Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

of the Book” were supposed to enjoy according to shari’a law¹⁹ was far from idyllic and that, on the contrary, persecution was endemic in Muslim countries. To illustrate her point, she detailed numerous incidents of antidhimmi riots, forced conversion, and oppression due to the restrictive legislation that regulated the religious and economic activities of nonbelievers in the Muslim world. However, she seemed to overlook the long periods when Christians and Jews flourished under Muslim rule and discriminatory provisions were regularly flouted. Her conclusions are construed by a number of scholars as too one-sided and polemical.²⁰ The American historian Mark R. Cohen called this style of gloomy representation of Jewish life under Islam “a neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history”, arguing that both this pessimistic interpretation and its opposite, an inflated vision of an interfaith utopia, are but a myth and countermyth rooted in the current political discourse of Arab and Israeli historiography.²¹ Other scholars, such as Harvey E. Goldberg and Michel Abitbol, tend to agree that, with the winds of a new pan-Arabic nationalism blowing since the late 1930s and the identification of Jews as agents of the hated British and French colonialists, the discrimination against the Jews of Arab lands in the hands of their respective governments grew significantly worse.²² The argument as to whether they were genuine victims of persecution in their own land is at the heart of the issue of identification and feelings of belonging that I investigated in the course of my interviews.

The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, a book by Professor Norman A. Stillman—whose special area of interest is Jewish and Islamic history and culture—was particularly relevant to my study because of its time frame. It focused on the far-reaching consequences of the sudden and brutal penetration of Europe into the Middle East, with the landing of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt in July 1798, and its impact on all the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly the non-Muslim minorities.²³ Whereas the Muslims perceived that impact to be a threat to their civilisation, the Jews saw it as a way out of their subordinate status of dhimmis. In fact, Stillman pointed out that before the Europeans’ arrival in the area, apart from a very small prosperous minority, the