Refugee Speaks on History of Jewish Displacement

Recalling his childhood experiences, a former Jewish Egyptian refugee recounted the history of Jewish displacement in the Middle East and urged his audience to keep an open mind in a speech last night.

One audience member, however, loudly challenged the speaker’s own objectivity at the close of the speech.

Joseph Abdel Wahed spoke to a packed Lowell House Junior Common Room at an event organized by Harvard Students for Israel.

Wahed, co-founder of Jewish Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, was born in Cairo. His family fled to Europe after the Egyptian government confiscated their property. After finishing his degree at Sorbonne, Wahed moved to San Francisco, where he rose in ranks to become chief economist at Wells Fargo Bank.

Wahed said he aims to bring awareness to the displacement of Jews from the Middle East.

“We are the forgotten refugees of the Middle East,” Wahed said. “But tonight, I break my silence.”

According to Wahed, Egyptian Jews’ minority status and deep-seated religious tensions with the larger Muslim community created “anxiety and uncertainty that caused stress and fear.”

He remembered an especially chilling moment as a 16-year-old when one of his close Muslim friends suddenly wiped his hand across his neck and said, “One day I would slit the throat of all the Jews.”

Wahed was quick to note, however, that the majority of Muslims are “the most welcoming people in the world,” and that the “silent majority who wanted us to stay [in Egypt]” far outnumbered the Islamic fundamentalists.

Once during his childhood, Wahed said a Muslim janitor taught him to say in Arabic “I am a Muslim, and I believe in one God” in case he ran into belligerent Muslim mobs.

But thinking about that experience after arriving in the United States made him realize he had been forced to deny his heritage in exchange for safety in Egypt.

Wahed said he was disappointed to find ethnic prejudice on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

While speaking to a peace rally at San Francisco State University last May, Wahed said he faced taunts that “Hitler did not finish the job.” Wahed said that to his horror, “the police stood there as frozen as an Egyptian policeman” while protesters physically attacked Jewish students present.

“I’m not as safe as I thought I was,” Wahed said.

But Wahed said that he decided to affirm his heritage and not try to appease the mob, unlike his teenage days in Egypt.

“I turned around to face them. I said, ‘I am a Jew, and I believe in one God,’” he said.

He also stepped back from personal experiences to give audience his perception of the history and persecution of Jews in the Middle East.

“There’s always a way for us to survive, and we’ve always lived under other people,” Wahed said. He noted the important contributions Jews have made to Middle Eastern societies, citing his relatives who helped draft the Egyptian constitution in the 1920s and composed music for several legendary Egyptian singers.

Wahed stressed that the key to overcoming anti-Semitism is understanding.

“Only when I can say, ‘I’m a Jew, and I believe in one God,’ will there be peace,” concluded Wahed to a roomful of applause.

Audience feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

“It’s obviously a story that has not been told very much. I think these events diminish some of the myopia that people have about Middle East and Jewish identity,” said third-year law student Nugzari Jakobishvili, who was born in the country of Georgia.

During the question-and-answer session afterward, however, Joachim C. Martillo ’78 angrily challenged Wahed’s earlier comment that “Arabs are pathological liars.”

“I thought this was another one of those anti-Arab events,” said Martillo. “It met my expectations.”

After the event ended, Wahed said he had misspoken in making that comment and only meant to refer to Arab leaders.