He is a happy man who has come across an eye-opening book. Nagasawa Eiji's 600-page "Jewish Egyptian Marxists and the Palestine Question"(in Japanese), published earlier in this year 2012, has been one such book to me. It minutely and persistently follows, and analyzes, the lives of two Egyptians who are of Jewish origin, have embraced Marxism, and, in spite of all the persecution, been faithful to the 'ism' in their own way.
Ahmad Sadiq Sa'd(1919-88) is the younger of the two, but survived the elder one by ten years as he died a natural death. He is more of a scholar of the two and has left at least two works which are worth remembering even today. His father comes from a family who fled Spain at the time of the Reconquest to Turkey. His mother was born at Odessa.
Henri Curiel(1914-78), the senior one, is more of a man of action, and a charming speaker. His life, however, was cut short by a political assassination. His parents are originally from Italy and Turkey, respectively, and we are bewildered at the cosmopolitan nature, the 'world citizenness', of those families.
They were both French-educated, but while Curiel's Arabic language remained poor till the end, Sa'd made an effort to improve his so that he could play a more active part in the mass movement. Moreover he together with his wife got converted to Islam.
Curiel did not get converted, but forfeited his Italian citizenship for an Egyptian one. Those actions on their part were motivated by the popular demand for indigenization (Egyptianization) of the leadership of the Communist movement. They responded to the move positively, but the positive response itself resulted in pushing them to a corner. Sa'd was dismissed from the party leadership, while Curiel was expelled from Egypt in 1950.
It is to be noted, however, that when the German tanks approached the Suez Canal zone during the Second World War, many fellow Jewish left the country in fear of persecution, but both of the two had determined to remain in the country.
Curiel also distinguished himself by single-handedly opposing the merger of Egypt and Sudan.
When the UN decided the partition of Palestine into the Arab and the Jewish parts in November 1947, with the Soviet support, ultimately leading to the war disastrous to the Arabs, Curiel supported the decision while Sa'd opposed it. As his friend told the author, after his death, Sa'd was of the view that there is no national home for the Jewish people, they should live in Egypt as Egyptians, in Britain as Britons and so on, a Zionist state cannot be allowed to be set up in East Arab as it belongs to the Arabs for thousands of years and Zionism is a form of racial discrimination. In other words Anti-Semitism gave rise to Zionism in Europe, which in turn brings about anti-Jewish attitude in the Middle East.
The author's attention is closely drawn to Sa'd's work, "Palestine in Claws of Colonialism", 1947(in Arabic). It is a study of the Palestinian economy under the Mandate. It says that the Zionists regard upon the Arabs as backward and unfit for the democratic framework. They bring both the capital and the labour from outside Palestine, the labour from Eastern Europe. They do not employ the local labourors. They also appropriate the Arabs' land.
In the second edition of the book, written in 1973 but remaining unpublished, Sa'd sees the possibility of the new Jewish nationalism to overcome Zionism in Israel.
The author was not lucky enough to meet either of the two. In the last chapter, instead, he mainly talks of another activist, co-founder of a different Communist group, an author, a long-term political prisoner out in the desert, a very likable man fully one generation elder than him. His contact with him continued on and off from the early 1980s to the mid-90s when his elder friend passed away. The author says that it is because there is a person like him that he can continue to study this country(Egypt).
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