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The body of literature covering this topic is not extensive.17 The state of research on Egyptian Jews in Australia is understandably even more restricted, due to their small number and low profile. The few historians who have dealt with this issue did so briefly, in the context of a broader study of Sephardim in Australia. In France, where the size of the Egyptian diaspora is more significant, personal migration stories have been the object of several memoirs, but even there it seems that only a few researchers engaged in a serious and systematic study of the Egyptian Jews as a distinct migrant group.
Chapter 2 outlines the methodological strategies, including a description of the different approaches to the evaluation of the data, bearing in mind the basic social concepts that have just been outlined. Oral history as a research tool is discussed with the intention of identifying its inherent strengths and weaknesses, as well as explaining why it was particularly appropriate for this study. The use of archival records and secondary sources was also essential for comparing and contrasting the results of the collected data.
Based on primary and secondary sources, chapter 3 proceeds to establish the history of the Jews of Egypt in the modern period, starting with the landing of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. Following a thematic approach, this section concentrates on the rise and fall of Egyptian Jewry, looking at the way the Jews of Egypt responded to the clashing ideologies of the interwar period, focusing on the chain of events that led to their mass exodus starting from 1948, and ending with the near-total demise of a viable Jewish community in Egypt.
Both Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the oral history data, using a quantitative and qualitative approach by linking the questions to the findings. Chapter 4 compares and contrasts elements of the Australian participants’ stories and their personal perspective of the events that so dramatically changed their lives, to the official version of those same events. The analysis of their demographic, ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural characteristics leads to a reconstruction of their experience as Jews in Egypt, evoking both the privileges they enjoyed earlier and the discrimination they suffered later. It also helps to define their identity as