Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

education in nineteenth-century Egypt.³⁴ The story of the most interesting figure among the leading Jewish supporters of Egyptian nationalism, Yacub Sanua, known as Abu Naddara (1839–1912), was outlined. Landau highlighted Naddara’s importance in the literary and journalistic fields and in the Egyptian theatre, where he introduced political satire using for the first time colloquial Arabic.³⁵ By exposing the social and political context of the environment of Egyptian Jews in the pre-1914 period, Landau’s work contributed significantly to the understanding of the whole period and therefore was found to be extremely useful.

Another important study that dealt with different aspects of the Jewish society in modern Egypt was Shimon Shamir’s book, The Jews of Egypt: A Mediterranean Society in Modern Times, published in 1987. This publication incorporated a collection of papers by a number of Israeli and international scholars, such as Aryeh Schmuelevitz, Jacob M. Landau, Shamir himself, Gudrun Krämer, Jacques Hassoun, Sasson Somekh, and others, which were presented at a conference titled “The Jews of Egypt in Modern Times”, convened at Tel Aviv University in June 1984. These authors each selected topics within their sphere of interest, such as the Ottoman background of the Jews in Egypt, the extent of their political participation in Egyptian society, their contribution to the economy and to the Egyptian-Arabic culture, their diversity, and finally “the self-view of Egyptian Jews and the ways these Jews were viewed by the Egyptian majority and by the founders of Israeli society”.³⁶ Shamir dealt with the complicated issue of Egyptian nationality by looking at the evolution of Egyptian nationality laws and how they were applied to the Jews, a topic that concerned quite a number of my respondents. The book also includes an array of impressive primary sources related to the respective subject of each section.³⁷

One of the most comprehensive studies of the history of Egyptian Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century can be found in The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952, by Gudrun Krämer, published in 1989.³⁸ Krämer chose to focus on the social and economic position of the Jews in Egyptian society, as well as on their political activities, compared to the position of other non-Muslim minorities. Drawing on a number of