 Thank you all for coming. I'm Yair Wallach. I'm the lecturer in Israeli studies and the head of the Source Center for Jewish Studies. I'd like to start by thanking Source for supporting this lecture and also the LMEI, the London Middle East Institute, for co-hosting this lecture with us as well as the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics who has also contributed to making this happen. Now the topic of Jews of the Arab world is one of the core issues for us at Source Center for Jewish Studies. It's only natural because we specialize in Asia and Africa as an institution. It's only natural that for us this is the prime focus and it's an issue that gets relatively little attention and I think generally. So it's important for us and we've done many events in the last few years around this topic. Now the discussion of Jews in the Arab world is very much shaped by the dichotomy, the perceived dichotomy between Jews and Arabs. Jews and Arabs today are seen as antonyms, as opposites, as something that categories that exclude each other as rivals, enemies, even. And this idea of the dichotomy of Arab and Jew is very much of course the product of the 20th century and specifically the Palestine-Israel conflict. And when there is discussion of Jews in the Arab world, that discussion is very much dominated by the conflict and conducted under the shadow of the conflict. So on the one hand we have Israeli argument that try to equate the exodus of Jews from the Arab world with Palestinian refugees and there's objections that question. There's also the debate on the relation between Zionism in these communities, whether they're saved by Zionism or are they should be seen as victims of Zionism, as Ela Shohat famously argued. Now these are important questions both intellectually and politically, but in a way what they force us, what they make us is to look into this whole question through the eye of the needle of Israel Palestine. While we're talking about communities, if we talk about Jewish communities in the Arab world that existed in the area in the region for centuries if not millennia and played a crucial part in respective societies and countries and cultures. And so the result is a somewhat reductive discussion. So one of the interesting developments of the last 10, 15 years and this is the topic of the lecture tonight is a re-emergence of interest in Arab Jews in the particular context in which these communities existed. And the interesting thing is that that interest and that fascination comes from the region itself where there is a re-examination of Jewish heritage and contribution and role in these respective societies. And I think we have no better scholar to talk about this than Dr. Najat Abdul Haq was one of the emerging scholarly voices on the history of the Arab Jews. Dr. Abdul Haq is a Berlin-based Palestinian scholar originally from Nablus. She studied at the universities of Bezait in Palestine and Leipzig in Germany. She received her PhD in Middle East Studies at the University of Erlang and Nuremberg in Germany in 2012. And the product of that was her book, Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt, Entrepreneurships and Business Before NASA, which was published by Ibi Taurus in 2016 and is available for sale outside the door in a significant discount. So grab your copy. This book is the first academic study of the economic role of Egyptian minorities and it's based on original and groundbreaking research of archival sources and in that sense it's a very significant study. Dr. Abdul Haq teaches at the University of Erlang but she's also consultant on Middle East in different media outlets and if you watch for example Deutsche Welle in Arabic you are very likely to see her. So I'd like to welcome her for this talk on rethinking and reclaiming history, imagining our interest in Jewish heritage in the Middle East. Thank you. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to first thank the London Middle East Institute, the SOA Center for Jewish Studies, Dr. El-Wagh and Professor Gilber Ashqar for making this lecture possible for their invitation and to all other people who worked in the background to make this possible today, the whole organization and the contacts with the publisher and so on. And I would like to thank you all for coming this evening. The late Samir Naqash who's an Iraqi Jew who was forced to migrate from Baghdad said I was a Jew in Iraq and now I am an Iraqi in Israel. This sentence of Samir Naqash brings us back to the question of how did Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian, Yemenite, Moroccan, Tunisian Jews perceive themselves and how do they today or how the second generation does today. But besides the the Jews themselves who most of them were forced or some of them may be willingly left their countries, there are also the residents of these countries who now are also interested about this heritage. Today I would like to present and discuss with you a phenomena that emerged we can say last decade or maybe a bit earlier where the question of the Arab Jew and the history of departure and expulsion became much more popular than it was before. In fact maybe 10 years ago this wasn't a topic to be discussed in any Arab country. On the contrary it was only seen I would say from a security perspective especially in this country. If anyone tried to do some research which I also myself