Index of Jewish Surnames Found in 20th Century Cairo

The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable surge of publications, both academic and literary, about Jewish life in Egypt during the 20^th century. The latest is the Ph.D. thesis by Dr.Liat Maggid Alon from the Ben Gurion University, a summary of which appeared recently. (See, Liat Maggid Alon, The Jewish Bourgeoisie of Egypt in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: Modernity, Socio-Cultural Practices, and Oral Testimonials, Jama‘a, vol. 24, 2019, pp.7-32) .

The summary reviews most of those recent studies and points out to the paucity of archival sources as the current geopolitical circumstances prevent access to them, not only in Egypt but through the whole Middle East. This is a serious hurdle for researchers who wish to focus more on personal narratives rather than on general trends or to look into the human structures of organizations and the individuals who were members of them. In other words, they need surnames and given names to analyze who is who, what is his or her religious or ethnic background and what can be learned and extracted from them.

The Jewish community in Cairo (as well as in Alexandria and Port Said) during the first half of the 20^th century is an example in place. There is no central depository or database which is accessible. Some of the documents of the Jewish Community which found their way out such as those at Yeshiva University in New York deal mainly with Jewish education and community affairs.

The same may be said about the “Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People” in Jerusalem which is in possession of the same kind of materials. The main problem with those materials is that they deal mainly with the community’s dignitaries and Jewish schools and education.[4] The Central Zionist Archive (CZA)in Jerusalem possesses lists of Egyptian Jews who emigrated to Israel but without mentioning their cities of origin. The Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) has some lists of Egyptian Jews but with no city of origin. Those lists represent only a fraction of the Egyptian Jews because many of them were holders of European passports (Italian, British, French, Greek, and Spanish) and left Egypt independently and were not in contact with these organizations. This is the place to mention that only half of the Egyptian Jews made their way to Israel while the rest settled mainly in the USA, Brazil. Argentina, France, Italy, and Australia.

This paper intends to fill those lacunae and to list down the surnames of the Jewish families, Sephardic and Ashkenazi and the Karaites, which resided in Cairo from the turn of the 20^th century with a brief survey of the available sources which were consulted and used to construct such an index.

The main source for harvesting Jewish surnames are the two weeklies in French that were published in the city between 1918-1945: “Israel” and “L’Aurore”. They are scanned and can be viewed on the website of the National Library of Israel. They can be searched online by OCR technique which, because of the print quality, misses a considerable number of surnames.

The fact that many surnames are spelled in a variety of ways necessitates a creative search methodology. However, the major drawback of these two weeklies is that they focus on Jewish communal life, institutions and Jewish schools and organizations. Unfortunately, many Jewish kids did not attend Jewish schools, and their parents were not donors to Jewish organizations and institutions, thus they fell beyond the coverage of the Jewish press.

The second source is the personal memoir books by authors who grew up in Cairo, some of whom drew literary praise and positive coverage by the media. However, they are very poor in providing surnames.  The Farhi’s Family website “Les Fleurs de L’Orient” has a large index of families which are related to the Farhi family by marriage. The index notes the place of birth, residence or death of each indexed individual thus constituting an additional source for Cairo Jewish surnames.

Another important source is the different Egyptian business and telephone directories but they require careful scrutiny to dig out the Jewish surnames keeping again in mind that only a fraction of the city’s Jews is listed in them.

The Bassatine Cairo Cemetery is only partially and indexed here and covers some 19^th-century graves but can barely contribute any useful data. See

MyHeritage offers only a small fraction of Cairo surnames and so does Findagrave website (55 graves). Yad Vashem’s database of pages of testimony offers also some surnames of victims who were born in Cairo as does the Jewish Genealogical Family Finder and also the JewishGen SIG archives.

The most promising and fast-developing source is social media, namely the several Facebook groups of Egyptian Jews which offer quick communication around the globe:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Egyptianjews/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/189099621661090/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/696709837127562/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1528403684101271/

The language of communication in most of them is Hebrew, French, Portuguese, English, and Arabic (some Egyptians contribute photos and comments). Many of the participants were born in Cairo and attended elementary schools there in the 1950s and hail from families that are not mentioned in the weeklies above mentioned. Their contribution to the surnames collecting process is significant as they are able to shed a light about the origin of the family before arrival to Cairo, which is a critical component for the further stages of genealogical research.

Using all those sources yielded so far 1,690 surnames which can be reviewed in the attached table. The Karaite surnames are marked K.  This is by no means a complete list and it is hoped that more will be supplemented by readers who have an intimate knowledge of the city. As previously noted, many surnames were spelled in various ways and an attempt was made to keep them together, with few exceptions in case of doubt. Considering the fact that at its peak the community amounted around 40,000 members (See Dario Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt: AnImagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s-1950s (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), p.5) this high number of surnames reflects the dynamic mobility of the Jews in and out of the city. During my initial steps, I consulted several people who were born in Cairo and could provide surnames they remember. I would like to mention them by name: Dr. Ruth Kimche, Ilana Nahmias (the widow of Victor Nahmias), Alain Farhi, Ambassador(ret.) David Sultan, and the late Yossi Shvo (Shababo). Their help gave me a critical boost. I thank them all.

Index of Surnames Found in 20th Cairo