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Joseph Aslan Cattaui Pacha Joseph A. Cattaui (1861–1942) was Egypt’s most prominent Jew between the two world wars, tracing his family’s residence in Egypt back to the eighthcentury Umayyad period. His surname is often spelled Cattaoui, and he is also known as Yusuf (or Youssef) Qattawi. A graduate of the world’s oldest engineering school, the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, Cattaui authored books on Egyptian and world history as well as of scientific articles, writing in Hebrew, French, and Arabic. He was also an entrepreneur, a wealthy businessman, financier, agricultural industrialist, and hydrologist. Reasonably sympathetic to women’s causes, from 1924 until his death, Cattaui was the avidly non-Zionist leader of Cairo’s Jewish community. A practicing Jew, he began his public life and career by taking a position in the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. In 1912 he was made a pasha; in 1916 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly; and in 1916 he joined the Committee of Trade and Industry. Cattaui then left Egypt to study the sugar refining industry in Moravia. After his return he became the director of the Egyptian Sugar Company and president of the Kom Ombo Company, which developed a sugar industry in Aswan Province, cultivating sugar cane on 70,000 acres of what had been desert land. Building on this base, Cattaui established industrial and financial enterprises, often in partnership with other Egyptian Jewish families. Following the 1919 Revolution, Cattaui was sent to London to help negotiate Egyptian independence. During this same period he was also the founding director of Bank Misr and the chief mentor of Tala‘at Harb (1867–1941), a leading Egyptian economist and founder of the Bank of Egypt. In 1922 Cattaui was appointed to the Constitutional Committee that drafted the Egyptian Constitution. He became minister of finance in 1924 and minister of communications in 1925. At this time Iraq also had a Jewish minister of finance, the legendary Sasson Heskel Effendi, (later Sir Heskel Sasson, 1860– 1932). In 1927 King Fuad appointed Cattaui to the Egyptian Senate, where from 1931 to 1935 he chaired the Finance Committee. Amid the tumultuous concurrent rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism, Cattaui did as much as he could to help Egypt’s chief rabbi, the scholarly Haim Nahum Effendi (1872–1960), manage the affairs of the Egyptian Jewish community. Both men kept as low a profile as they could. ...

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