experienced when I was in Cairo to do some research on the Jewish minority the first thing you will face is a direct or indirect meeting with the with the security of these countries because it's considered as a national issue related to Israel and so it's really difficult to escape this space or this room. About 800,000 Jews used to live in the region between Morocco and Iraq and the majority of them left these countries between 1948 and 1967 okay there are some cases that left later maybe the Syrian Jews where the the last to leave in the early 90s. Here I have one of my favorite images which is the school of the Karate community in Cairo and I use it very often because it's one of the images that show us if we if we see the image and the people sitting and we don't we're not fluent in Arabic you will not necessarily know that they are Jews or Muslims because the rabbi in the middle with the with the white cover can be also a sheikh or a imam or a teacher of Quranic school. So the change started to find place to find the interest in Arab Jews I know that the term Arab Jew can be discussed and maybe also we can have a fight about it can Jews be Arab can Arab be Jews and so on but still I will use it here because I I see the cultural connection between all residents in the Arab countries with the places and with their culture so Arab here might not be a political term or an ethnic term as such but let's say a cultural term because the Arabic and partially also the Islamic culture influenced all minorities who were living in this in this region. So the first who really started this interest was in Morocco but Morocco has a special case because in fact the Moroccan community or the Moroccan Jews did not live totally the country and today there are about 2,000 Jews living in Morocco compared to other countries it's a huge number if we take Cairo they are maybe 14 or if we take Egypt I don't know how many are in Iraq and apparently in Syria there are no any modern or in Beirut of course Tunisia is also a special case because of Jerba. So the Jewish museum the Moroccan Jewish museum was opened in 1997 the initiative was from a Moroccan Jew who passed away and then it was closed and then reopened in 2013 but beyond this very singular example and the filmmakers were the avant-garde of this revival and in this context I would like to mention mainly forget Baghdad by the Iraqi filmmaker Sameer who in fact went back to Israel and to New York to meet the friends of his father and followed by the film Salata Baladi it's an Egyptian film it's the story of an Egyptian family by Nadia Kamel forget Baghdad was 2004 Salata Baladi was 2007 and now today we have about 12 films one of them is El Gusto it's about the Algerian Jews and music and the last two films at least the one I know about is one by Rula Khayyat she's an Lebanese filmmaker and she did the film from Brooklyn to Beirut it was released by the end of 2016 and Yasmina Benari did the film on Albert Arié he's in fact the last Jew living in Cairo and it's called Atiti's balcony and the film discusses not only his Jewishness maybe he's less Jew but also his political career in Egypt so from my perspective despite of the fact that I'm specialized in Egypt and I know much more about the situation in Egypt I'm about the daytime Egypt but this phenomena is really spread through all the countries and one of the main factors that show this measure of interest is in fact literature so literature we had or we have until now since 2006 about 25 novels and fiction where the Arab Jew going into details the Iraqi Jew the Egyptian Jew the Algerian Jew are the main figure and the plot and the plot of the of the fiction this wasn't the case before despite of the fact that we had in the novel of Wujih Ghali who's Egyptian and he wrote in English in 1964 there was a main Jewish figure in his novel and then Ahsan Abdul Quddus and Najib Mahfouz and Ibrahim Abdul Majid which are famous Egyptian authors had similar but the novels were not about the Egyptian Jew in that sense but Jews had had Jews were figures in these novels what is new now is that there are in fact there is a new generation writing novels writing fiction and discussing the history of the Jews of Arab countries one of the first book was from Rahim el-Jubeen he's Syrian and it's a diary of a Jew of Damascus it was published in 2006 but it was forbidden in Syria so you could not get the book at any bookstore in Syria you could get it in Beirut but also not not easily and the the the number of copies is very limited and the book about the Jews of Bahrain by Ali Jallawi both books did not find like how to say did not become really famous but these are one of the first who were that were published in in Arabic and more famous are other books I tried to be a little bit artistic but yes so the book of Ali Badr who's in who's an Iraqi author Har Sattab or the Topacco Keeper and Yamash Sattaf al-Kamal Rahim he's Egyptian Yahud al-Iskandariya is also an Egyptian work and Sifr al-Tarhal also we see that the number of Egyptian authors is high our part of the books who became famous Ali Badr's work and the work of the Yemenite author Ali al-Maqri reached the the long list of the booker's price of the Arabic booker's price in 2009 2011 so and Ali Badr's work was translated into English into 2012 Ali al-Maqri's work as far as I know was translated into Hebrew but not I know