Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

the conspiracy—calling it child’s play —and to stress that the accused were not on trial as Jews.⁶⁰ It is again difficult to see how this could be construed to represent the defining moment for Egyptian Jewry. I would argue that, although this particular episode was certainly embarrassing and somewhat destabilising for the Jews of Egypt at the time, their future in the country was already sealed after the signing of the Treaty of Montreux in 1937, which abolished the privileges granted to foreign nationals and their protégés under the Capitulations regime. The first cracks started to appear immediately after World War II, with the riots in the streets of Cairo organised by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood and the violent reaction aimed at the local Jewish population after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The last straw was the tripartite attack on Egypt by England, France, and Israel in 1956.

The most interesting part of Beinin’s work was his discussion of the crucial themes of identity, dispersion, and struggle over the retrieval of identity, these themes being at the centre of my own research. He claimed that, as far as the Jews of Egypt were concerned, there was no single, authentic Egyptian Jewish identity, and that “the Jews of Egypt were always already a heterogeneous community of cosmopolitan hybrids. This was both the strength of the community and one of the factors in its ultimate demise”.⁶¹ He tried to represent that heterogeneity through his selection of case studies: the graduates of the socialist Zionist movement ha-Shomer ha-Tza’ir in Israel, the Communist émigrés in France, and the small community of Karaites in San Francisco. However, seeing as all three case studies represented very marginal subgroups within Egyptian Jewry, one is left to wonder about the identity of the bulk of Jewish Egyptian émigrés, their destinations, and their diverse post-exodus experiences, particularly because the title of Beinin’s book promised the readers a history of “The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry”.⁶² The present book intends to fill part of that void by listening to the stories of some of the more common types of émigrés from Egypt.

Nevertheless, Beinin did present an argument based on a critical assessment of a variety of sources and texts. His knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic allowed him to delve extensively into Egyptian and Israeli,