A Fragile Cradle: Writing Jewishness, Nationhood, and Modernity in Cairo, 1920-1940

On the basis of literary texts by four Jewish writers (Georges Cattaui, Emile Mosseri, Albert Staraselski, and Lucien Sciuto), this article tries to understand the models of Jewish cultural and political identity circulating in Cairo during the monarchic period, investigating the intellectual atmosphere of interwar Egypt and the numerous ways in which the Cairene Jewish middle and upper classes narrated their lives vis-a-vis their own ethnoreligious community, Egypt, Europe, and Zionism. Literary representations of Jewishness, nationhood, and modernity suggest that living in Egypt as a Jew meant belonging not only to a (semicolonial) national space, to whose imagination these four writers contributed, but also to a wider Mediterranean lieu de savoir (site of knowledge), at the crossroads of past ethnoreligious legacies and novel feelings of cultural and political belonging.