Private Motive for Egypt’s Public Embrace of a Jewish Past

CAIRO — Egyptians generally do not make any distinction between Jewish people and Israelis. Israelis are seen as the enemy, so Jews are, too.

Khalid is pretty typical in that regard, living in a neighborhood of winding, rutted roads in Old Cairo, selling snacks from a kiosk while listening to the Koran on the radio.

Asked his feelings about Jews, he replied matter-of-factly. “We hate them for everything they have done to us,” Mr. Badr said, in apracticed way and as casually as if he had been asked the time.

But Mr. Badr’s ideas have recently been challenged, by hos own government. He has had to confront the reality that his neighbourhood was once filled with Jews — Egyptian Jews — and that his nation’s history is interwoven with Jewish history.

Not far from his shop, down another narrow, winding alley once called the Alley of the Jews, the government is busy renovating an abandoned, dilapidated synagogue.

In fact, the government is not just renovating the crumbling, flooded old building. It is publicly embracing its Jewish past — not the kind of thing you ordinarily hear from Egyptian officials.

“If you don’t restore the Jewish synagogues, you lose a part of your history,” said Zahi Hawass, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in the past has written negatively about Jews because of the clash between Israel and the Palestinians. “It is part of our heritage.”

Egypt has slowly, quietly been working to restore its synagogues for several years. It has completed two projects and plans to restore about eight more. But because of the perception on the street — the anger toward Israel and the deep, widespread anti-Semitism — the government initially insisted that its activities remain secret.

“They told us ‘We are doing these things, but you can’t tell anybody about it,’ ” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

“This was such a reverse of what we experience in Eastern Europe, where governments don’t do much but want to present the picture they are doing things. In Egypt they were doing things, but, ‘Shhh, don’t let anybody know!’ ”

So why the sudden public display of affection for Egypt’s Jewish past? Clearly politics is at play and not street politics, but global politics.

Egypt’s minister of culture, Farouk Hosny, wants to be the next director general of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In the context of this conservative Islamic society, Mr. Hosny, 71, is quite liberal, running afoul of Islamists when he criticised the popularity of women wearing head scarves, for example.

But to appease — or please — his local constituency, he said in 2008 he would burn any Israeli book found in the nation’s premier library in Alexandria. He has apologised, but that has done little to end the attacks on his candidacy to lead an organisation dedicated to promoting cultural diversity.

So his subordinates have increased the rate of the restoration process. After a year of study, the work began in June. They pitched a blue tent, and held a news conference — two, in fact — right inside the old synagogue around the corner from Mr. Badr’s shop. Mr. Badr said that was when he realized that the building with no roof and cemented-over windows was a synagogue.

It is a historic one, actually, named after Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, a physician and philosopher who is considered among the most important rabbinic scholars in Jewish history. He was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1135, moved to Alexandria and eventually to Cairo.

He is known in the West as Moses Maimonides, he worked and studied in the temple until his death. Mr. Hawass said it was last used in 1960 and then was allowed to crumble, even as a new mosque was built right next door.

But the news conference only seems to have stoked more skepticism, as charges arose that the work was ordered, only to silence Mr. Hosny’s critics.