Between Terror and Tourism. Michael Mewshaw
was disparaged as the College of High Heels. Girls were reputed to enroll there to pick up a degree and, at the same time, an educated husband with good job prospects.
“What’s that got to do with headscarves?” I broke in.
“I’m getting to that. For a lot of girls the hijab is a badge that says they don’t want to be bothered by boys. But it’s also a license to flirt because it’s clear they don’t intend to do anything.”
If I found this confusing, it was no fault of Michael’s. And no failure of my grey matter. Throughout the Mediterranean basin the issue of hijabs had provoked debate, anger, violence, even killing. In France, which had seven million Muslim immigrants, the controversy raged from schoolyards all the way to the Elysée Palace. Turkey had banned headscarves for decades to preserve itself as a secular society, yet it was confronted by a segment of the female population that persisted in wearing them. Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s finest novel, Snow, centered on the question of whether a headscarf is a symbol of liberation or repression. Of resistance to the government and its masculine hegemony? Or of submission to Islam and its masculine hegemony? In the end, the hijab seemed to mean whatever the individual woman said it did.
During the Cosmopolitan Era many Jewish families in Alexandria were wealthy, and in a city thronged with expatriates and displaced persons, they held positions of social prominence. Yet they had reason to feel insecure. In Out of Egypt, his beautifully evocative memoir about Jewish life, Andre Aciman looks back from exile in America and recalls a household of eccentric relatives who longed to escape Alex’s provinciality, then regretted it once they’d been banished by President Nasser. Although they viewed themselves as citizens of the world, they were attached to local customs. Like their Egyptian neighbors, they ate foul, a refried bean paste, for breakfast, and along with the rest of the privileged classes, they migrated with the seasons, moving to beach houses in summer. To Aciman’s shame, he discovered that his elderly grandmother treated the home bathroom as Muslims do, planting her feet on the porcelain bowl and squatting down. Aciman’s picaresque Uncle Vili complained, “It’s because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us.”
But when Nasser confiscated their property, it was less from racial or religious prejudice than political expediency. Nasser needed an enemy, and he found one ready-made.
Now the synagogue in Alexandria didn’t even have ten men to make a minyan, the minimum number required by Jewish law to conduct a communal religious service. Constructed more than a century ago on Nabi Daniel Street, and renovated after the Germans bombed it during World War II, it stood forlornly behind locked gates guarded by Egyptian soldiers. With curt hand gestures, they directed me to a side entrance. It was difficult to guess whom they were protecting or guarding against. Terrorists? Tourists? Jews?
By telephone I had spoken earlier to Ben Yusuf Guon and arranged a tour of the synagogue. I pictured him as an ancient rabbi, a patriarchal figure with a long white beard. Instead I met a middle-aged man in designer jeans and a burgundy shirt, with a fashionable four-day growth of whiskers.
Ben Yusuf Guon identified himself as the vice-president of Alexandria’s Jewish community and as its youngest member. “I’m the baby,” he joked. “I’m fifty-three.”
Crossing a courtyard planted with palms and ficus trees, he told me there were twenty-three Jews left in the community, mostly women. “We have eighteen very poor ladies and two very rich ones. Cairo has thirty Jews, all women, no men.”
Among the buildings in the compound that still belonged to the synagogue, one had been a Yeshiva. Now the state rented it as an Egyptian girls’ school. “We have no rabbi,” he said. “One comes from Israel for Passover and stays until Yom Kippur. When he’s not here, we don’t have services. I light a candle for my mother and father. That’s all.”
Under the portico, well-fed dogs napped on the stairs. They didn’t stir as we stepped over them. Arabs consider dogs unclean, little better than vermin, and chase them away from mosques. But Ben Yusuf Guon laughingly referred to these as “Jewish dogs.”
“For security?” I asked.
“The Egyptians take care of that. No problems. We have good relations. All the police are very correct.”
“Now that Egypt and Israel have diplomatic relations is there any chance Jews will come back to Alexandria?”
We were in the rear of the synagogue putting on paper yarmulkes. “They return to visit,” Ben Yusuf said. “A woman was here today. A lady in her fifties, like me. She found her family pew and was happy.”
“I mean is there a chance Jews will resettle?”
He shook his head, saying, “There’s always a good smell here. It’s very clean.”
It was an olfactory theory of religious distinctions that I had first encountered in Beirut in 1969, and had heard since in a dozen countries and would hear again throughout North Africa. Arabs, Christians and Jews believed their own neighborhoods smelled sweet and other ethnic groups stank.
Ben Yusuf explained that the synagogue had been designed by an Italian architect in 1890. He invited me to admire the Corinthian columns that supported a gallery where women had once worshipped. Then he called to the custodian, an old black man, and had him unveil the Ten Commandments, chiseled in Hebrew.
Ben Yusuf’s cell phone cut him off in mid-sentence; its ring tone was “Dance with Me” by Dean Martin.
While Ben Yusuf spoke in French, the custodian introduced himself as Abdel Naby, which he said meant “Servant of the Prophet.” He came from Aswan, in the far south, and he saw nothing exceptional about a Muslim being employed in a synagogue. He said the Jews treated him well and had even taught him a little Hebrew.
Ben Yusuf snapped his phone shut and appeared eager to finish the tour. He had little interest in discussing why he had stayed on in Alexandria and how he had managed to do so. Only when pressed did he reveal that his father had been Nasser’s tailor. “Nasser used to send a car to bring my father to his villa for fittings.”
“So it was a personal relationship?”
“No. Professional.”
“And that’s why your family wasn’t expelled?”
“No. It was because we didn’t have dealings with Israel. The people who were expelled were in contact with Israel.”
I didn’t argue. The absurdity of the statement was its own rebuttal. Alexandria’s fifteen thousand Jews hadn’t been uniformly Zionist. Still, all except for a handful had had their property seized and been exiled.
We returned our paper yarmulkes to the table and stepped out over the dogs on the portico. I asked what would happen after the last Jew died. Ben Yusuf Guon chuckled. “When I die, it’s finished. They’ll turn the synagogue into a museum.”
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Christians were forbidden to ride horses in Egypt, Europeans reached Pompey’s Pillar on donkeyback. I doubt, though, that their buttock-bruising expeditions were any more unsettling than my taxi trip to one of the few monuments in Alexandria that have remained intact since antiquity. We hadn’t gone three blocks before the cabbie picked up a second passenger. “My brother-in-law,” he said.
“I assume we’ll be splitting the bill?”
The cabbie pretended I had exceeded his fluency. “I speak small English.” He held his thumb and index finger a millimeter apart.
“I am journalist,” the brother-in-law spoke up, “making pictures on tourism.” He swiveled around in the front seat and handed me his card. When I didn’t exchange the courtesy, he demanded his card back. He carried a camera and from time to time he told the driver to stop while he snapped shots through the windshield. He didn’t bother to climb out for a clearer view. But it wasn’t laziness that kept him in the car.
“My brother-in-law is a bad man,”