The Forgotten Bridge-Builder: How One Jewish Egyptian Filmmaker Embodied a Lost Middle Eastern Unity
In an era of deepening Middle Eastern divisions, the legacy of Togo Mizrahi reveals a radically different past where Jewish and Arab artists created together in Cairo’s golden age of cinema.
When Cairo Was Hollywood on the Nile
The 1930s and 1940s marked an extraordinary period in Egyptian cultural history, when Cairo rivaled any global cinema capital in its creative output and cosmopolitan spirit. This was the golden age of Egyptian cinema, a time when the city’s film industry produced works that resonated across the Arab world and beyond. At the heart of this cultural renaissance stood figures like Togo Mizrahi, a Jewish Egyptian filmmaker whose very existence challenges contemporary assumptions about Middle Eastern identity and belonging.
Mizrahi wasn’t merely a participant in this cultural flowering—he was one of its architects. As a director, producer, and studio owner, he created films that seamlessly wove together elements from Egypt’s diverse communities: Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Greek, and Italian. His productions featured Arabic-speaking Jewish actors, Muslim performers, and stories that reflected the multicultural reality of pre-1950s Egypt. This was not tolerance performed for international audiences, but lived experience captured on celluloid.
The Erasure of Cosmopolitan Memory
Today, Mizrahi’s name is largely absent from mainstream narratives about Middle Eastern cinema. This amnesia is not accidental but reflects the profound demographic and political transformations that swept the region after 1948. The establishment of Israel, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab countries created a historical rupture that made figures like Mizrahi inconvenient to remember. His films—featuring Jewish actors speaking fluent Arabic, Muslim-Jewish business partnerships, and intercommunal friendships—document a social reality that contradicts both Israeli and Arab nationalist narratives of eternal conflict.
The contemporary rediscovery of Mizrahi’s work by scholars and film archivists has sparked uncomfortable questions. His 30-plus films, many thought lost until recently, reveal an Egypt where identity was fluid rather than fixed, where a Jewish filmmaker could direct comedies beloved by Muslim audiences, and where cultural production wasn’t segregated along religious lines. This evidence of past coexistence challenges the inevitability narrative that dominates current Middle Eastern discourse.
Policy Implications of Cultural Memory
The Mizrahi case illustrates how cultural memory shapes political possibility. When societies forget their cosmopolitan past, they lose the imaginative resources to envision pluralistic futures. The systematic erasure of Jewish contributions to Arab culture—from Mizrahi’s films to the music of Iraq’s Jewish musicians—impoverishes contemporary Middle Eastern societies and reinforces zero-sum thinking about identity and belonging.
Recent efforts by institutions like the Arab Film Archive to preserve and digitize Mizrahi’s work represent more than mere historical preservation. They constitute a form of cultural diplomacy that could provide new vocabularies for discussing Middle Eastern identity beyond the binary of Arab versus Jew. As younger generations in both Israel and Arab countries encounter these films, they discover ancestors who inhabited hyphenated identities comfortably—Egyptian-Jewish, Arab-Jewish, Levantine-cosmopolitan—categories that contemporary politics renders almost unthinkable.
Conclusion
Togo Mizrahi’s films offer more than nostalgia for a lost golden age; they provide evidence that the Middle East’s current polarizations are historical constructions rather than eternal truths. As the region grapples with questions of minorities, citizenship, and belonging, perhaps the real question isn’t whether the past can be recovered, but whether contemporary societies possess the courage to acknowledge what was deliberately forgotten—and why?
