Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

Jews of Egypt shared some remarkable attributes, such as an astonishing level of multilingual skills, and therefore an innate ability to accommodate a multilayered identity and to interact with people from different backgrounds. The advancing tide of an exclusivist Egyptian nationalism had or should have somewhat forewarned and prepared them for their eventual exodus. Furthermore, because the Jews of Egypt—as part of a Levantine society—had personally experienced cultural pluralism as a way of life, they already possessed the necessary skills to achieve a smooth integration into whatever country or culture they would implant themselves after their forced emigration. I have raised some pointed questions on the degree of their acculturation to the dominant culture. How did their multilingualism serve them in the monolingual Australia of the 1950s and 1960s? How did they negotiate the different layers of their plural identity in their new country, and did they retain a core identity in the process? According to my investigations, no other researcher has done a scientific study of Egyptian Jews in Australia based on those themes.

Before entering into the body of my topic, it was important to delineate the conceptual framework around which this study was constructed by clearly defining such terms as forced emigration, assimilation, integration, acculturation, and multiculturalism in order to establish their relevance to the present study. For instance, the act of forced emigration can be understood to refer to people or a group of people who are either physically expelled from their native country by authority or compelled to leave their country because of political persecution, conflicts, economic problems, or religious or ethnic discrimination, as opposed to voluntary emigration where there is an element of choice.² This phenomenon can also be defined as an “exodus” that, in the biblical sense, is more than just a mass departure. It is “a journey by a large group to escape from a hostile environment”.³ The people who make up this group become refugees forced to seek residence in any nation-state that will accept them within its borders.⁴ My study will show that this was the case for Egyptian Jews.⁵

Once they are settled in that nation-state, the newcomers are faced with a number of different strategies destined to make them feel part of