Bibliography

Explore the references, sources, and research that support Egypt's stories and cultural content.

• Literature and folktales

  Stories and Writers of the Jews of Egypt

  Egypt has been a home for Jewish writing for more than two thousand years, from the philosophers of ancient Alexandria to the Cairo of Maimonides and the memoirs of families forced out in the twentieth century.

  Ancient and medieval voices

  Alexandria and Cairo

  In Alexandria, Jews translated the Bible into Greek, and the philosopher Philo wrote works that bridged Jewish and Greek thought. A thousand years later, Moses Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed in Fustat, old Cairo, in Judeo Arabic. Cairo's Ben Ezra Synagogue kept every page it received in its storeroom, the Geniza. When scholars such as Solomon Schechter studied it in the 1890s, they found letters, poems, contracts, and stories from medieval Jewish life across the Mediterranean.

  Folktales and legends

  A synagogue full of stories

  Legends gathered around the Ben Ezra Synagogue itself. Local tradition held that it stood near the place where the infant Moses was found in the Nile and where the prophet Jeremiah prayed. Egyptian Jews also kept a local Purim, Purim Mitzrayim, with its own scroll recalling the rescue of Cairo's Jews from a cruel governor in 1524.

  Modern writers

  Memoirs of a lost world

  Twentieth century Egyptian Jewish writers wrote in French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The poet Edmond Jabès, born in Cairo in 1912, wrote The Book of Questions in exile in Paris. Jacqueline Kahanoff's essays, collected in Mongrels or Marvels, celebrated the mixed Levantine world she grew up in. André Aciman's Out of Egypt and Lucette Lagnado's The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit tell the stories of families who lost their homes in Alexandria and Cairo.

  Read with students

  Start with these

  • Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole (high school)
  • The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, Michael David Lukas (novel, high school)

  See all books on the Jews of Egypt in JIMENA's bibliography →

  Sources: Philo; The Guide for the Perplexed; Cairo Geniza; Edmond Jabès; Jacqueline Kahanoff.