The historic core of the indigenous community consisted mainly of Arabic-speaking Rabbanites and Karaites. After their expulsion from Spain, more Sephardi and Karaite Jews began to emigrate to Egypt and their numbers increased significantly with the growth of trading prospects after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As a result, Jews from all over the territories of the Ottoman Empire as well as Italy and Greece started to settle in the main cities of Egypt, where they thrived. 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. In the late 1950s, Egypt expelled its Jewish population and sequestered Jewish-owned property. As of 2014, the Jewish population of Egypt was estimated at 12 to less than 40, down from between 75,000 and 80,000 in 1948. Genesis and Exodus Aramaic. Marriage Document of Ananiah and Tamut, July 3, 449 B.C.E. Brooklyn Museum The Book of Genesis and Book of Exodus describe a period of Hebrew servitude in ancient Egypt, during decades of sojourn in Egypt, the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, or the three months journey through the wilderness to Sinai. However, most histories of ancient Israel no longer consider information about the Exodus recoverable or even relevant to the story of Israel's emergence due to the complete lack of direct evidence for its historicity. Historically, there were no Jews in Bronze Age Egypt (the setting of Exodus and, long before that, of the pyramids' erection), because there were no Jews at all until the rise of the kingdom of Judah in the Iron Age. Israelites first appear in the archeological record on the Merneptah Stele from between 1208-3 BCE; right at the end of the Bronze Age. A reasonably Bible-friendly interpretation is that they were a federation of Habiru tribes of the hill-country around the Jordan River. Presumably, this federation consolidated into the kingdom of Israel, and Judah split from that, during the dark age that followed the Bronze. The Bronze Age term "Habiru" was more general than the Biblical "Hebrew"; it referred simply to Levantine nomads, of any religion or ethnicity. Mesopotamian, Hittite, Canaanite, and Egytian sources discuss them largely as bandits, mercenaries, and slaves. Certainly, there were some Habiru slaves in ancient Egypt; but native Egyptian kingdoms were not heavily slave-based. Later ancient times In the Elephantine papyri, caches of legal documents and letters written in Aramaic amply document the lives of a community of Jewish soldiers stationed there as part of a frontier garrison in Egypt for the Achaemenid Empire. Established at Elephantine in about 650 BCE during Manasseh's reign, these soldiers assisted Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his Nubian campaign. Their religious system shows strong traces of Babylonian polytheism, something which suggests to certain scholars that the community was of mixed Judaeo-Samaritan origins, and they maintained their own temple, functioning alongside that of the local deity Chnum. The documents cover the period 495 to 399 BCE. The Hebrew Bible also records that a large number of Jews took refuge in Egypt after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah in 597 BCE, and the subsequent assassination of the Jewish governor, Gedaliah. (2 Kings 25:22-24, Jeremiah 40:6-8) On hearing of the appointment, the Jewish population fled to Moab, Ammon, Edom and in other countries returned to Judah. (Jeremiah 40:11-12) However, before long Gedaliah was assassinated, and the population that was left in the land and those that had returned ran away to Egypt for safety. (2 Kings 25:26, Jeremiah 43:5-7) The numbers that made their way to Egypt is subject to debate. In Egypt, they settled in Migdol, Tahpanhes, Noph, and Pathros. (Jeremiah 44:1)

• published: 12 Jun 2015
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