Adonis Diaries

The “Blue Moslem” Jews of Egypt: Same cultural sympathies?

Posted on: June 17, 2012


I am reading a French book of childhood memories of 32 Jews who immigrated to France in the 50’s and 60’s from “Arab African” States of Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt, and the Near East Mediterranean Sea States of Lebanon and Turkey.

Should the occupation of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe of Palestine and the establishment of a colonial apartheid State of Israel cancel out the centuries of cultural sympathies that the Sephardi Jews connected with the Arab and Islam culture, civilization and traditions?

I might review a few of these childhood memories and group them on gender and geographic location. I discovered that:

1. The male authors have very different recollections from the females, due to their greater freedom to mingle with other communities and stepping out of their homes…

2. The Jews in the northern African States during the extended French colonial period have been discriminated by the French from the Moslems and given French citizenship and forced to learn in French schools with French programs…

3. Most of the adult males, including fathers and grandfathers, had to be forced to immigrate, their feet first: They were totally unwilling to relocate to France and change their life style…

I am reporting in this post on the “Blue Moslems” of the Caraite (Karaite) Jewish sect community in Egypt.

Mireille Cohen Massouda was born in Cairo in 1940 and immigrated with her family to France in 1953. Mireille wrote that she belonged to the Caraites community in opposition to the Rabbanite Jewish sect.

Much later, in France, she understood the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.

The Cariates religion was transmitted by the father instead of the mother, and the young males were dispatched to Crimea in order to select a Jewish wife.

Josy Eisemberg said in one of her 4 commentaries in 1994 that the Caraites were considered as “Jews of the Jews“, meaning not really accepted as original Jews by the local Jews in Palestine.

In fact, Nazi Germany delayed defining the Caraites as Jews till 1944.

In the meantime, the Caraites would issue certificates to the Rabbanites that they were Caraites and saved them from certain extermination for many years.

The Caraites were called the “Blue Moslems” in Cairo because all their praying and eating customs and traditions were identical to the Moslems, with this slight difference: Their praying garment had blue stripes…

Mireille wrote that she was assigned a separate section of the house where she slept with the female servant.  Apparently, the well-to-do Caraite Jewish families preferred to separate the females from the males gender…

Lower class Caraite families sent their young girls to work as servants at richer Caraite families in order to save for their dowry…

Apparently, the family of the girl was to provide the dowery of the girls for their marriage?

Is it about time to separate political Resolutions of Israel/Palestine from cultural sympathies in the Near East?

Note: Mireille Cohen-Massouda works at the hospital of Argenteuil as pedo-Psychiatry.  She is engaged at disseminating the belief system of the Carait sect, a Jewish faction that was established in the 8th century by Anan Ben David. She wrote and directed the film “From silence to speaking”

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s




June 2012

Blog Stats

  • 1,416,088 hits


Join 767 other followers

%d bloggers like this: