History of the Jews in Egypt

Egyptian Jews constitute both one of the oldest and one of the youngest Jewish communities in the world. The historic core of the Jewish community in Egypt mainly consisted of Egyptian Arabic speaking Rabbanites and Karaites. Though Egypt had its own community of Egyptian Jews, after the Jewish expulsion from Spain more Sephardi and Karaite Jews began to migrate to Egypt, and then their numbers increased significantly with the growth of trading prospects after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As a result, Jews from many territories of the Ottoman Empire as well as Italy and Greece started to settle in the main cities of Egypt, where they thrived. The Ashkenazi community, mainly confined to Cairo's Darb al-Barabira quarter, began to arrive in the aftermath of the waves of pogroms that hit Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. In the 1950s, Egypt began to expel its Jewish population (estimated at between 75,000 and 80,000 in 1948), also sequestering Jewish-owned property at this time. the president of Cairo's Jewish community said that there were 6 Jews in Cairo, all women over age 65, and 12 Jews in Alexandria. , there were 5 in Cairo. As of 2022 the total number of known Egyptian Jews permanently residing in Egypt is 3. In the Elephantine papyri and ostraca, caches of legal documents and letters written in Aramaic amply document the lives of a community of Jewish soldiers stationed there as part of a frontier garrison in Egypt for the Achaemenid Empire. Established at Elephantine in about 650 BCE during Manasseh's reign, these soldiers assisted the Twenty-sixth Dynasty pharaoh Psamtik I of the Nile Delta in his campaigns against the Twenty-fifth Dynasty pharaoh Tantamani of Napata. Their religious system shows strong traces of Babylonian religion, something which suggests to certain scholars that the community was of mixed Judahite and Samarian origins, and they maintained their own temple, functioning alongside that of the local deity Khnum. The documents cover the period 495 to 399 BCE.