that it was translated into English besides these novels that I'm really I won't mention them all here there is a vivid translation activity of biographies of Jews who used to live in Arab countries again Cairo is very famous that were written in English or in French and translated into Arabic so this work of Lucid Linyando the man with the white shark skin suit I think it's now in the fourth edition in Cairo and it was for a while kind of best seller and the others followed but not as famous as this book and there is beside literature and beside films there's a blog by Na'al al-Tukhi Na'al al-Tukhi is an Egyptian journalist author and translator and yeah he has a blog The Spoke Kohen where he really specialized in translating Hebrew literature into Arabic but he was very much interested in the so-called Eastern Jews or Mizrahi Jews the most famous is the work of al-Maq Bihar and al-Tukhi translated it into Arabic and it was published in Cairo in 2016 and also was now it's in second edition by al-Qutab Khanna so we have literature and we have a blog and in Morocco we have sorry in Iraq we have another activity it's it's not it's not fictions but Mazen Latif is a journalist and he published oh sorry he published a huge number of books maybe about 10 about different Jewish figures one of them is from Dr. Saimiz Beda who's among us today about the Iraqi kitchen and he translated other works and Mazen Latif's situation is very specific because he has a column every second week in an Iraqi newspaper called Al Alam I have a screenshot downstairs sorry on the down of the picture where where he where he writes about one Jewish famous Jewish figure here he writes about Jackie Abboud and he has an article about Samir Naqash and about Naim Qattan and Sha'ul Anwar Sha'ul thank you and and many others um in Morocco there is a very vivid um scene of novels and translations but it goes also a further because since 2003 there is a festival in the Sawira it's the Andalusian or the Atlantic Andalusian music festival this festival is not Jewish by definition or as to say but it's one of the unique festivals in all the Arab countries that revised the Andalusian Jewish music that was a very important tradition in Morocco and the festival as we see here it's the poster is from 2013 it was its 10th anniversary this year it's going to be its 15th anniversary and it's becoming a much more popular and famous festival and some famous singers I mean became known there or some singers who were not famous you know in orchestra that also of Jewish musicians Jewish Moroccan musicians who to take part in this so we have um um we have this on let's say on intellectual level but another action um which is I think from my perspective again being uh export of Egypt since summer 2017 a Madame Magda Haroon who's the head of the Egyptian Jewish community and others who some of them are the sons of Jews who converted to Islam Henley and others who are not related at all with the Jewish community started an organization called the called uh which is um the Drop of Milk Association in Cairo and what they do is as we see here they are reopening the synagogues the libraries cleaning them and making them accessible to public which is really something special and unique because this wasn't it wasn't possible to enter any library for example when I was doing my research back in 2007 2008 2009 it was easier to enter the Egyptian archives than entering the any any Jewish library or archives I collected some pictures from their work all the people who work there do voluntary work and this is um the synagogue in uh Heliopolis where I'm trying to to repair you know the lights finishing the chairs and reopening it was officially reopened the Ghamba synagogue or Maimonadus ibn Ma'abad ibn Maimon uh it's in the Jewish Quarter in Cairo in old Cairo uh it was opened um 2010 for a very short period and closed again and now they reopened it and it's um it's public also for tourists to visit which wasn't the case before um and they are having other other activities I think by now three synagogues are cleaned at least not all of them are renovated because they were closed for like 50 years and there's a debate in Egypt also with the Egyptian community outside Egypt the Brooklyn Egyptian Jewish community protested through a letter to the Egyptian embassy in the US asking to stop these activities because they want the synagogues only to be a place for worship but the idea of Magda Haroon and the activist with her is uh to to make these spaces for cultural events to bring people back into the synagogue and to get more information about the Jewish heritage so what is interesting from my perspective taking the novels or taking all these activities is that not all of them is done especially the novels these are not novels written by uh Arab Jews let's say or by their children or grandchildren I mean taking um or excluding the the translated books that were written in the states or in France but it's by younger Egyptians mainly I mean the 25 novels I have mentioned 20 of the authors are young people and not really famous names but young people when he wrote his the first edition of his book the last Jews of Alexandria he was 27 so we have a young generation that is emerging to write about this and these people did not live Egypt or Alexandria or Cairo or Morocco or Tunisia Syria or Iraq as a as a multicultural multi-ethnic