A Modern Exodus in the Shadows: New Report Uncovers $59 Billion in Seized Assets from Expelled Egyptian Jews

Edited by: Fern Sidman

As Jews around the globe gather to commemorate Passover, reliving the ancient Exodus from Egypt and celebrating the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery, a haunting parallel from modern history has reemerged to challenge collective memory. According to a newly published investigative report detailed by The Jerusalem Post, Egypt was once again the setting of an exodus — not from ancient bondage, but from 20th-century persecution, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing.

The report, compiled and released by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) after six years of rigorous documentation, shines a powerful light on the tragic dismantling of Egypt’s Jewish community during the mid-20th century. It estimates that the total value of assets seized from Jewish families and institutions in Egypt stands at a staggering $59 billion in today’s currency — a measure not just of economic loss, but of cultural and communal erasure.

As The Jerusalem Post report indicated, the modern Jewish experience in Egypt was a rich tapestry woven across millennia, marked by deep cultural, religious, and economic contributions. But while the ancient Israelite exodus is preserved in sacred tradition, the modern-day uprooting of Egyptian Jewry remains a largely unspoken tragedy, one that brought to an abrupt halt thousands of years of continuous Jewish presence along the Nile.

“Unlike its ancient counterpart, the modern-day uprooting of Egyptian Jewry is not a tale of triumph but of tragedy,” the JJAC wrote. “It brought to a grinding halt millennia of vibrant history and heritage.”

The Jewish presence in Egypt, as The Jerusalem Post report recounted, spans well beyond biblical legend. Historical records place Jews in Egypt as early as the end of the First Temple period, with a thriving community persisting through the Second Temple era. The ancient “Land of Onias”, home to a Jewish temple during the Hasmonean period, and the great intellectual and religious centers of Alexandria cemented Egypt’s role as a key node in the Jewish diaspora.

Through centuries of alternating tolerance and repression, Jewish life endured under Hellenistic, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and British rule. Medieval luminaries such as Saadia Gaon and Maimonides lived and worked in Egypt, while the discovery of the Cairo Geniza revealed a 1,000-year treasure trove of daily documents — marriage contracts, letters, business records — chronicling the intricate texture of Jewish life in the Islamic world.

According to the report cited by The Jerusalem Post, Egyptian Jews were far more than a religious minority — they were integral architects of modern Egypt’s economic and cultural infrastructure.

Stanley Urman, executive director of JJAC, emphasized that Jewish Egyptians were instrumental in shaping Egypt’s industrial and financial frameworks: “They were key in building the modern economic framework in every sector: agriculture, industry, commerce, and finance,” Urman explained.

Prominent Jewish figures played foundational roles in Egyptian society. Moreno Cicurel built Cairo’s premier department stores. The Mosseri banking family helped modernize Egypt’s financial system.

Joseph Smouha, a Jewish businessman from Baghdad who had settled in Alexandria, developed entire urban neighborhoods, including the now-famous Smouha City.

Jewish cultural figures also left a lasting imprint. Composer Daoud Khidr Levi (known as Dawood Hosni) was a giant in Arab music, while playwright and satirist Yaqub Sanu was an early pioneer of Egyptian theater and journalism, as was explained in The Jerusalem Post report. These individuals, along with countless unnamed merchants, educators, doctors, and artisans, helped shape Egypt into a thriving and cosmopolitan society in the early 20th century.

Despite their vast contributions, Egypt’s Jews faced a swift and merciless reversal of fortune beginning in the mid-20th century. As The Jerusalem Post reported, political turmoil, Arab nationalism, and the fallout from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War began to cast Jews as scapegoats. Persecution intensified following the 1956 Suez Crisis, during which Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered the expulsion of Jews and the nationalization of their assets.

Many Jews were stripped of their citizenship, imprisoned, or forced to flee with only the clothes on their backs. Their homes, businesses, and community institutions were confiscated — a coordinated campaign of state-sanctioned theft and erasure that today would be considered a form of ethnic cleansing.

By the early 1970s, a once-vibrant population of over 80,000 Jews had dwindled to just a few dozen. The report in The Jerusalem Post said that communities, synagogues, and cemeteries fell into neglect or were demolished. The modern exodus was complete — not to the sound of triumphant liberation, but to the silence of forgotten history.

