Journal

Journal of LevantineStudies
ofLevantine StudiesVol.Vol. 8 No.
7, No. 1, Summer
1, Summer 2017,2018, pp. 167-170
pp. 9-34

Najat Abdulhaq
Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt:
Entrepreneurship and Business before Nasser
London: I. B. Tauris, 2016. 320 pp.

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Middle Eastern religious minorities have long attracted scholarly interest and
controversy. Najat Abdulhaq’s compelling contribution to this field lies in
positioning ethnic minorities as a pivotal and integral component of the modern
Egyptian economy. Using groundbreaking archival work, Abdulhaq demonstrates
the structural role that Jewish and Greek business elites played in driving Egypt’s
economy before the 1950s. The first study to look at the two communities jointly,
Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt offers a view of the breathtaking rise and fall
of these minorities, which together constituted no more than one percent of Egypt’s
population. During the first half of the twentieth century, Greeks and Jews played
a crucial part in the cotton, sugar, railway, banking, retail, and many other enterprises.
But with the 1950s promotion of nationalization and Egyptianization, they lost that
position and departed Egypt en masse.
Greeks and Jews were the largest ethnoreligious groups in modern Egypt, distinct
from the Arabic-speaking Muslims and Copts. From the outset, there were significant
differences between Greeks and Jews, which the first and second chapters of the
book elaborate in detail. Greeks were cohesive in ethnic and linguistic terms, and
rarely proficient in Arabic. Jews were an extremely heterogeneous group in terms of
language, ethnicity, and nationality, encompassing autochthonous Arabic-speaking
Jews and Ottoman, Mediterranean, and Eastern European migrants. The Jewish
business elite were francophone, with Arabic-speaking elements. Greek business
strength developed around the nineteenth-century cotton boom, in which Greeks
played a vital role in both the countryside and in Alexandria. The Jewish business
elite emerged from urban trading and money changing. As the rich historiographical
review here shows, Egypt’s Jews have received greater scholarly interest, and their
study has been conducted in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a result, the
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discussion of Jews in Egypt is considerably more charged than the discussion of the
Greek minority.
Despite these differences, there were striking similarities in the rise of both
groups to prominence in modern Egypt. While they differed in terms of business
practices and influence, Greeks and Jews played a crucial role in investment
and entrepreneurship. Their overrepresentation in modern Egyptian capitalism
is well known and has been discussed by many scholars. Abdulhaq, however,
goes beyond anecdotal references to elite families—such as the Salvagos and
Qattawis—and through a painstaking survey of items from the Egyptian Gazette
held in the Egyptian National Archive, the book demonstrates the astonishing
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magnitude of Greek and Jewish involvement. Of the 759 joint-stock companies

established in Egypt between 1885 and 1960, 35 percent had Jewish participants,
and 23 percent had Greek participants. One typical explanation for this
disproportionate role presented Greeks and Jews as foreign, or “quasi-Egyptian,”
elements, who benefited from British colonialism and access to foreign capital.
Robert Vitalis and Joel Beinin have already challenged this narrative of “foreign”
versus “local” capitalists in Egypt.1 Abdulhaq goes further by demonstrating that
colonial privileges played a limited part in the success of these groups. As her
empirical data convincingly shows, even in 1940s, after the dismantling of the
Capitulations, Greeks and Jews continued to have leading positions in enterprise.
Her explanation, which builds on Schumpeterian growth theory, attributes Greek
and Jewish success to the strength of their networks and their role in innovation.
Being part of diasporic networks extending across the Mediterranean and beyond
gave Greeks and Jews a built-in advantage over other groups. Through networks
of kinship and cultural affinities, they could establish trust more easily, gain access
to new information, and reduce investment risks. This became especially crucial
for innovative enterprises, where the risk was higher. Abdulhaq shows that in
enterprises involving new technologies, products, and practices, Greeks and Jews
had an even higher share of participation.
The theoretical and quantitative analysis (chapter 3), which looks at participation
and networking within and across groups, is the basis for an in-depth inquiry into
the role played by Greeks and Jews in interwar Egypt (chapter 4). The emphasis
on networking is demonstrated magnificently in the examples of the cotton
entrepreneur Theodoros Rallis, and in the detailed account of the formation of the
Misr Group.
 Journal LevantineStudies
ofLevantine
Journal of StudiesVol. 7, No. 1, Summer 2017, pp. 9-34 169

The final chapter deals with the fate of Greeks and Jews after World War II and
the implementation of the 1947 Egyptianization law that set limits to “foreign”
capital and labor. Abdulhaq’s nuanced account shows, through archival records,
how this policy was implemented rigorously but not rigidly. Companies embedded
within the Egyptian establishment, such as the Cicurel Department Stores, had
ample room to argue their case and receive a sympathetic hearing. But Abdulhaq
also exposes the ultimately xenophobic nature of this operation, as only people
with “foreign” (i.e., non-Muslim) names were asked to present their papers. “Real”
Egyptians—that is, Muslim Egyptians—were not requested to prove their identity,

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and it is doubtful that many of them held the documents that were now demanded of
Greeks and Jews. While Egyptianization was no doubt a response to social pressures
for more jobs and social mobility for Muslim Egyptians, it resulted in a redefinition
of Egyptianness along exclusivist, xenophobic lines.
The ultimate downfall of the Greek and Jewish elites in the 1950s and 1960s
was remarkably similar, driven by the takeover of the Egyptian economy by the
state and the military. Here again, there were differences. Initially, as Abdulhaq
shows, Jews had more room to maneuver because of their more complex nationality
status and integration into the Egyptian establishment. Greeks did not have such
political clout and were marked as foreign citizens. But as the conflict in Palestine
escalated in the late 1940s, Jews were increasingly perceived as the “enemy within,”
as agents of former colonial powers and Israel. Greece was not a former colonial
power, and Greeks in Egypt were never seen in such a negative light. Indeed, Greek
workers were praised for playing a crucial role in running the Suez Canal after its
nationalization. At the end of the day, however, both groups suffered similar fates.
The elites lost their business empires, which were either sold off or nationalized, and
virtually all Greeks and Jews, regardless of their social class, emigrated from Egypt,
much against their will.
Despite the profound differences between the two groups, the striking similarity
in their rise and fall suggests a systematic logic, which Abdulhaq explores compellingly.
It was their extensive networks that allowed Greeks and Jews to become such
dominant and dynamic elements in the Egyptian economy. And it was the Egyptian
state’s authoritarian turn—the military takeover of the political economy—that
effectively eliminated Greeks and Jews from the Egyptian social landscape. Thus,
in Abdulhaq’s work, the removal of minority groups becomes a litmus test for the
destruction of the creative heterogeneity that identified pre-Nasserist Egypt.
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The book therefore offers not only an economic history of the two minority
groups but also an investigation into the shaping of the modern Egyptian state,
society, and economy. As such, it is a timely contribution to the ongoing scholarly
discussion on the rise and fall of the Middle Eastern bourgeoisie.2

Yair Wallach
SOAS, University of London 
yw11@soas.ac.uk  
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Notes

1 Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern
Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide:
Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
2 Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism,
and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sherene Seikaly,
Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2016).