This article has resulted from Rim Naguib’s project presentation at the EUME Berliner Seminar on 29 November 2023, titled “‘Affectueusement, Laila’: Being a ‘foreign’ Jewish communist woman in post-colonial Egypt”. The audio recording of the talk is available on SoundCloud.
Noémie Canel (1927–2012) was an Egyptian Jewish communist who spent a total of 11 years in various prisons in Cairo and was deported from Egypt twice. Throughout the period of her activism and long incarceration, she persisted in “the democratic struggle”, all while resisting her exclusion from Egypt and from her political family. Yet, the historiography of the communist movement in Egypt is almost devoid of any mention of her name or existence. Noémie’s experience—and her subsequent invisibility in the historiography—was shaped by her being a woman and a so-called “foreign” Jewish communist in post-colonial Egypt. I examine hundreds of letters written by her and about her in the period 1948–59, to analyze the gendered nature of communist activism in mid-century Egypt, and to argue that her feminized role in the movement entailed the complete fusion of her personal and political being and aspirations. On the other hand, I trace in Noémie’s prison letters the increasingly precarious position of the communist Jews of Egypt, and, in response, their embrace of post-colonial nationalism and their striving towards their “Egyptianization”. In the case of Noémie, both her being a woman and a “foreign” Jewish communist made contingent her personal fate and her emotional well-being upon the fate of the movement, and particularly upon the fate of the increasingly excluded Jewish communists of Egypt. Ultimately the defeat of the movement, and the inability of Egypt’s Jewish communists to maintain their place in it or in the country, meant her personal defeat and desolation.