Jacques Hassoun: Jew of the Nile
“The Jew from Egypt may well be a figment of the imagination, or a character drawn from an epic poem, shaped by the diasporas experienced by a minority. In their birthplace, they had multiple identities. At times, individuals affirmed their national roots; at others, they embraced the privileges of the foreign protection system. Yet regardless of their stance, they remained part of a minority.”(1)
One of the most intriguing figures from this minority was Jacques Hassoun (1936–1999), the psychoanalyst who devoted much of his life to exploring the layered identity of Egypt’s Jews.
His writings, including the seminal Histoire des Juifs du Nil/History of the Jews of the Nile, grapple with the nature of belonging for Jews in Egypt before their exodus, which began in earnest in 1948.
Born in Alexandria to a Jewish family speaking Arabic and French, Hassoun studied at the Lycée de l’Union Juive. In 1954, he was exiled to France for his communist activism and his ties to the underground Democratic Movement for National Liberation (known by its Arabic acronym, HADETU), a leftist group founded in 1944 by another Egyptian Jew, Henri Curiel.
In Paris, Hassoun would go on to study psychoanalysis under the tutelage of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), becoming both a disciple and a practitioner until his death in 1999.
In Paris, Hassoun joined what became known as the “Rome Group”—a collective of 20 to 30 HADETU Egyptian members living in exile. What distinguished them was not only their political commitment, but also their cultural grounding. Educated in French secular institutions, they embraced reason, democracy, and a rationalist worldview.
“Functioning as a branch of HADETU was a clear statement that they considered themselves Egyptians in exile. [...] The ideological formulations and political practices of the Rome Group were informed by the struggle for national independence and against neocolonialism” as well as their rejection of Zionist solutions to the diaspora’s dilemmas.(2)
They never considered themselves foreigners. As Gil Perrault, biographer of Henri Curiel, put it: “Exile Egyptianized him.” (3)
The image of the Egyptian Jew
There is an anecdote about Jacques Hassoun that I find significant.
He was once seated next to the Egyptian writer Ibrahim Aslan during a dinner in Paris organized to welcome a delegation of Egyptian authors. After a few warm toasts, Hassoun introduced himself as “an Egyptian Jew” and spoke of his great love for Egypt and about his family’s origins in the village of Khalwat Al-Ghalban near Mansoura and his boyhood there.
The revelation shook Aslan. He later wrote of the moment in his 2003 non-fiction work “Khalwat al-Ghalban”, confessing his unease and how he pulled away because Hassoun was Jewish.
Still, Hassoun invited him and the other writers to dine with him before they left Paris. Aslan never showed up, even though Hassoun had stayed up, waiting, with dinner prepared.
Aslan came to regret that decision five years later when he learned that Hassoun had died of a brain tumor.
I felt retrospective shame on Aslan’s behalf. If only he had accepted the invitation, perhaps he could have granted Hassoun a fragment of his multifaceted identity as one of the Jews of the Nile.
“I am Jewish because I am Egyptian. I am Egyptian because I am Jewish,” Hassoun once said.(4)
The identity of Egypt’s Jews during the reign of King Fouad was neither entirely identical to the Egyptian identity, nor was it its antithesis. As Hassoun put it, “They began as a foreign national minority, later reframed as a religious one, equated with other foreign minorities, especially after Egypt opened itself to European communities. But as the Arab dimension of identity receded, the image of the Egyptian Jew became harder to fix. Historians must work doubly hard to discern the features of protagonists from a past that has vanished.”(5)
Hassoun addressed both historians and himself—as one of them—with the recommendation of clarifying the image of the Egyptian Jew and bringing into sharper relief the Arab component of that identity.
This pursuit animated his books on Egypt and its Jews, his visits to his country of origin, and his co-founding, in 1979, of the Association for the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Egyptian Jewry, whose driving force included many former communists who had worked with Henri Curiel and the Rome Group.(6)
Coexistence not assimilation
Hassoun viewed Jewish identity in Egypt as a negotiation between two nationalisms.
“Jewish nationalism,” he wrote, “is not so different from Arab nationalism, and reexamining it invites us to rethink the idea of Arab Jews assimilating into either their homelands or host countries.”
He argued that the relationship between Jews and Egyptians was more of blending rather than assimilation.
Historian Zubaida Muhammad Atta noted a similar tension during the partition of Palestine. One current aligned with Arab-Islamic nationalism, the other with loyalty to Israel.(7)
For some Jewish intellectuals living in Egypt, communism offered a third way—a tool for reconciling the irreconcilable. “I think that politics, in other words, the ability to remain a communist, and then almost immediately to become a Trotskyist, allowed me to resolve all of this because the internationalist ideology permitted a certain marriage of these contradictions,” wrote Hassoun.(8)
Hassoun may not have fully faced this conflict during his time in Egypt. But exile in Paris—the city that became his permanent home—magnified it. There would be no return. Wars between Egypt and Israel had closed that door.
Writing of this irrevocable distance, he reflected, “I had to practically reconstruct for myself the category of Egyptian Jews, I had to create associations with others, and I had to finish with this story of the Egyptian Jew in order to finally see all the different aspects of my identity reconciled.”(9)
Perhaps one of the clearest manifestations of this reassembling of memory is his detailed and intimate narrative text “Events of Daily Life” included in “The History of the Jews of the Nile”. The narrative carries this same personal inclination towards his own life and the lives of Jews in Egypt, without seeking to possess or claim ownership over a history that was not his to own.
