Youssef Darwish

Youssef Darwish (Arabic: يوسف درويش‎‎) (October 2, 1910 - June 7, 2006) was an Egyptian labour lawyer, communist and activist. During his years of political activism, he was frequently accused of communist subversion and imprisoned, spending around 10 years of his life in jail. Of Jewish background, he converted to Islam in 1947. He was one of the few from the Karaite Jewish community to remain in Egypt after the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Darwish was born in 1910 to the Jewish Egyptian jeweller Moussa Youssef Farag Darwish. His family belonged to the minority Karaite Jews that were one of the communities that comprised the rich and diverse mosaic of Egyptian Jewry. Karaite Jews were simultaneously multilingual and highly integrated in the Egyptian community at that time; most families spoke French and Arabic at home and sent their children to bilingual schools. Some families spoke Greek, Russian and Turkish as well.

Darwish graduated from a prestigious French high school in Cairo, l'École des frères, in 1929 and received his degree in law from the University of Toulouse in 1932. In Toulouse, Darwish was first exposed to Marxist literature and became engaged in the local cell of the French Communist Party.

In 1934, Darwish returned to Egypt and started his career as a labour lawyer and political organizer. Together with two other Egyptian Jewish activists - Ahmad Sadiq Sa'd and Raymond Douek- he established a new secret Egyptian communist organization known as Al-Fajr Al-Jadid (Arabic: لفجر الجديد‎‎) or the New Dawn, that was linked to many trade unions. By the mid-1940s, Darwish had become the legal representer to 67 of Egypt's then 170 labour unions, for which he worked with minimal or no fees.

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