138 y฀ PROOFTEXTS 26 (2006): 138–162. Copyright © 2006 by Prooftexts Ltd. Sensing the City: Representations of Cairo’s Ÿarat al-Yahud DEBORAH A. STARR Our Cairo had been two cities that turned their backs on each other. One looked like Paris, because Khedive Ismaªil, who ruled in the middle of the nineteenth century, had wanted to pull Egypt into Europe and had brought in European architects to build it. The other had narrow mean- dering streets, mausoleums, and public baths; fountains with curvy iron grilles and windows screened by wooden lattices; Coptic churches and mosques with minarets rising into the sky like delicately embroidered candles. —Claudia Roden 1 B eginning with the dispersion of the modern Egyptian Jewish community in the middle of the twentieth century, a rich body of litera- ture has appeared, representing, memorializing, and to a certain extent inventing the lively and seductive lifestyle attributed to a lost Egyptian cosmopoli- tanism. The life portrayed in these works was a product of elite, urban society during a period of indirect and direct foreign involvement in the Egyptian economy and governance from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. 2 Texts about Cairo traverse the open but hardly public spaces of the city that, to employ Claudia Roden’s characterization, “looked like Paris”—the sporting clubs, the opera house and grand salons of vast apartments—and barely, if ever, venture into the districts with “meandering streets” and “windows screened by wooden lattices.” 3 Within this