History of the Jews in Egypt
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| (57,500+) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Israel
|
57,500 |
 Egypt
|
6 |
| Languages | |
| Hebrew, Arabic | |
| Religion | |
| Judaism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Mizrahi Jews, Sephardi Jews | |
Egyptian Jews constitute both one of the oldest and youngest Jewish communities in the world. 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 began to expel its Jewish population (estimated at between 75,000 and 80,000 in 1948), also sequestering Jewish-owned property at this time.
In 2016, the spiritual leader of the Jews in Egypt, Magda Tania Haroun, stated that there were 6 Jews remaining in the entire country, all women over the age of 65.
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, and the three-month journey through the wilderness to Sinai. The historical evidence does not back this account. Israelites first appear in the archeological record on the Merneptah Stele from between 1208-3 BCE 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 less specific than the Biblical "Hebrew". The term referred simply to Levantine nomads, of any religion or ethnicity. Mesopotamian, Hittite, Canaanite, and Egyptian sources describe 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.
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