societies this is a generation that grew up where in Egypt okay there are cops but but there are Egyptian cops but but no other minorities that was before and the same is for Iraq or even for Tunisia and uh the other thing which really is interesting here that all these novels despite of the difference in details and to be frank not all of them are really good novels in literary sense but this is not the question here um have a common common aspects and they go beyond stereotyping this is the first thing and the other thing they go beyond the israel-palestine conflict and this is one of the uh the things that really attracted my attention and I asked myself first the question and then I started to find answers is young filmmakers young authors our musicians or the activists in Cairo why are they interested in a community that disappeared and in a community that in fact is only in you known through through the conflict and always related um to Palestine and why is this uh emerging now and um why didn't happen before I would like to show you some images just just to put the context the man on the right side is general Mohammed Najib who was the first Egyptian president after the revolution or coup in 1952 and on the left side is uh Rabbi Nahum Afandi the great rabbi of Egypt and this is an image of a visit of Mohammed Najib on Yom Kippur in October 1952 to the synagogue in Sharia Adli which is one of the biggest synagogues in Cairo so the what what is in our mind is that especially regarding Egypt that Abdel Nasser's era or the coming of Abdel Nasser was the main reason why the Jews left we can elaborate on this later if you like also um shows us that at least in the beginnings there was no hostility in the sense of classical hostility against the Jews per se they were Egyptians also at the same time you know they were they are not and were not at that time citizens of the state of Israel so this is the general Mohammed Najib and this is for example one of the books of Jewish law and family issues and this is an example um how these books were printed in fact in Hebrew and in Arabic um to be accessible to the people also again showing that the Jewish community the Egyptian Jewish community and then also the Iraqi Jewish community the Syrian where um influenced in Arabic as all other citizens um in uh in those countries and this is a an image most probably from Alexandria from the Eliyahu Hanik Bi synagogue one of the Shabbat prayers so to go back to go back to the to the main question and the whole history of of the Arab Jews were in fact captured in the Palestine-Israel conflict and for sure to be also very clear here it's um it's not possible to de-attach it from the conflict and to de-attach the discussion from the conflict but the question is where were the spaces one can discuss this question or this history beyond the conflict and in fact it wasn't really possible um I consider that the history of centuries of of vivid communities as I said 800,000 to up to one million between Morocco and Iraq it was frozen or captured starting 1942 there's a very famous speech of David Bonguio where he mentioned as to say the Mizrahi Jew the Oriental Jews that had to be brought to Israel as a Hebrew work working force of the Da'a Afghit to the country so this was like the the starting point of the political interest of the Zionist movement in the in the Jews of the of the Arab countries of the Orient and it was a 42 until 67 if we try to discuss this history these are the dates we are stuck in when was there a political interest before there was an interest but not really an active one to see what communities are these how Jewish they are and so on I mean we are talking here also about a Ashkenazi hegemonical discourse in this regards and then 67 the 67 war it is like there is like a kind of a block as if it's an ice block and all the history or the contribution of this community was kind of forgotten or ignored let's say and these are the years where the whole issue is discussed I would like to elaborate a little bit on this to put it all in context mainly two discourses emerged after 48 and in fact naturally after 48 but much later one of them was more dominant which is as I call it through my research and if you like the first chapter of my book elaborates on all these and all the writings and all the arguments which is an initialistic discourse and the other one is is not a nationalistic discourse it tries to discuss the whole question beyond nationalism but since the nationalistic discourse was the dominant one and became by time the official narrative or the official discourse I will go I will really just elaborate on that a little bit so this nationalistic discourse again can be divided into two parts or can be seen from two perspective there is an Arab nationalistic discourse and Israeli nationalistic discourse well the Arab nationalistic discourse was also very much dominated by the Egyptian by the Egyptian discourse of course because of the importance of the country because of the events that happened in the country and because of the relation to Israel but it came mainly started after 67 I mean with that that before 1967 the works or the books that were written about Egyptian Jews were not necessary hostile toward this community after 67 it's also we can understand after the war and after the the October war in 73 it emerged more but a the visit of