An Italian historian with a fresh approach to Egyptian Jewry will feature among the presenters at a conference on the Jews of Egypt in the holiday resort of Eilat next month:
"We're all middle class now" -or evenupper middle class - might best describe Egyptian Jews up to their mass exodus in the 1950s - even if they did not have money or status.
According to an Italian historian, Jews in Cairo and Alexandria identified as 'upper bourgeois' in culture, leisure and family values, behaviour and self-image.
Dr Dario Miccoli, a historian from the Ca'Foscari University in Venice, will expound on the 'bourgeois' identity of Egyptian Jews at the Fifth World Congress of the Jews of Egypt in Eilat, Israel on 12-14 May 2014.
Congress president Levana Zamir said of Dr Miccoli:"finally a researcher, who is not Jewish, has managed to formulate the 'bourgeois characteristics' of this vibrant, cosmopolitan community of Jews from Egypt until the mid-1950s. This community no longer exists but is dispersed all over the world, except when it gathers from time to time at world congresses such as that being held in Eilat."
At the Congress Dr Miccoli will present his book "Histories of the Jews of Egypt: an imagined bourgeoisie, 1880s - 1950s", soon to be published in the UK by Routledge.
Among other topics the Congress will discuss is "All you wanted to know about compensation to the Jews of Egypt and other Arab countries". A huge amount of communal and private property was left behind when Egyptian Jews fled. Only 14 of a community of 80, 000 remain.
For more information on the Congress (12 -14 May, Eilat) please click here.
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