Centre de Recherche et d'Études sur le Judaïsme d'Égypte (CREJE)

The singularity of Judaism in Egypt lies in its antiquity. No other diaspora, perhaps except that of Babylon, can claim such a long continuity with the biblical land. The Exodus narrative makes Egypt the very place of servitude and foundational departure; but documented history also shows a return and lasting settlement. From the Persian period onwards, a Judean garrison held a temple at Elephantine, in Upper Egypt. It is however in the Hellenistic period that the community experiences its first great flowering. In the Ptolemaic era, this dynasty of Greek origin fostered a period of cultural and intellectual flourishing, notably in the capital, Alexandria, with which the Jewish community was closely associated. It was in Alexandria that the version known as the Septuagint was translated into Greek, and where Philo, a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher, lived.

This temporal depth explains the diversity that the CREJE places at the heart of its object of study. The Egyptian community was never a unified bloc: it brought together distinct rites, languages and traditions. In Egypt, the Jewish community was plural, as much on the ethnic and doctrinal level — Karaites, Sephardim, Ashkenazim — as on the political level. This pluralism, which contemporary historiography seeks to restore against the myth of a homogeneous community, constitutes one of the explicit axes of the center's editorial work, which publishes on Judeo-Egyptian literature, the music of Alexandria and Karaite families.

No place better condenses the richness of medieval Egyptian Judaism than the Ben Ezra Synagogue, in the Old Cairo of Fustat. It is inseparable from the most considerable discovery ever yielded by a Jewish diaspora: the Cairo Genizah. The documents of the Cairo Genizah illuminate the social, economic and cultural life of the Jewish community of the medieval Mediterranean world. The Jewish custom forbidding the destruction of any written text that might contain the divine name led the community to deposit, for centuries, in a room of the synagogue, contracts, letters, poems and liturgical fragments — a deposit exhumed at the end of the nineteenth century and dispersed in the great libraries of the world.

The building itself bears the stigmata of time. Although it endured through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even as many other synagogues in Fustat and Cairo ceased to exist, it fell into ruin; the synagogue was entirely rebuilt in the early 1890s and restored again in the early twentieth century. In present times, the preservation of Ben Ezra falls to Egyptian authorities as much as to a memory that has become worldwide. A restoration project undertaken in 2022 by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities culminated in a grand inauguration in the presence of Egyptian dignitaries at the end of August 2023. No Jew attended the opening. This detail says everything about the paradox that the CREJE faces: a heritage saved, but without the community that gave it meaning.

Between the mid-nineteenth century and 1948, Egyptian Judaism experienced a second flourishing, urban, cosmopolitan and prosperous. The opening of Egypt to Mediterranean capital and migration attracted Jews from Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Syria and North Africa. Alexandria and Cairo became capitals of a plurilingual Jewish bourgeoisie — speaking French, Italian, Arabic, Ladino or Greek — active in trade, banking, the press and the professions. The community boasted magnificent synagogues: Sha'ar Hashamayim in Cairo, Eliyahu Hanavi in Alexandria, alongside the ancient Ben Ezra.

It is this vanished world that CREJE endeavors to document, by collecting the archives of Alexandrian and Cairene families established in France, Israel, Brazil and the United States. The music of Alexandria, Judeo-Egyptian literary production in French and Arabic, associative and school life form the fabric of a culture that neither censuses nor monuments suffice to restore. This chapter draws, in order to understand the role of Memory in the reconstruction of a sunken past, on classical analyses devoted to the places and frames of collective memory [Halbwachs, 1941] [Nora, 1992]. The center's approach — making the family archival item a place of memory — consciously inscribes itself in this French intellectual tradition.

The rupture was political before it was human. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, then the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the 1967 war marked a departure that took on, in turn, the form of emigration, despoliation and expulsion. The Jews of Egypt, long integrated into the country's cosmopolitan fabric, found themselves suspected of disloyalty, stripped of their property and nationality, forced to leave. In less than twenty years, a community of tens of thousands of people was reduced to a handful. The major historiographical readings of Israel's birth and its repercussions on the Judaisms of the Arab world illuminate this chain of events [Heller, 2000] [Shapira, 2014].

The massive arrival of these refugees in Israel, as in other lands of refuge, was not without tensions. The integration of Jews from Islamic lands was accompanied, in Israel's early decades, by social and cultural conflicts that recent research has brought to light [Roby, 2015] [Ben-Rafael, 1982]. The CREJE, in collecting the memory of families scattered across four continents, preserves the trace of these broken trajectories. Today, at 91 years old, Marcelle Haroun is among the six remaining members of a Cairo community reduced to almost nothing — a living figure of an erasure that the centre intends to document before it becomes irreversible.

The CREJE is born from this dispersion and aims to counteract it. An associative research center based in France, it brings together and studies the material and immaterial traces of a community without territory. Its method combines collection—family archives, photographs, ritual objects—and the publication of scholarly studies. Its preferred subjects, Judeo-Egyptian literature, the music of Alexandria, and Karaite families, draw the portrait of an institution concerned with restoring the plurality of its subject rather than offering a smoothed-over image.

