“My landscape is mute”

Abstract

This article focuses on artefacts lost and left behind by Egyptian Jews after their departure from Egypt. It shows how these material artefacts and their preservation, especially those with a collective dimension such as synagogues or objects of worship, play a key role in the forms of continuity of the Jews of Egypt in the diaspora. Like a ‘phantom limb’, they often take on more importance and space than the objects carried into exile. The article also aims to grasp why the Jewish past sticks to the present, inside and outside Egypt, seemingly more than the Greek, Italian or Shawam (Syro-Lebanese) ones. This persistence is due to a double dynamic: one, the eagerness of certain Egyptian Jews to maintain this heritage in situ and to gain recognition for the Jewish contribution to Egyptian culture and history, and two, the diverse, asymmetrical interests, often resulting from different if not opposite aims, which lead to the valorisation of this heritage in Egypt. To highlight this dynamic, I will refer to an event in Alexandria two years ago, which reveals contradictory forces, diverse interests and convergences, and the central role of the objects and materials left behind in this process.

Keywords

• egypt
• jews
• memory
• heritage
• silence