Sadat to Jerusalem and his speech in the Knesset made a let's say an explosion of academic and unacademic discussions and the discourse was really the late 70s was when the moment where the discourse was very very strong and became very very much dominant so this discourse I mean when checking all the the literature and the writing that were written says that in a nutshell the Jews of Egypt enjoyed a good life with equal rights they misused these circumstances and we can we can I mean it's now with the Egyptian case but similar similar slogans were heard from from other countries from other Arab countries and the moment they could they turned their back to the country so they are not part of us and Egyptian Jews were not or are not a natural or an organic component of the Egyptian or of the Arab society and the majority of them sympathized with Zionism even if not publicly but you know silently and that's why it's legitimate to to exclude them of of our societies as I mentioned this perception of Jews was not established by 48 I would like to give an example in 1952 in January 1952 in fact on the 26th of January 1952 there was a huge fire in Cairo okay especially in the so-called West El Balad which we call today downtown Cairo or among the the stores that were burned at that time were department stores of Shikorel who was a very famous Egyptian Jew with very famous department stores and for example the store of the father of Monsieur Albert Albert Ariez this Jewish person who still lives in Cairo and all these stores and all others were compensated by the Egyptian government and was considered as national economy so Shikorel was compensated for the burn that happened as did Sidnawi who was a Syrian merchant with a huge department store as did for example the father of Albert Ariez his name was Ibrahim or Abraham Ariez so we see that in 52 in Egypt was in an uneasy situation at that time in political situation at that time these people were considered totally as Egyptian as Egyptian citizens and they had the right to get compensation they the change the big change came after 67 and let's say after more blood was shed between Israel and Egypt and later in the 70s when we when we see the whole writings mainly of Anas Mustafa Kamal and Siham Nassar there are also others the the Jewish citizen became an enemy because for for many people who did not go into the details of who left when and where did the people leave all of them went to Israel and became Israeli citizens and became enemies of the of the Egyptian state and I think we can we can we can have a similar comparison with Iraq for example that the Iraqi Jew one decision one day one night and all of them were deprived of their citizenship and were really forced to leave the country there are only a few who did not and the Camdavid Accords also or the visit of Sadat also activated the writings of the Egyptian and Arab Jews who were in Israel but mainly again here the Egyptians because it was very much an Egyptian issue that Sadat went to Israel and there are famous works of Reklin Kahanoff and some others but again to go back to the discourses there was a publication of the American Jewish community committee sorry and the Anglo-Jewish Association of 1950 that quotes we're talking about the riots of 1949 in Cairo where part of the Jewish quarter was attacked by by young people of Mr. Al-Fattah which is a nationalist movement and most probably of the Muslim brothers I mean it's still until today in discussion and archive documents have to be proven in order to to have real evidence who was who was participating but at least this is what is known until now so I quote in the light of these facts it's easier to understand the outbreaks of mob violence against Jews in Egypt such as those of 1949 where you in the main less in the main less to anti-Semitism than to hatred of all foreigners from the powerful west so foreigners and partially also some of the Jews were considered as foreigners were in fact targeted by these people and that the similar thing happened in 1952 but there was a publication in 1957 called the black record of Nasr's persecution of Egyptian Jewry published by the just a minute the American Jewish Congress and this publication insists on anti-Semitic attitude of the Egyptian authority towards the Egyptian Jew and the book of Michael Laskier one of the famous scholars on Egypt Jews also emphasizes this so this report in fact is the basic for the Zionist discourse that argues that the Jews do not belong truly to any to any of these countries of these Arab countries they used to live to live in for example Iraq or or Egypt and in fact Jews cannot live in this country after the proclamation of the state of Israel this is the state of the Jews and part of the process is that all these people in fact migrate to Israel these two these two nationalistic discourses sound to be at the very beginning that they are contradictory but they complement each other it's a complementary relation with them because the arguments that are argued that Jews are not an organic component of the Egyptian society or Jews are a supporter of Zionism and that's why they are an enemy of the state or the argument that Jews cannot be organic components of the of these societies and after the the state of Israel has been established as the Jewish state these people have to migrate to to to Israel and they they fit each