Egyptian Muslim nationalism dispersed all minority communities, not just Jews

Evidence

It is often said that the Egyptian Jewish com­ munity has been a casualty of the Arab-Israel struggle. In a sense this is true— but it is not unlikely that the Egyptian Jewish community would have suffered the same fate even had there been no Arab-Israel struggle. The Jews in Egypt were by no means the only minority. There were also some 70,000 Greeks, 50,000 Italians, and smaller groups of Levantine Christians, Cypriots, Maltese, Armenians and others, many of them established in the country for generations. All these have suffered the same fate. Without actually being driven from the country, they have been induced to leave by the steadily increasing pressure of Egyptian Muslim nationalism, which made it very difficult for members of for­ eign communities or even minority religious communities to make a livelihood. The Greeks, the Italians and the rest have gone home, and the 65,000 Jews who once lived in Egypt are now reduced to barely 3,000. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1276

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the theme from the modesty article about how nationalist/class identity politics displace out-groups; also connects to The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Egypt/America dynamic.
• SEED: Angle: an essay on how nationalist homogenization purges minorities without ever formally expelling them — the slow economic squeeze as a gentler ethnic cleansing.