The lost Jewish surnames of Cairo
An extensive list of the surnames of the Jewish families who lived in Cairo has been published, helping tell stories across generations.
Over the last two decades, interest in the Jewish communities in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries, including their history, culture, literature and religiosity, has been on the rise, as shown by the increasing number of academic and literary publications about them. And the life of the Egyptian Jewish community has not been an exception.
Yet in this expanding body of knowledge, personal narratives focusing on the individual members and experiences that made up that community have largely been missing. This is in part attributed to the paucity of archival sources and the difficulty of accessing this information due to the geopolitical context, both in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. Even in more personal works, such as memories, names were to a great extent absent.
Veteran diplomat and independent consultant in demographic mapping Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch, however, has started to fill these gaps. His study of the Jewish surnames found in 20th century Cairo, published in December, puts together in a single index as many as 1,854 surnames of Jewish families who resided in Cairo from the turn of the 19th century. The index has been published by Avotaynu Online, a website devoted to study the origins and migrations of Jewish populations worldwide.
“I am very active in Jewish genealogy, in the research of roots of families in Eastern Europe. I was born in Poland and my parents were Holocaust survivors, but they did not speak about what they went through. I only found out after they died, and I became quite involved in how to research about families. I [then] lived for many years in Arab countries and I got interested in Jewish families who came from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt, so I was looking for a similar tool as we know it in Eastern Europe. But that did not exist,” Rosen-Koenigsbuch told Al-Monitor on Skype, noting that the study is one of four that have been or are being developed, including similar indexes from Damascus, Baghdad and, soon, Alexandria.