Its singularity also lies in its anchoring in the present. The center works in relationship with the Israelite Community of Cairo, the last representative body managing the synagogues Ben Ezra, Sha'ar Hashamayim, and Eliyahu Hanavi, and dialogues with the Egyptian government for the preservation of these monuments. This positioning inscribes it in a moment when the Memory of the Jews of Egypt is experiencing new visibility. The last Jews of Egypt are attempting to preserve their heritage, and this local undertaking finds, in diaspora institutions like the CREJE, a scholarly and documentary relay. The recent restoration of Ben Ezra and the Cairo cemetery, while reintroducing these places into the heritage circuit, has also revived sensitive questions about the fate of archives and fragments from the Genizah, which the center follows with attention.

Among the axes claimed by CREJE, the study of Karaite families in Egypt occupies a remarkable place. The Karaites, who recognize the authority of Scripture but reject rabbinic oral law, constituted in Egypt one of the last living centers of this minority Judaism, concentrated notably in Cairo. Their history, long marginalized by historiography centered on Rabbinism, resurges in contemporary work on Egyptian doctrinal plurality, which recent research reminds us mingled Karaites, Sephardim, and Ashkenazim. In documenting these families, the center confronts the transmitted memory of Karaite lineages with archival evidence, in work where oral tradition and written document answer each other.

This chapter falls within the intersection because CREJE, like any memorial institution, operates at the junction of family narrative and archival proof. Its publications on Judeo-Egyptian literature and Alexandria's music proceed from the same requirement: to gather testimony, then to test it. The great scholarly tradition of studying relations between religious communities in the Mediterranean [Simon, 1948], as well as work on the memory of persecutions and exiles [Wieviorka, 1992] [Ben-Shalom, 2004], provide this undertaking with a comparative horizon. The Egyptian diaspora thus joins the vast project of the history of displaced Judaisms.

The CREJE being a recent institution whose leaders are not individually documented in the consulted sources, the major figures discussed here are those of Egyptian Judaism itself, which the center is dedicated to studying, as well as the last attested guardians of this memory.

Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 45 CE), in Greek Phílōn. A Jewish philosopher writing in Greek, he lived in Alexandria at the height of its intellectual golden age. He sought to reconcile biblical heritage and Greek thought, particularly Platonic philosophy, through an allegorical reading of Scripture. An ambassador of his community to the emperor Caligula, he embodies the first great flowering of Egyptian Judaism. His work, preserved by the Christian tradition, remains the primary source for understanding ancient Alexandrian Jewish life.

Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), in Hebrew Moshe ben Maimon, known as the Rambam. Born in Córdoba, he settled after a long exile in Fustat, near Cairo, where he became the spiritual leader of the community and physician to the Ayyubid court. There he composed his Guide for the Perplexed and his great legal code, the Mishneh Torah. His tomb is traditionally located in Tiberias, but Fustat preserves the synagogue and memory of his presence. He remains the highest intellectual figure that Jewish Egypt ever sheltered.

Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), in Hebrew Shneur Zalman Schechter. A scholar of Romanian origin, he revealed to the learned world the Cairo Genizah by transporting to Cambridge, at the end of the nineteenth century, some hundred thousand fragments from the Ben Ezra Synagogue. This discovery transformed the study of medieval Mediterranean Judaism. Though he never lived in Egypt, he brought to light an entire section of buried history, the very subject of research that the CREJE places at the heart of its heritage.

Marcelle Haroun (born c. 1932, according to available data). A living figure of the residual Jewish community of Cairo, she counts, according to the press, among the very last members to have remained in place. At 91 years old, Marcelle Haroun is among the six last members of this community. Her testimony embodies the end of a three-thousand-year presence and the very material that memory centers, such as the CREJE, strive to gather before it fades away.

For the ancient figures of the Elephantine garrison or the translators of the Septuagint, the sources do not preserve assured individual names; they should be evoked collectively, without attributing to them an identity that the archival record does not guarantee.

The Centre for Research and Study of Egyptian Jewry accomplishes a paradoxical task: preserving the Memory of a world almost entirely absent from the place where it was born. From Philo to Maimonides, from the Genizah to restored but deserted synagogues, the history of Egyptian Jews is one of exceptional continuity broken in less than a generation. By gathering the archives of families scattered between France, Israel, Brazil and the United States, by publishing on literature, music and the Karaites, and by dialogue with the last institutions of Cairo and Egyptian authorities, the CREJE links archive to testimony and monument to remembrance. It acts at a time when a great inauguration was held in the presence of Egyptian dignitaries at the end of August 2023, without a single Jew attending the opening — a sign that stone can survive the community, and that Memory, now, takes place elsewhere. It is this elsewhere that the centre inhabits.