Is there a duality?
In that text, Hassoun wonders whether there truly exists a duality in the average Egyptian Jew’s affiliation with two conflicting national identities, but swiftly dismisses that idea.
“The Jew, regardless of their social background, is like the beggar Abdallah the Jew: that is, the galabiyya, the jacket, the tarboosh, and the shoes.”(10)
Abdallah the Jew, one of the characters in his text, was a beggar on Coronation Street (now Mohamed Karim Street) in the Anfoushi neighborhood of Alexandria. He belonged to the Karaite Jews of Egypt, “who spoke Arabic and did not feel discriminated against. Their Arab cultural orientation made them more integrated into Egypt than other Jews.”(11)
Abdallah’s image encapsulates a complex blend of rootedness and difference, and it reflects the layered interaction of Egyptian Jews with their surroundings. “He suffered from eye inflammation, wore a tarboosh, had a tangled beard, chanted like Muslims, ‘Allah, Allah,’ and his galabiyya was stained with traces of every meal. Yet there was something particularly distinct about him: he wore a jacket over his galabiyya and on his feet were a pair of old shoes long stripped of their laces. He was not barefoot like his Muslim beggar counterparts.”(12)
This Jew, and others like him, lived without clear distinction from other Egyptians, before 1948 at least. “The Egyptian Jew was not an immigrant, not a Jew living in Egypt. Only recently has he become a Jew from Egypt, after confronting the state, the idea of the state, the Egyptian state, the Israeli state, and the European states. That is, he became a Jew on the verge of leaving, or going into exile.”(13)
The majority, including Abdallah, spoke Arabic. Hassoun wrote, “The Jews of Egypt did not invent a language of their own, unlike the Moroccans, Eastern Europeans, or Balkan Sephardim. They spoke Arabic.”(14)
This majority viewed their wealthier peers as war profiteers. As Hassoun noted, the poorer Jews grew more destitute, seeking scraps of power. “That Jew who had grown poorer than before would say he would not trade his miserable life for that of those dogs who lived like characters out of a Lawrence Durrell novel,” because “the vast majority of those Jews belonged to the same minority, and by that fact to the same history.”(14)
Events of daily life
In “Events of Daily Life,” Hassoun’s narrative is marked by a meticulous and affectionate attention to detail: traditions, holidays, religious rituals, foods, table manners, clothing, tastes, smells, sounds, class distinctions within the same community, and the lines between the permissible and the forbidden.
His account blends public and private life, the religious and the secular, with no boundary between them. Through this blending, an identity scattered across history is gathered again, and the faded identity of the Egyptian Jew reconstituted.
The effort to retrieve this identity, and its protagonists from the diaspora, emerges in Hassoun’s intimate and empirically grounded storytelling. He dwells at length on the Arab component within this composite identity. It is an attempt to restore—or examine—the mosaic of the Egyptian Jew’s external and internal image. It is also a reconstruction of his personal portrait, in search of wholeness.
Hassoun writes, “The defining features of the Egyptian Jew who belonged to the majority are based on three elements: the use of Arabic (alongside other languages), adherence to a traditional lifestyle, and an acknowledgment of the Jewish–Egyptian duality, one that cannot survive if either side is diminished.”(14)
Language, for Hassoun, was always central to identity. In Paris, he worked as an assistant to Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst who expanded Freud’s theory of the unconscious by asserting that the unconscious is structured like a language. For Hassoun, this linguistic architecture shaped the unconscious image of the Egyptian Jew.
Perhaps through his books and in “Events of Daily Life,” Hassoun was seeking to heal the fracture of multiple identities—or to reconcile them. Perhaps he was treating himself, while also documenting the history of Egypt’s Jews.
Reading his text—this methodical, unsentimental approach—we find no nostalgia, no indulgence, no longing to reclaim a lost world. Instead, the scenes emerge from life itself and are traced within it, following the fault lines of division, assimilation, coexistence, and the push and pull between multiple identities. And yet, there is also the force of love.
“This love and nostalgia among some exiles for those traditions, for the Arabic language, the Egyptian land, the familiar figures, and the food,” he wrote, “is a sign of the enduring reference points of their identity.”(14)
There is a ghostly presence of the author throughout “Events of Daily Life.” Sometimes I see him as the child sneaking between legs on a Saturday night, or as the estranged son “who no longer goes to evening prayers with the family, leaving an empty place that the others regard with sorrow.”(15)
Perhaps that estranged son is the one who will eventually reconcile the diverging images of his identity.
(*) A version of this article first appeared in Arabic on May 24, 2025.
(1) Histoire des Juifs du Nil, Jacques Hassoun, trans. Youssef Darwish, Dar al-Shorouk, 2007, p. 22
(2) The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, Joel Beinin, University of California Press, 1998.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Histoire des Juifs du Nil, p. 209
(6) The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry.
(7) Yahud Misr: Al-Tarikh al-Siyasi (Political History of the Jews of Egypt), Zubaida Muhammad Atta, Ain Publishing, 2010.
(8) The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Histoire des Juifs du Nil, p. 189
(11) The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry.
(12) Histoire des Juifs du Nil, p. 134
(13) Ibid., p. 133
(14) Ibid., pp. 194–95
(15) Ibid., p. 180