Between "Ḥarat al-Yahud" and "Paris on the Nile": Social Mobility and Urban Culture among Jews in Twentieth-Century Cairo

Abstract

Abstract: In this article I examine out-migration from old Cairo's Ḥarat al-Yahud (The Jews' Alley) to that city's urban expansions in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. This migration was coupled with large-scale Jewish immigration to Cairo and intersected with its modern urban culture, which Jews shared with Muslim and Christian Cairenes. I argue that for Cairene Jews, these migrations, urban spaces, and regular itineraries within them held the promise of upward social mobility and integration into an urban middle-class culture that did not erase their Jewishness but removed it as a social barrier. This argument works against common narratives that saw Jewish Egyptians as foreigners living separately from Muslim Egyptians in another cultural milieu.