$59 billion, in today’s currency.
That, according to a report recently compiled by a group called Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, is what the Egyptian government owes the families of Jews who were forced to leave Egypt during the 20th century.
The culmination of six years of research, the report documents the substantial cultural and economic contributions of Jews who lived in Egypt in modern times, and the systematic persecution that led to their expulsion.
When Israel declared its independence in 1948, hostility toward Jews became endemic in Egypt, like it did in other Arab countries. Bombs were set off in the Jewish Quarter of Cairo, killing more than 70 Jews and wounding nearly 200. And blood libels, which happened even in earlier years, were leveled with new vigor.
When Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in 1954, the 40,000-strong Egyptian Jewish community began to decrease, as many Jews saw what was coming.
And it came two years later, after Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt in response to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, a crucial international transportation hub. The Egyptian government declared all Jews enemies of the state, and began a systematic expulsion of Jewish Egyptian citizens. Tens of thousands of additional Jews left the country and hundreds of Jewish-owned businesses were confiscated.
The Six-Day War in 1967 resulted in the imprisonment and expulsion of the last major group of Egyptian Jews, reducing the community to a mere few hundred. By the early 1970s, Jewish life in Egypt had virtually disappeared. Today, the report claims, only two Jews remain in the country.
(In keeping with the Arab propensity to fabricate facts from fantasies, Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, remarked to then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2023 that “Jews always lived peacefully in Egypt” and were never targeted “in their old or modern history.”)
The new report reminded me of something that happened back in 2003. That year, a lawsuit was filed against “the Jews of the world” by Dr. Nabil Hilmi, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq in Egypt. The esteemed academic , citing the Torah, laid claim to property—“gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing and more”—taken by the ancestors of modern Jews during Yetzias Mitzrayim.
Dr. Hilmi calculated that 1,125 trillion tons of gold were owed by contemporary Jews for each of the 300 tons of the metal he estimated were taken.
When that story appeared, it brought a broad smile to my face. Because what was essentially the same lawsuit was lodged over two millennia ago in a world court of sorts that was presided over by Alexander the Great.
The story is recounted in Sanhedrin 91a. A Jewish defender, Geviha ben Pesisa, asked the Egyptian representatives to identify the source of their claim to compensation from the Jews for what they had taken from Egypt during the Exodus, and was told “the Torah.”
“I, too, then, will invoke the Torah,” the Jewish attorney responded, “which says that the Jews spent more than 400 years laboring in Egypt. Please compensate us for 600,000 men’s work over that period of time.”
The Egyptian barristers, the account continues, asked Alexander for three days during which to formulate a response. The recess was granted but the representatives never returned.
Geviha didn’t press his own case for compensation from Egypt for the slave labor. So it would seem that both he and the Egyptian reps decided to let bygones be bygones.
But the contributions of Jews to modern-day Egypt isn’t terribly bygone. Compensation for seized property and assets of Jews who were pressured to leave Egypt mere decades ago—and, for that matter, compensation for Jews in other Arab lands who were forced to flee state-sanctioned murderous mobs—is entirely in order.
And the same is true regarding Iran, which was home to over 100,000 Jews before 1948, but currently has a Jewish population of around 9,000. Instead of sending missiles Israel’s way, directly or through proxies, Iran should be sending the funds it allots to its nuclear program. Maybe President Trump can include that stipulation in the deal he hopes to strike with the mullahs.
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