Cairo קהיר
The new city beside Fustat, founded by the Fatimids in 969; in the twentieth century a community of forty thousand, dispersed within a single generation.
Cairo, al-Qahira, the Victorious, was laid out by the Fatimids in 969 beside old Fustat. The Jewish history of Egypt in those centuries is Fustat: the synagogue of Ezra the Scribe, the Genizah in its store room, Maimonides, who lived there from 1171 until his death. Fustat has its own record in this reference, and all of that is there.
The community becomes Cairo later, when the descendants of Maimonides and after them the rest move to the new city. Under the Ottomans, from 1517, Jews held posts in the treasury and paid for them in the exactions and accusations of governors. The real growth came in the nineteenth century: about five thousand in 1882, about twenty nine thousand in 1917, the new quarters of Heliopolis and Garden City.
In 1947 Cairo counted 41,860 Jews. After the proclamation of Israel and the wars of 1948 and 1956 the community dispersed: in 1960 there remained 5,587, and the decline went on to the end of the century. The exodus of the Jews from the Arab lands stands in this reference as an event of its own.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The censuses of Egypt of 1882, 1917, 1947 and 1960 — the size of the community by year
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years, the numbers and the circumstances
Basis: documents and evidence.