Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

vast majority of Jews were not only poor and oppressed like most of the population but also “had to bear the burden of social isolation, inferiority, and general opprobrium”.²⁴ Whereas France had been the traditional protector of Catholics in the Levant since the sixteenth century, the Jews of the region had no Western protection until the 1830s when England started to take “a protective interest in the welfare of Ottoman Jews as a group”.²⁵ In addition, Stillman portrayed the conflicts faced by traditional Jewish communities in response to the challenges of modernity and the contending forces of Zionism, European colonialism, and Arab nationalism. He discussed the darkening shadows of the interwar period, the trouble brewing in Palestine, the rise of Nazism, and Jewish responses to the problem of anti-Semitism. He examined the increase of anti-Zionist agitation in the Arab world after 1943, which translated into anti-Jewish riots throughout several Arab countries. He presented the case of Egypt where mass demonstrations, accompanied by looting and ransacking of the Jewish quarter and Jewish businesses, occurred on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1945.²⁶ According to Stillman, by the time the State of Israel was established in 1948, the status of Jewish minorities in Arab lands was already considerably weakened, and their faith in a secure future in those countries significantly eroded. Therefore, one of his main contentions was that, although the question of Palestine was certainly “a major contributing factor in all of this…it was by no means the only one”.²⁷

Stillman pointed to the strong ethnic and religious component of Arab nationalism, which was gradually excluding Jewish minorities from the national project, and to the first Arab-Israeli War, which led to the beginning of a mass exodus of Jewish populations from the Arab world.²⁸ That exodus was resumed in force after the October 1956 Arab-Israeli War, which is considered to have been the coup de grâce (the final blow) for an Egyptian Jewry already destabilised by the 1954 discovery of a spy and sabotage ring composed of eleven young Egyptian Jews working for Israel.²⁹ Stillman also provided an invaluable collection of primary sources, selected from various archives, particularly from the records of the Alliance Israëlite Universelle (AIU), as well as from newspapers,