Sunday, March 14, 2010
This article is full of ironies, not least of which is the fact that there are only a handful of Jews left in Egypt:
...Egypt's Jewish community, which dates back millennia and at its peak in the 1940s numbered around 80,000, is down to several dozen, almost all of them elderly. The rest were driven out decades ago by mob violence and persecution tied in large part to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Egypt and Israel fought a war every decade from the 1940s to the 1970s until the 1979 peace treaty was signed.
Despite that treaty, Egyptian sentiment remains deeply unfriendly to Israel, and anti-Semitic stereotypes still occasionally appear in the Egyptian media...
So, it's nice that holy sites are being restored, now that the Jews are gone and the Copts are under attack.
I'm also glad to see this article, which mentions the Egyptian Jews. Hooray. This subject receives so little attention and it's actually very significant to any discussion of the Arab/Israeli conflict.
Martin Solomon adds: And look who's still at the center of things -- Zahi Hawass. See also Point of No Return: Egypt finds excuse to cancel Maimonides ceremony.
