When Cairo’s Jews Vanished, My Uncle Was Left With the Keys

Long after Cairo’s Jews were gone, my uncle still held the keys to one Jewish shop, and with that, and the memory of a lost community.

By Jasmin Attia.

My mother knows the way to the goldsmith shop, but I pay no attention to the winding alleyways or the clank of copper and brass. I’m seven years old, and I’m annoyed by the street sand from the Khan El Khalili market that has found its way into my sandals. She takes my hand. I thread my fingers through hers. For the summer months we spend in Cairo, my mother sheds her American persona, the one that is keenly aware of being the other, the immigrant assimilating in the New World. No, in her Cairo, the rhythm of her steps is deliberate and bold. But I’m moving slowly, the sand between my toes taking up all the space in my head. So, my mother tugs on my arm as if to say, hurry.   

I’m too young to hear the echoes of vanished stories whispering from the ancient storefronts. I can’t see the long-gone hands that laid the towering mosaics of blue and white, smoothed the soaring arches, or carved the wooden latticed balconettes. My sight for them is undeveloped. I have no knowledge of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Khan El Khalili or the oud players that gather nightly at the café carrying his name, only steps from where I am. All of this is as elusive as the dusking saffron sky that dissolves into a bustling market night. 

The shop is in the goldsmith quarter next to the Al-Azhar Mosque. We turn onto a small side street that opens to a cluster of alleyways. We pass lit vitrines shimmering with gold jewelry: bangles, rings, necklaces, earrings, and pendants. Shopkeepers are waving us in, and even as a child I feel inexplicably lured, but my mother shakes her head and tightens her grip on my hand. She is not in the market to meander. She’s going to the warsha, the workshop, the only place she’ll buy or sell gold. It’s owned by her brother-in-law, whom we all affectionately call Uncle Mena. The shop has a small storefront where customers peruse the jewelry. My head barely clears the countertop, but behind it I can see a halfway open door that leads to a larger area filled with machines and benches and workers hunched over their work. “That’s how they make the gold,” my mother says this as she admires the shimmering bangle she’d slid on her wrist.

Years later, I will learn from my mother how my Uncle Mena inherited the workshop. It is a story of a Jewish mentor, his Coptic apprentice, and a friendship that survived dictatorship, war, and even absence. 

My mother has told me this story countless times, but recently I asked her to tell it again in hopes that I’ll glean one more detail, something to help flesh out the scene in my mind. I imagine Uncle Mena circa 1940, a tall and lanky boy of thirteen, pushing himself through the dusty, crowded Khan El Khalili market looking for any work. 

“His father had died. And he had to take care of his mother and brothers. They had no money. Nothing. He dropped out of school and by the grace of God, a Jewish goldsmith gave him work.” My mother says this as she sits in her living room peeling a tangerine. “He loved your uncle Mena, treated him like a son. He even let him collect gold dust from the floor to sell later. That’s no small thing. Then the wars came and everyone left. They were our friends, our family, our teachers. Some shops stood empty. These were sad times.” 

According to my mother, the Jewish owner of the gold shop–whose name is lost to time–left Egypt after the 1956 trilateral attack by Israel, France, and Britian on Egypt in the wake of the Suez Crisis. The only thing we know is that he left Uncle Mena the gold workshop in its entirety, keys, locks to deposit boxes, and codes to safes. He told Uncle Mena to take a monthly salary from the shop’s profit and put the rest in a bank account until it reached the amount equal to the sale price of the business. Someday, the mentor said, he’d be back to collect the money. There were no sale documents, no lawyers, not even an initial deposit. There was a deep bond, implicit trust, tearful goodbye, and a promise to return. The rest of the story is buried with its authors, but we do know from my aunt that until he died, Uncle Mena kept the money earmarked in a bank account as promised. I often wonder what a reunion between the two men would have been like. But it was never to be. 

Who was this goldsmith? What was his name? What were the circumstances that led to his departure? Did he receive an official expulsion order, or did he flee in fear of violence? And where did he end up? There are no definitive answers to these questions, but historical research aids in the important task of reconstructing the past.

Lyn Julius chronicles in Fathom Journal the events that followed the 1956 war. Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s Pan-Arab Socialist leader, invoked an emergency law “expelling British and French subjects.” The Jews, especially those with foreign ties, were scapegoated as a “fifth column” aligned with Israel and the West. They were expelled in two waves: the first wave, accounting for some 500 Jews, were given 24 hours to leave. The second wave was ordered to leave the country within two to seven days with their families. Assets were sequestered, and the Jews of Egypt were expelled on the baseless accusation of being “zionist spies.”. In my novel, The Oud Player of Cairo, the character Zacharias Haroun suffers the same fate. He is accused of spying, sent to prison, and then hastily released after being given an expulsion order. The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies published a photo of such an order in a 2019 article entitled “How should we remember the forced migration of Jews from Egypt?” The order is written in Arabic. The same article documents photos of Italian newspapers reporting on the arrival of hundreds of Jews on boats coming from Egypt. 

