Egypt’s Jewish history runs from the Elephantine garrison of the 7th century BCE to the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the 1940s. Maimonides lived and worked in Fustat; the Cairo Geniza preserved a thousand years of Jewish life on the Mediterranean; and after 1492 Sephardi exiles joined an old Arabic-speaking community. Nearly all Egyptian Jews left between 1948 and 1967. See also Syrian Jews and Lebanese Jews, linked to Egypt by family and trade.
Origins
A Jewish military colony stood at Elephantine, on the Nile near Aswan, from about 650 BCE; Aramaic papyri from 495 to 399 BCE record its legal and family life. Jews were present at the founding of Alexandria in 332 BCE and soon held two of the city’s five districts. There Jewish scholars produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The community was nearly destroyed after the Diaspora Revolt of 115–117 CE, and later recovered.
After the Arab conquest, the Treaty of Alexandria (641) guaranteed Jews freedom of worship. Under the Fatimids, Jews from North Africa settled in Egypt, and Karaite Jews formed a large community alongside the Rabbanites; see Karaites and Rabbanites. Maimonides settled in Fustat in 1166, served as head of the Jewish community and court physician, and completed the Mishneh Torah there in 1180.
- The Cairo Geniza. For centuries the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat stored worn-out writings that bore God’s name. Its geniza, studied from the end of the 19th century, holds hundreds of thousands of fragments: letters, contracts, poems and religious texts. They show Jewish merchants trading from Spain to India.
The Sephardi connection
After 1492, Sephardi exiles reached Egypt. When the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517, Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra, the Radbaz, a Spanish-born scholar, became head of the Cairo community and led it for about forty years; see the Radbaz. The Sephardi rite and rabbinic tradition gradually became the norm for Egypt’s Rabbanite Jews.
After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, Jews from the Ottoman Empire, Syria, Italy and Greece settled in Cairo, Alexandria and the canal cities, and Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe followed. Alexandria in particular became a city of French-, Italian- and Arabic-speaking Jewish families, with schools, hospitals and banks of its own; see Alexandria’s Jewish institutions.
Modern era and departure
- 1947–1948. The 1947 census counted 65,953 Jews, and the community peaked at about 75,000–80,000 around 1948. A 1947 company law limited employment to Egyptian nationals, and only about 7% of Jews held Egyptian nationality. In 1948 bombings of Jewish neighborhoods killed 70 people.
- 1948–1950. By 1950 nearly 40% of Egypt’s Jews had emigrated, about 14,000 of them to Israel.
- 1956–1957. After the Suez War, about 25,000 Jews, nearly half the community, were forced to leave, signing declarations that they were departing voluntarily and giving up their property. About 1,000 were imprisoned.
- 1967. After the Six-Day War most Jewish men aged 17 to 60 were expelled or detained, and more property was confiscated.
By December 2022 five Jews, all women, were reported to remain in Egypt.
Religious life
Egypt’s Rabbanite Jews followed the Sephardi rite in Hebrew; the Karaites kept their own synagogues and law, and Cairo had Ashkenazi congregations as well. Cairo’s old Jewish quarter, Harat al-Yahud, held the synagogue named for Maimonides. Alexandria’s great Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue was restored by the Egyptian government and reopened in 2020.
Language, music and food
The old community spoke Judeo-Arabic; families who came after 1869 often spoke French, Italian, Ladino or Greek at home, and French was the language of the Alliance and community schools. Egyptian Jewish cooking includes sofrito (braised meat with potatoes), hamud (a lemony celery soup served with rice), haroset of dates and raisins at Passover, and ka’ak (ring biscuits) for holidays. See our Sephardic recipes.
The community today
Almost no Jews live in Egypt today. The Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo and the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria are restored and can be visited. About 57,500 Jews of Egyptian origin live in Israel, with other communities in France, the United States and Brazil.
Notable people
- Yaqub Sanu 1839–1912 · Cairo Playwright and satirist, a founder of Egyptian Arabic theater; published Abu Naddara Zarqa from 1877.
- Togo Mizrahi 1901–1986 · Alexandria Film director of some 30 Arabic films; forced out of Egypt in 1946.
- Edmond Jabès 1912–1991 · Cairo French-language poet, author of The Book of Questions; left Egypt in 1957.
- Leila Mourad 1918–1995 · Cairo Singer and film star, daughter of the cantor Zaki Mourad; converted to Islam in 1946.
- André Aciman b. 1951 · Alexandria Writer, author of the memoir Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name.
Sources and further reading
- Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (University of California Press, 1998).
- Gudrun Krämer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (University of Washington Press, 1989).
- S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (University of California Press, 1967–1993).
- André Aciman, Out of Egypt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
- “History of the Jews in Egypt”, Wikipedia.
Revised October 2026 to correct errors in an earlier version of this page.
