Back to Egypt?

Arab hostility to Israel, after the 1948 war and especially after the Suez conflict in 1954, caused many of the Arab states to expel their Jewish populations, Jewish communities often dating back centuries.  I just finished reading for a second time André Aciman's memoir, Out of Egypt, describing his family's expulsion from Egypt in 1964, when he was a boy of 14.

Oddly enough, I've never written an essay discussing this book, although I've mentioned it in various contexts in essays on other subjects.  (Especially in my 2016 essay, Thanks for the Memories, discussing the extent to which a memoirist must truthfully and literally report his memories.)   

Aciman is a Proustian scholar and writer, and his memoir, like  his essays and novels, are not to be understood simply as historical reporting.   But, even accepting that he has taken some liberty with his remembered facts -- and displays a remarkable memory of events and conversations that occurred when he was about five years old -- Out of Egypt is a devastating description of how his extended family's life and unity were wrenched and disrupted as they were expelled on short notice from their Alexandria homes, all their assets except personal items being confiscated by the Nasser government.

Coincidentally, this week's Economist reports that Arab hostility toward the Jews they expelled has begun to soften.  Arab writers are beginning to appreciate that they share common Semitic roots and Middle Eastern history with the Jews.

A surprising number of researchers uncovering the Middle East's Jewish past are Palestinian.  Some even speak of a common fate with dispossessed Arab Jews.  "We're entering an age of post-colonialism," says a Christian cleric from Cairo.  "We're again learning how to see richness in others, not threats."

Egypt's president announced in February that he would build new synagogues if the country's Jews returned.  And his government is restoring the largest synagogue in Alexandria. 

No one in Aciman's family could have foreseen this turn of events, however small it may seem, in 1964.  A family of Sephardic Jews, their forebears had fled Spain during the expulsions in 1492, ultimately ending up in Turkey.  Growing hostility after World War I caused them to move to Egypt to seek a better life, a major disruption for a family that had lived for generations in the Ottoman Empire.  When leaving Egypt, the family correctly believed that they would never be allowed to return, except for short visits as tourists. 

In his haunting conclusion to Out of Egypt, the facts of which Aciman later cheerfully admitted were largely invented -- in detail, if not in emotion -- his 14-year-old self broods, looking out over the ocean from the Corniche:

I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year nor any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden  beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.  … [Those watching me and my family] would never, ever know, nor ever guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.

The family members who Aciman so lovingly and often humorously describes are all long dead, their final years spent scattered across Europe.  Aciman himself, still very much alive, calls New York his "home," while protesting that for an exile, no place ever becomes a "home," no matter how long he has lived there.

Alexandria, before the Egyptian nationalists took over, was one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world, and the Jews were a major component of the cosmopolis.  I doubt that the Egyptians' actions, however well intended, will ever draw many Jews back to Alexandria. 

But the gesture is welcome and may suggest a growing sophistication among Arab leaders, and a growing ability to distinguish between the Jewish people and the Israeli state.