other to to make like let's say like and maybe unwanted alliance of the argument between both and this this in fact is the discourse that dominated both discourses lead to a legitimation that it's okay to displace people and it is okay to to like to deprive people of their nationality of their countries for a more important you know issue or sake was it the state of Israel or was the national security but both in fact do not go beyond any political development related to the conflict both discourses they they are fixed into political developments there are no social aspects no identity aspect no discussion about economy and I think so to come back to to the to trying to to answer the question that we have in the beginning of the 21st century 21st century I'm sorry about why 50 years after all these people left are we are we discussing it or why why are people interested and having in mind that this discourse let's now talk about the Arab countries not about Israel because it will you know explore the frame I have for for sure it can be discussed in in in other context let's let's take the Arab national discourse and the Arab countries so in fact having in in mind that this was the discourse that dominated and that was in fact strong and with a very strong hegemony about the discussion about the with the Jewish question and now we have novels we have films we have activities that go beyond it I argue that literature and culture are this intellectual spaces and films that one can especially in the Arab world one can discuss difficult topics or maybe also taboos and part of this process is going through literature and not through the official universities or not through let's say the official role of a role of the state to try to discuss a rethinking of narratives or a rethinking of history is because novels are the place the space where this this can find place and films as I mentioned so films and novels were were the beginnings music in Morocco and now in Egypt we are in Iraq we have we have some some other activities so okay we have an intellectual space people discuss these topics they cannot discuss beyond it it's difficult to discuss us in in at least in printed press Egypt had a very special case by the end of 2012 and beginning of 2013 where there was really a revival of talk shows were hafaz el mirazi a famous tv presenter interviewed isham al arian who was one of the heads of the muslim brothers and isham al arian in an interview on the 28th of december 2012 invited all egyptians used to come back to to egypt and upon this there was an interview with magda haroon who was at that time not the head of the jewish community karmine weinstein was the head but she was ill so magda haroon went publicly on tv and started the first discussion and after there was maybe with magda herself jizel khuret vbc interviewed her and some and some other tv stations and there was a vivid discussion it was very interesting to observe it for me in egypt so okay this this is an exceptional case this didn't happen in iraq or in syria or or in tunisia it it's very specific egyptian so okay we have literature we have the space and why why is is there a younger generation interested from my perspective and this is my argument and should disagree with me we can talk about it later for sure the answer the answer lays in the internal arabic dynamic in the last two decades so until the the nineties the mid nineties and the late nineties a hegemonic cultural discourse dominated where the state was controlling newspapers tv stations theaters and a very strong censorship for novels and writings and it also presented very official narratives through to many issues one of them is the jewish question the other one maybe the words that were with israel there are no archives open to discuss what happened in the in the in the june war or or also later in the in the world of 73 even even the 48 were so the younger generation through literature and through right raising the jewish question is in fact uh challenging the system it's part it's part of the challenge that started to to take place let's say starting 2007 to 2008 and one of it speaks for us for example midan it's one of the peak of this movement that the younger generation is challenging official narratives challenging the system and challenging also the official the official uh uh journalism and uh and tv control so uh it's i would say it's like the small steps of an intellectual revolution that started to find place now why the jews and not other issues okay here we we we come back i mean besides this let's say rethinking and challenging uh activities of of younger people uh and i mean novels is one but when when when we really see um tv works documentary films other activities and activities on the street this is accumulation or it's like a big puzzle where many things come near each other to that that that caused the movement what we know of the 18 days of uh of the uh the revolution of the 25th of january uh in kairu and before uh in tunisia so despite of the fact that maybe the main reason of these movements was also economics but not only you know it's it's a challenge i take egypt as an example again it was also a challenge to the whole system uh of 30 years of mubarak but we shouldn't forget that there is also a factor of nostalgia i mean we cannot ignore it but maybe we should not give it a very huge uh how to say