As a result, Jews from many territories of the Ottoman Empire as well as Italy and Greece started to settle in the main cities of Egypt, where they thrived (see Mutammasirun).

The Ashkenazi community, mainly confined to Cairo's Darb al-Barabira quarter, began to arrive in the aftermath of the waves of pogroms that hit Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.

Their religious system shows strong traces of Babylonian religion, something which suggests to certain scholars that the community was of mixed Judahite and Samarian origins,[19] and they maintained their own temple, functioning alongside that of the local deity Khnum.

According to the Hebrew Bible, a large number of Judeans took refuge in Egypt after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE, and the subsequent assassination of the Jewish governor, Gedaliah.

Thus, their history in this period centers almost completely on Alexandria, though daughter communities rose up in places like the present Kafr ed-Dawar, and Jews served in the administration as custodians of the river.

This period likely saw an increase in immigration from Syria Palaestina, as indicated by the rising number of inscriptions, letters, legal documents, liturgical poetry, and magical texts in Hebrew and Aramaic from the fourth and fifth centuries.

[34] In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon describes the Alexandria pogrom: Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch (Saint Cyril), at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues.

Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance; their houses of prayer were leveled with the ground, and the episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving nation.

The Treaty of Alexandria, signed on in November 641, which sealed the Arab conquest of Egypt, provided for the rights of Jews (and Christians) to continue to practice their religion freely.

The caliph al-Hakim (996–1020) vigorously applied the Pact of Umar, and compelled the Jewish residents to wear bells and to carry in public the wooden image of a calf.

Judah Halevi was in Alexandria in 1141, and dedicated some beautiful verses to his fellow resident and friend Aaron Ben-Zion ibn Alamani and his five sons.

At Cairo there were 2,000 Jews; at Alexandria 3,000, whose head was the French-born R. Phineas b. Meshullam; in the Faiyum there were 20 families; at Damietta 200; at Bilbeis, east of the Nile, 300 persons; and at Damira 700.

[49] In all the religious fervor of the period the Mamluks began to adopt Sufism in an attempt to assuage dissatisfaction with traditional Sunni Islam facilitated solely by the Sultan.

[49] Jews who for the most part were kept segregated from Arab communities first came into contact with Sufism in these state sponsored ceremonies, as they were obliged to attend out of a show of loyalty to the sultan.

Admiration for the structure of khanqahs (Sufi schools), and its doctrinal focus on mysticism began to make many Egyptian Jews long to adopt something similar.

[49] Abraham Maimonides (1204–1237), who was considered to be the most prominent leader and government representative of all Mamluk Jews, advocated reorganizing Jewish schools to be more like Sufi Hanaqas.

It was during the reign of Selim's successor, Suleiman the Magnificent, that Hain Ahmed Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt, revenged himself upon the Jews because de Castro had revealed in 1524 to the sultan of his designs for independence.

Among his pupils were Isaac Luria, who as a young man had gone to Egypt to visit a rich uncle, the tax-farmer Mordecai Francis (Azulai, "Shem ha-Gedolim," No.

Joseph ben Isaac Sambari mentions a severe trial which came upon the Jews, due to a certain qāḍī al-ʿasākir ("generalissimo," not a proper name) sent from Constantinople to Egypt, who robbed and oppressed them, and whose death was in a certain measure occasioned by the graveyard invocation of one Moses of Damwah.

Jews played important roles in the economy, and their population climbed to nearly 80,000 as Jewish refugees settled there in response to increasing persecution in Europe.

René Qattawi, leader of the Cairo Sephardi community, endorsed the creation in 1935 of the Association of Egyptian Jewish Youth, with its slogan: 'Egypt is our homeland, Arabic is our language.

The impact of the well-publicized Arab-Jewish clash in Palestine from 1936 to 1939, together with the rise of Nazi Germany, also began to affect Jewish relations with Egyptian society, despite the fact that the number of active Zionists in their ranks was small.

[citation needed] One of these Arab authorities was Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was influential in securing Nazi funds that were appropriated to the Muslim Brotherhood for the operation of a printing press for the distribution of thousands of Anti-Semitic propaganda pamphlets.

[65] As the Partition of Palestine and the founding of Israel drew closer, hostility towards the Egyptian Jews strengthened, fed also by press attacks on all foreigners accompanying the rising ethnocentric nationalism of the age.

As Jews were often considered foreign or stateless persons, this constrained Jewish and foreign-owned entrepreneurs to reduce recruitment for employment positions from their own ranks.

[73] On 24 November 1947, the head of the Egyptian delegation to the UN General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal Pasha, said that "the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Moslem countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state.

From 1956 to 1970, under the Nasser regime, the military government of Egypt and its agents monitored the Jewish population, implementing measures such as police detention, and arresting suspects.

Rami Mangoubi, who lived in Cairo at the time, said that nearly all Egyptian Jewish men between the ages of 17 and 60 were either thrown out of the country immediately, or taken to the detention centers of Abou Za'abal and Tura, where they were incarcerated and tortured for more than three years.

Zahi Hawass, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said: "If you don't restore the Jewish synagogues, you lose part of your history.

[94] As of December 2022, there are only 3 Egyptian Jews living in Egypt, all women, of whom the youngest Magda Haroun (born 1952) is the community leader,[95] who is an anti-Zionist[96][97][98][99] and married to a Catholic.