Books

A classic multivolume history of Jewish communities in the medieval Mediterranean, reconstructed from Cairo Geniza documents, covering trade, family life, community organization, and daily life.

A collection of scholarly essays reassessing Egypt's 1952 revolution and the transition from monarchy to republic, covering politics, the economy, society, and minorities.

A history of Egyptian Jews from 1920 to 1970 examining Zionism, antisemitism, and the Arab Israeli conflict, and how these pressures led to the community's decline and near disappearance after 1948 and 1956.

A study drawing on Cairo Geniza documents to show how Jewish women and men in medieval Egypt navigated marriage, divorce, and disputes through rabbinical courts, communal leaders, and Muslim courts.

Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff is a collection of essays, autobiographical reflections, and cultural criticism exploring Egyptian Jewish history, Sephardic and Mizrahi identity, Levantine multiculturalism, Jewish–Arab relations, and the experiences of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel, emphasizing the rich cultural diversity of the Middle East and its influence on modern Israeli society.

A literary and cultural study of twentieth century Egyptian Jewish writers, including Jacqueline Kahanoff, Edmond Jabès, and André Aciman, exploring how memory of cosmopolitan Egypt and exile shapes their work.

The story of the Cairo Geniza, the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue whose centuries of discarded papers, retrieved by Solomon Schechter and other scholars, revealed the daily life of medieval Jews across the Islamic world.

Lagnado's second memoir follows her mother Edith, a gifted young teacher in Cairo's Jewish community, and Lucette herself from Egypt to Brooklyn, exploring women's lives, lost status, and the cost of exile.

A history of Egypt's Jewish communities from 1914 to 1952, examining their social diversity, economic roles, legal status, and responses to Egyptian nationalism and Zionism before the 1952 revolution.

An edited collection of essays on the Jews of modern Egypt, examining their communities, economic roles, cultural life, and political attitudes, and their departure from the country.

A Portuguese language memoir by Alain Bigio tracing his family's departure from Ismailia, Egypt, amid rising anti Jewish hostility and their new life in the Higienópolis neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil, in the 1950s.

A novel that braids the story of a Berkeley student of Jewish and Muslim descent with a thousand years of Muslim watchmen guarding Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue and its Geniza, including Solomon Schechter's nineteenth century visit.