Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

Chapter 1

State of Research

The modern history of the Jews of Egypt and their dispersion after 1948 has only recently started to attract the attention of scholars. Although serious research on this topic has made significant progress since the 1980s, the amount of published material dealing with the topic is still not extensive. Even less has been written on their migration experience to Australia owing to their small numbers and low profile. However, the study of Jews in the Islamic world has generated several publications from a number of scholars. The Orientalist historian Bernard Lewis delved into the complex and often-paradoxical history of Jewish-Muslim relations from the late medieval to the early modern periods in his book The Jews of Islam.¹⁸ Bat-Ye’or (pseudonym of Giselle Littman née Orébi), an independent and controversial historian and émigrée from Egypt living in Switzerland since 1956, published The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (1985) in which she re-evaluated the meaning of the dhimmi status for Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule from the time of the prophet Muhammad until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. She argued that the protection the “People