Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt offers a view of the breathtaking rise and fall of these minorities, which together constituted no more than one percent of Egypt’s population. During the first half of the twentieth century,
Greeks and Jews played a crucial part in the cotton, sugar, railway, banking, retail, and many other enterprises. But with the 1950s promotion of nationalization and Egyptianization, they lost that position and departed Egypt
en masse.
Greeks and Jews were the largest ethno-religious groups in modern Egypt, distinct from the Arabic-speaking Muslims and Copts. From the outset, there were significant differences between Greeks and Jews, which the first and second chapters of the book elaborate in detail. Greeks were cohesive in ethnic and linguistic terms, and rarely proficient in Arabic. Jews were an extremely heterogeneous group in terms of language, ethnicity, and nationality, encompassing autochthonous Arabic speaking Jews and Ottoman, Mediterranean, and Eastern European migrants. The Jewish business elite were francophone, with Arabic-speaking elements. Greek business strength developed around the nineteenth-century cotton boom, in which Greeks played a vital role in both the countryside and in Alexandria. The Jewish business elite emerged from urban trading and money changing. As the rich historiographical review here shows, Egypt’s Jews have received greater scholarly interest, and their study has been conducted in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a result,
discussion of Jews in Egypt is considerably more charged than the discussion of the Greek minority.
Despite these differences, there were striking similarities in the rise of both groups to prominence in modern Egypt. While they differed in terms of business practices and influence, Greeks and Jews played a crucial role in investment and entrepreneurship. Their over-representation in modern Egyptian capitalism is well known and has been discussed by many scholars. Abdulhaq, however, goes beyond anecdotal references to elite families—such as the Salvagos and Qattawis—and through a painstaking survey of items from the
Egyptian Gazette held in the Egyptian National Archive, the book demonstrates the astonishing magnitude of Greek and Jewish involvement. Of the 759 joint-stock companies established in Egypt between 1885 and 1960, 35 percent had Jewish participants, and 23 percent had Greek participants. One typical explanation for this disproportionate role presented Greeks and Jews as foreign, or “quasi-Egyptian,”elements, who benefited from British colonialism and access to foreign capital. Robert Vitalis and Joel Beinin have already challenged this narrative of “foreign”versus “local” capitalists in Egypt.
Abdulhaq goes further by demonstrating that colonial privileges played a limited part in the success of these groups. As her empirical data convincingly shows, even in 1940s, after the dismantling of the Capitulations, Greeks and Jews continued to have leading positions in enterprise. Her explanation, which builds on Schumpeterian growth theory, attributes Greek and Jewish success to the strength of their networks and their role in innovation. Being part of diasporic networks extending across the Mediterranean and beyond gave Greeks and Jews a built-in advantage over other groups. Through networks of kinship and cultural affinities, they could establish trust more easily, gain access to new information, and reduce investment risks. This became especially crucial for innovative enterprises, where the risk was higher. Abdulhaq shows that in enterprises involving new technologies, products, and practices, Greeks and Jews had an even higher share of participation.
(full article online)
In his review of Najat Abdulhaq’s Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt: Entrepreneurship and Business before Nasser (Tauris, 2016) SOAS lecturer Yair Wallach writes in the Journal of Levantine Studies (Summer 2018) that the book exposes the xenophobic discrimination to which both...
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