Jews who held French or British citizenship.”

Worse, he says, was Nasser-era Interior Minister Abdel Azim Fahmy’s decree that anyone who was a Jew on 15 May, 1948, would be considered a Jew even if he converted to Islam.

“So, if you converted after 15 May, you’re still a Jew in the eyes of the authorities. This was illegal and sacrilegious, for if you say El-Shehada, then you’re a Muslim. Period.”

The last straw for the Jewish community, the two men recall, was the year 1967. With that war, the majority of the 10,000 Jews who had stayed behind began to leave. The result: “Today’s Jews are a bunch of elderly women who are dying one by one. I think there are perhaps 40, maybe less,” Arie says.

Both men complain that since the revolution, some in the media have only made the lot of Jews worse by equating Judaism with Zionism.

“They think about it in this way: Israelis are bad, Israelis are Jews, so every Jew must be a closet Zionist,” Darwish says. “They portrayed Jews as the enemies of Islam, saying that in the past, they controlled everything. I don’t know if this will change anytime soon, because some people still think that by attacking Jews, they’re attacking Israel. On the contrary: They’re doing Israel a big favor; this is a country that tries to victimize itself and claim it’s in a vulnerable position.”

In this mad world, the two men agree, it shouldn’t be surprising that misconceptions are no longer exclusive to any one community. “In fact, Muslims face the same plight as the Jews. There are millions of Muslims in France who have French citizenship, yet the far-right claims they aren’t French because they do not have ‘French blood’,” Arie notes.

With that, Arie’s wife comes in to serve us tea and cake, a warm smile on her face as she sits down to join us.

“I met Albert through friends in 1965 at the cinema club,” says the Egyptian Muslim woman, who asked to be identified only as Mrs. Arie. “The first thing that attracted me to him was his insistence that he would not leave Egypt, no matter what. For him, there was no other country but Egypt. We lived Socialism in all aspects of our daily lives. It wasn’t about hollow slogans.”

Mrs. Arie accepted her fair share of problems for having married a former Jew.

“I used to work as a journalist. Before marrying Albert, they called me in, asking me if I knew that he was originally a Jew. I told them, ‘So what? I bet you know everything about him, and is there a good reason for me not to marry him? If so, please inform me.’ I think they felt helpless in the face of my boldness.”

Eventually, Mr. and Mrs. Arie tire of talking about the difficulties they faced in the lean years immediately after 1967, particularly the harassment and intimidation.

As they once more close the “Jewish” chapter of their lives, the two begin telling us stories about their lives as newlyweds nearly 40 years ago. With so much time passed, Mrs. Arie can laugh about what she says was the remarkably odd behavior of her mother-in-law, who “left the house virtually naked in summer,” the same season in which she would routinely strip the house of all its curtains and carpets, saving them for winter time.

They’re still reminiscing as we leave, two old souls who have persevered through the decades by knowing exactly who they are.

As for Darwish? His wife has passed away, but he’s thriving on his memories of the time they shared, the good and bad alike. After all, he concludes, that’s the only thing that makes life worth living at age 95. et