A pseudo-scholarly antisemitic book is discussed at the Cairo Book Fair ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, January 29, 2026

A pseudo-scholarly antisemitic book is discussed at the Cairo Book Fair

At the Cairo International Book Fair there was a discussion of the book "Jews of the Arab World: Claims of Persecution" by Zubaydah Atta.

The point of the book appears to be to prove that Jews really were not treated bad in the Arab world - an easily provable lie.

One specific statistic that Ms. Atta claimed in the talk was that Jews had been a peripheral presence in Jerusalem, saying that an Ottoman census found only 60 Jewish families in the entire city. I could not find any such census; the lowest number I could find was in 16th century Ottoman tax recordss that said there were 1,194 Jews, about 21% of the total population, which is still significant.

This author is not telling the truth even in her "scholarship."

But this book, being praised by fellow Egyptian "scholars," goes much further than just discussing Jews in Muslim lands. It describes the Jewish mindset (simultaneously pretending to be the victim and supremacist,) it critiques Jewish interpretation of the Torah as being selective, it accuses Jews of inventing stories that distort Islamic history and it says Zionists created false narratives about Jewish history to the West.

This goes way beyond Jews in the Arab world into lots of other fields like European history, psychology and theology, which is strange for a supposedly scholarly work.

But it all makes sense when you realize that these disparate factoids all converge on one theme: Jews are bad.

And this is the level of scholarship that gets celebrated at the Arab world's premier book fair.