The Golden Age of Egyptian Jewish Journalism

After the British took control in 1882, Egypt experienced rapid economic growth. This attracted numerous immigrants, including no small number of Jews. Their presence helped to revitalize the Egyptian Jewish community—which dates back to several centuries before the common era—and led to the development of a thriving press, as Ovadia Yerushalmi writes:

The end of World War I brought about a golden age of Egyptian journalism. . . . Jews produced more periodicals than any other minority in Egypt. [Of the country’s 90 Jewish-owned periodicals], two-thirds targeted Jewish audiences. Most of these were written in French, but others appeared in Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, and Ladino. [The additional third] were marketed to the general Egyptian public.

One of the most important Jewish newspapers in Egypt was L’Aurore (The Dawn). Its owner and founding editor was Lucien Sciuto (1886-1947), a writer and educator who had originally founded L’Aurore in Istanbul. Conflicts with the leaders of the local Jewish community there led to its closure, and in 1919 Sciuto emigrated to Egypt, [bringing L’Aurore with him]. The paper was published in Cairo from 1924 to 1941.

The weekly newspaper, characterized by its pro-Zionist stance, covered many areas of interest—religious affairs, local Jewish community leaders, relations with world Jewry and with the Jewish community of Mandatory Palestine, and relations with the Egyptian regime. In addition, the paper published articles translated from newspapers in Mandatory Palestine; starting in 1938, it even included a page written in Italian.

L’Aurore . . . was not afraid to criticize the heads of the local rabbinate and of the Egyptian Jewish community. It was also the first Jewish Egyptian newspaper to send reporters into the field . . . and carry out investigative journalism to expose the reader to the deficiencies of the local Jewish leadership.

Read more at The Librarians

More about: Egypt, History & Ideas, Journalism, Mizrahi Jewry, Sephardim

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society