André Aciman writes about his last day in Alexandria in his memoir, Out of Egypt. His family stayed in Egypt until the early 1960s, but ultimately his father’s factory was nationalized by the government, and they had no choice but to leave: 

“On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still clearing the dining room … thinking that all this was always as it was, that nothing ever really changed … the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the woman who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theater or our neighbors across the hall … would never, ever know, or ever guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.”

Further research on the gold business in Egypt during the early twentieth century reveals interesting details that might shed light on Uncle Mena’s mentor and friend. According to Shira Telushkin in her article, “The Secret Language of Cairo’s Goldsmiths,” the gold trade in Egypt was mainly concentrated among Karaite Jews, a minority community thought to have originated in what is now modern Iraq and Iran. Known for their distinct traditions that set them apart from Rabbinic Jews, the Karaites mostly lived in the Harat al-Yahud (the Jewish Quarter), and they had been in Egypt for over a millennium until their swift and sudden departure in 1956. As a result, “goldsmiths abandoned their businesses or gifted them to their non-Jewish assistants.”  

Tekushkin also writes in her article “The Jews You’ve Never Heard Of,” about a mostly Egyptian-Karaite community flourishing in California’s Bay Area, “held together by familial relations and connections from back in Egypt” and that largely existed outside the American Jewish community. Today, Daly City has the only independent Karaite synagogue. Could Uncle Mena’s mentor have been a Karaite Jew who ended up in California? We will never know. Stories of exile are painful, but recording them is essential, not only to preserve human collective memory and  foster empathy, but perhaps to demand accountability for the injustices done, especially in cases like the expulsion of Jews from the Arab world, where not even a formal acknowledgement, let alone apology, has ever been offered. 

There is another side of exile, one that is not often explored. It’s the void created in the wake of exile. Friendships are broken, lovers torn apart, livelihoods ended, economies hollowed from a swift drain of human capital. How did the Egyptians who stayed deal with the emptiness left behind? After all, they were all Egyptians, and suddenly part of the whole was gone. They had celebrated together, mourned together, served in the same military together, and worshipped side by side. 

Within the last ten years, two widely viewed mini-series released during Ramadan touch on the Jewish experience in Egypt. The first aired in 2013. Called A Girl Named Zat, it is based on Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Zaat. In one of the early episodes, there is a poignant scene in which beloved Jewish neighbors pay one last visit to Zat’s family. There is a tearful goodbye. Zat’s mother says, “Why? I don’t understand why.” 

The second series, released in 2015, is called Harat Al-Yahud (The Jewish Quarter). It chronicles a love story between a Muslim Egyptian military officer and a Jewish girl named Laila whose father happens to be a goldsmith. Its sympathetic Jewish characters caught the attention of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, which commended the first episodes, commenting on an embassy-run Facebook page that for the first time, “It shows Jews in their real human state, as a human being before anything, and we bless this.” In the opening scene of the series, there is an air raid warning, and everyone, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, take shelter in a synagogue. The viewer is reminded of a bygone era in which all three Abrahamic religions lived side by side in Egypt. But these portrayals also point to something deeper: a quiet cultural reckoning with the magnitude of what was lost. A lingering nostalgia is revealed, perhaps even guilt, for a pluralistic society that once was—  a recognition of what was erased. The question is not just what happened to Egypt’s Jews, but what Egypt became in their absence.

Today, Jewish culture echoes throughout Egypt. Hebrew words are still used among Muslim and Christian goldsmiths, a kind of secret trade language. Synagogues still stand replete with centuries of history. In 2019, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities approved the registering of thirteen Jewish artifacts, “including Torah scrolls, candlesticks and lanterns, belonging to synagogues in Alexandria.” And in 2023, the Ben Ezra synagogue in old Cairo was reopened. Situated in the same area as the Ibn Tulun mosque and directly behind the Saint Virgin Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church, the synagogue is believed by some to be the place where Moses prayed to God. And while the protection of artifacts is a positive step, the loss of Egyptian Jewry is a loss for all. 

My parents, Egyptian Christians, were both born in 1948—the year of Israel’s founding and the first Arab-Israeli war. In Israel, it was called the War of Independence; in the Arab world, the Nakba, the catastrophe that led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It was this regional upheaval marked the beginning of the end for Egypt’s Jews: by the early 1960s, nearly 80,000 had fled or been expelled, their homes, businesses, and presence erased with barely a trace. Unlike other exiles, theirs remains largely unacknowledged. 

The series Harat Al-Yahud gestures toward this rupture. In one scene, a Jewish daughter rails against her brother for leaving Egypt to live in Israel. “Your son is a traitor,” she shouted at her parents across their elegant living room. “You gave birth to him as an Egyptian Jew, not an Israeli Jew, which he never will be!” The scene deeply encapsulates the emotional and national fracture of the time.

It also underscores the tragedy: that Jews who desperately wanted to stay in Egypt were forced into choices between survival and identity, choices that were not theirs alone to make. ◦

Jasmin Attia is a 2021 graduate of the MFA program at Bennington College, and 2022 winner of the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and served as a mentor for the Cream Literary Alliance in West Palm Beach. Her writing appears in AWP's The Writer's Chronicle, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, the Jewish Book Council’s’ Paper Brigade, and The Millions. The Oud Player of Cairo is her debut novel.