um um weight but still there is the presence of the absentees if you walk through any arabic capital let's take beirut let's take damascos kairu pardad kazablanca fes tunis algir alexandria and look very carefully everywhere one will find closed synagogues or closed clubs that are about to be ruins so they maybe not the soul of these people but the buildings and the activities these people use to have in these countries are still there and the younger generations especially through social media they now see much more images and films and discussions about for example a cosmopolitan alexandria or a cosmopolitan by root that they do they do not recognize again today so nostalgia is is one of the main factors that there is a generation trying to you know to to re-bring history at least in novels and another another reason is especially among authors is that the the question of minorities is becoming more important or more popular also in international literature if you go to the european literature we see also that novels and fiction discuss questions of minorities that they did not do before and that alil makri and alibad reach the the booker's list to be very rational now is also a motivation for younger authors to to to write about these topics because they know they find interest or they find good selling and they might reach rich prices despite of the fact that i don't have really a a prove a connection maybe i will find it i nearly know it exists but but i couldn't find it that the discussion that found that found place in israel and then in america through elah elah shohat or yudah shinhav or samshalom shatrit and others who who wrote about the the rise of the of the oriental jews in israel the so-called Mizrahi jews might have influenced some of these people uh at least to to to understand and to know that there is also a critical relation to zionism and oriental jews and and that there are people around that that do not you know um agree with the with official israel narrative i mean this is this is uh not proven but at least um it's um it's one of the of the aspects so um challenging of system and rethinking of narratives rethinking of discourses rethinking of official discourses um through the history of jews found place in a maybe maybe very slow but it's part of the process nostalgia and the interest to to reach uh international audience or wider arab arab audience through the booker price or the or the documentary films so this is this is um the the space in which this found place a major shift took place in the ramadan 2015 and i think it's one of the how to say marking points in this process where the egyptian satellite station cbc broadcasted a tv a tv drama called happily hood uh the jewish neighborhood or the jewish quarter okay it was a tv series of uh 30 episodes maybe some of you who are fluent in arabic also saw part of it and it it was really it became very famous it the broadcasting was not only in egypt it was all over the countries the the number of um audiences who who saw it was very very high and reaction of media was also very particular over 70 media outlets in arabic french uh german english and hebrew uh reported about this through articles or through online articles or through short tv reports and so on and they were uh these two persons minna shella b uh became like she is a star and she became much more famous than before i to put it in this in context for those who don't know um having a so-called musalsal tv series in ramadan is the highest season of this tv series and there is a competition i mean they are like five or six parallel running a the egyptian market the egyptian productions are very important the syrian productions were for a while very important so what i wanted to say is that through having a series during ramadan means that it's the prime time to reach audiences after after the iftar um this tv drama is uh is very is very interesting i mean tv dramas are such are also interesting in the in the arab context but here especially i would like to to quote leila abul lukh in her work dramas of nationhood where she argues that that the politics of television in egypt which also influences the other countries and mass media have a huge power or enormous power to influence the societies through all its classes and it's not like theater or opera or a music concern but tv is much more important and in in this case it becomes more important because again it's not only limited to egypt but it goes beyond it where where um other millions of audience watched it and i would go further than abul lukh and discuss and introduce in fact introduce the perspective of max hockenham and teodor adorno with their term culture industry or cultural industry that is again really related to the term they use muslim culture or mass culture and both terms are the pillars of their work dialectic of enlightenment in this context according to hockenheim and adorno cultural industry is when cultural art becomes a functional instrument becomes a technology to create a mass culture that aims to shape the awareness of people so what do we have here we have a tv series called the jewish quarter and shows us what at least the makers think it is the jewish quarter um wide fancy flats francophone society that reflects in fact the life of the middle and upper class not only the jewish but the egyptian middle upper class in the 40s who lived