Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

the rich and the poor. He raised the conflicting themes of nationalism versus colonialism, demonstrating why most Egyptian Jews had difficulty obtaining Egyptian citizenship and how a privileged few bought the security of European nationalities, whereas the majority remained stateless. He argued that a large proportion of young middle-class Jews, imbued in French education and socialist ideology, were highly politicised. However, only a small minority turned to Zionism, even as a more significant number embraced Marxist ideology, which somewhat explains his focus on the Egyptian graduates of the leftist Zionist youth movement ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir in Israel and on the Communist émigrés in France.⁴⁸ According to Beinin’s basic thesis, most Egyptian Jews were sympathetic to the idea of a Zionist State as a haven for European Jews after the Holocaust, but they did not believe they were in need of such a haven because of their own secure situation in Egypt. It was only after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and more so after the 1956 Suez crisis, when their security was fatally compromised, that some reconsidered the option of immigrating to Israel.

Beinin was, therefore, highly critical of the overly negative representation of Jewish-Arab history promoted by Zionist historiography and adopted by writers such as Bat Ye’or, one of the earliest exponents of this perspective.⁴⁹ He also pointed to other historians—Norman Stillman, Bernard Lewis, and Martin Gilbert—who, in his opinion, all tended to take the same view.⁵⁰ He claimed that prior to 1948 most leaders of the Jewish community, even those who considered themselves Zionists, were proud of the long and peaceful history of the Jews in Egypt. Although he rightly argued against the contention that Jewish life in Muslim countries was a story of continuous persecution,⁵¹ it is also undeniable that, since the decline of the Ottoman Empire and by the time of the French invasion of Egypt, Jewish life in those places was in a state of significant degradation. One has only to read Edward William Lane, who lived in Cairo in the 1830s, depicting the Jews as being “held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Mooslims [sic] in general” and their condition, apart from a privileged few, as “wretched” and depending on alms.⁵² One could just as rightly argue