Cairo - With scenes of religious coexistence and vintage elegance in a more cosmopolitan era, an Egyptian soap opera aims to dispel prejudice towards the country's long-vilified and nearly extinct Jewish community.
"The Jewish Quarter" shows life inside Cairo's Haret al-Yahud district during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, depicting an almost idyllic portrait of a society where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side.
"I wanted to present this cosmopolitanism bringing together all religions" and to "show how Egypt used to be, and how it is today," said screenwriter Medhat al-Adl.
He said he wanted "to break the taboo and prejudice" by presenting "normal Jewish characters," in contrast to the derogatory representation of Jews in recent decades in movies and television shows.
The series initially won praise from Israel whose embassy in Cairo said it was pleased to see "for the first time, Jews represented according to their true nature, as human beings".
The show is openly anti-Zionist, however, and the Israeli embassy later criticised what it described as a "negative turning point" in the series and "attacks against the state of Israel".
The soap is being aired during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, considered television peak season in Egypt.
More than 80,000 Jews lived in Egypt before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked the start of an exodus.
Today only a few dozen, mostly elderly women, remain in Cairo and Alexandria.
With the many wars waged between Egypt and the Jewish state and the anti-Semitism they generated, Jews were either expelled or pressured to leave the Arab world's most populous country.
AFP
