Ambivalent Levantines/Levantine ambivalences: Literary constructions of Egyptian Jewish identity.

Abstract

In this dissertation, I analyze post-dispersion literary texts---writings by and about Egyptian Jews composed in Hebrew, Arabic, and English between the 1950s and the 1990s---to show how Levantine Egyptian Jews disrupt the local/foreign and colonizer/colonized binaries that have been often used to describe Jews' place in Egyptian society. In these texts, Levantine Egyptian Jews represent fluid subjectivities that I identify as cosmopolitan discourses. In turn, I show how these discourses destabilize narrow definitions of nationhood and permit explorations of otherness within. Finally, I explain how these texts engage in literary border crossings between Egypt and Israel. The writings of Jacqueline Kahanoff and Waguih Ghali from the 1950s and 1960s invoke cosmopolitanism to disrupt, on the one hand, diverse discourses of colonial power, and on the other, hegemonic discourses of unitary national identities both in Egypt and in their host cultures. A novel by Yitzhak Gormezano-Goren published at the time of the peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel hesitantly explores the subversive potential of converted, Levantine identities; in contrast, a novel by Ihsan 'Abd al-Qaddus published a year later depicts Levantine internalization of otherness as a threat to be resisted. Responding to the increasing prevalence in Egypt of intolerant discourses during the 1980s and 1990s, novels by Ibrahim 'Abd al-Majid and Edwar al-Kharrat revisit the diversity that once characterized Alexandria and create a pluralistic vision of Egyptian national identity. Contemporary Israeli authors Orly Castel-Bloom and Ronit Matalon examine earlier cosmopolitan discourses of Egyptian Jewishness in their attempts to decenter Ashkenazi cultural hegemony and to remap Israeli identity.