As The Jerusalem Post meticulously reported, by the early 20th century, Egypt’s Jewish community numbered around 60,000, a population bolstered by refugees fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East. These Jews were not peripheral to Egyptian life — they were deeply integrated into government, commerce, and diplomacy, shaping the very institutions that underpinned modern Egyptian society.

But the 1930s marked a dramatic turning point. Egypt became increasingly entangled in the rise of global fascism and local extremism. The growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood injected a volatile dose of religious militancy into Egyptian nationalism, while European-style fascist ideologies gave anti-Jewish sentiment new vigor.

As The Jerusalem Post cited from the JJAC report: “Violence, arrests, bombings, blood libels, and the virus of Jew-hatred had spread like a biblical plague throughout Egypt.”

This toxic atmosphere only intensified with the rise of the “Palestine problem”, which served as a lightning rod for nationalist grievances. Jews — many of whom had lived in Egypt for generations — were suddenly recast as outsiders, their loyalty questioned, their institutions attacked.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 marked the beginning of the end for Egyptian Jewry. From that year until 1966, an estimated 63,000 Jews fled Egypt, driven out by arbitrary arrests, travel restrictions, and the seizure of their homes and businesses, The Jerusalem Post report said. The 1956 Suez Crisis served as an accelerant: within just a year, 25,000 of the remaining 45,000 Jews had been expelled or fled in terror.

Then came 1967’s Six Day War, which proved to be the final blow. Egypt’s government rounded up Jews, imprisoning many without trial, while deporting the remainder under hostile conditions. By the early 1970s, Egypt’s once-thriving Jewish population had been reduced to a ghost community. Today, just two elderly Jews remain, according to the JJAC’s findings published by The Jerusalem Post.

While Jewish history in Egypt spans over three millennia, contemporary Egyptian leadership has largely denied or downplayed the persecution and expulsion of Jews. The Jerusalem Post reported that  in 2023, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi told then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “Jews always lived peacefully in Egypt” and were “never targeted.”

The JJAC report, however, directly refutes this narrative, providing extensive documentation and survivor testimony to the contrary. One such voice is Levana Zamir, president of the International Association of Jews from Egypt and vice president of JJAC. Recalling her forced departure, Zamir stated: “The Egyptians told us, ‘You are Zionists; you are enemies of this country, so we will confiscate all your assets.’ And they did.”

For Elie Abadie, co-president of JJAC, this denial compounds the original injustice. He notes that Jews are indigenous to the Middle East, predating Islam by over 1,500 years, and yet their story has been deliberately erased from Arab national narratives.

“The truth about the uprooting of Jews from Arab totalitarian regimes, dictatorships, and monarchies has been denied for over 75 years,” he explained to The Jerusalem Post. “This important project endeavors to set the record straight.”

The JJAC report is more than a forensic accounting of lost wealth — it is an urgent attempt to preserve a vanishing historical truth. As Stanley Urman told The Jerusalem Post, “Over the past 70 years, the long and proud history of Jews in Egypt slowly and inexorably moved toward extinction with the passing of each elderly Jew. The mission of JJAC is to preserve this history in the name of truth and justice.”

Indeed, Egypt’s Jewish past is not a footnote — it was once a cornerstone of Egyptian society. From the ancient Jewish temple in the Land of Onias, to medieval luminaries like Maimonides, to modern cultural icons like composer Dawood Hosni and developer Joseph Smouha, Jews helped shape Egypt’s religious, intellectual, artistic, and urban landscape. But their abrupt disappearance — and the silence that followed — has left a gaping wound in the region’s memory.

As Passover invites Jews to recall their liberation from ancient Egyptian bondage, The Jerusalem Post report urges us not to forget those who, in the modern era, were driven from the same land not into freedom, but into exile. The JJAC’s work stands as a clarion call: remembrance must not stop at ritual. Justice requires that truth be acknowledged, losses be accounted for, and the legacy of a people unjustly cast out be reclaimed.

The ancient Exodus is immortalized in scripture. The modern one — wrenching, silenced, and unresolved — is only now beginning to be written into the historical record.