in garden city and in samalek but less than of that of the jewish quarter of the of the 40s and besides the main figure minna shalabi and her family her father is a small merchant all other jews are rich people businessmen and most of them are affiliated with zionism she is not and and there is a figure in the in the series the owner of the coffee shop is from the muslim brothers and he's the reason of all trouble in the neighborhood with his jewish and non and non jewish neighbors so again if you have questions later we can elaborate on this but i what i would like to point out here is that uh in fact the the topic or the question of the arab jew jews had been brought into into the public sphere which is much more and stronger than novels or even than documentary films but again it failed to be critical or to be uh to see it from a more uh a diverse perspective let's say because um the series again brings us back to the official narrative it brings us back that the majority of these people were zionists who collaborated with zionism either publicly or not and they give an image that the jewish community was only a rich community in egypt which is not true um more than 50 percent of egyptian jews were in fact maybe not very poor people but poor people who lived in very modest and tiny houses and tiny allies and um the the series does not discuss the activity the political activity of egypt jews mainly the the leftist the leftist ones who were in the hadeto movement for example and in other movements and this is the main critique of magda haroon when she was interviewed about the series saying on one side it was impossible 10 years ago to have this tv series in egypt or in public tv to talk about this this topic but still the series failed uh to transfer a an an image that goes it goes a little bit beyond the the official discourse but not not in a in a in a in a big step and this was the same it's it's the same uh a similar comment that professor joel bynie of sanford university who wrote one of the very important books on egypt jews again he welcomes the series and mentions very clearly that it failed to be to be more diverse and more critical and to see also the other side of the jewish community um in egypt okay i i'm i'm approaching now the end of my talk and um this is an image of the most probably the last bat mitzvah in the synagogue of alexandria in 1956 and because after that the number of the jews in the city uh diminished and were so so little that no no religious events uh took place having all this mentioned uh the argument is that having the national discourse was it israeli or arab or egyptian as a main discourse for decades and i see that there is now an emergence a movement a change maybe winds of change to have a post-nationalistic discourse in this regards so we are moving from a nationalistic context to a post-nationalistic one and this movement is related to the popular movements that found place in the in the arabic streets in the in the last uh i mean since 2011 and i mean it's still ongoing process maybe less than before but but we see that the process is more or less going on and this post-nationalistic discourse doesn't necessarily ignore the palestine question or ignore the relation between the jews and uh and the israel-palestine conflict the jews of arab countries and the israel-palestine conflict but it finds spaces to go beyond it and not to be hijacked by it for the for the whole process and it's also very important to have an awareness of this history in in these countries uh even if it's not still not uh on on very official level still not in the universities there are some academics working on this question um like umar baum who's at the ucla in in in los angeles and and some other younger scholars who are who are doing this work but still there is at least i didn't i did not find any course or any lecture or any seminar discussing the history of arab jews at any uh arab university was at cairo or the jordanian university or maybe the university of bagdad still we are not so far so so the whole discussion is is finding on a different level so this post-nationalistic discourse um tries or it finds spaces to go beyond the conflict and to discuss these questions beyond the conflict again it's important because also in israel there is now a different discussion than it was before about the the the jews of arab countries and there is also um a political movement in fact asking to to find space for compensation for these people who left these countries and it's it's important to have also a balance on the on the on the other side of the equation that the the the the arab the egyptian the moroccan the palestinian and all the historians to be aware of what of what um history they had and i think it's also important because it it creates an awareness an awareness of how how should and how is the future for young people to deal with the rigid discourses and how to shake them and to find to find um um spaces to discuss even and to agree and disagree on discourses so um i think we are in the in the beginning maybe also in the middle but we cannot see it because we are still in it in the middle of a of a post-nationalistic discourse considering the question uh of the of the arab jews and the and the question of the history of these communities in these countries um thank you very much and of course um any questions later thank you