Noémie Canel (1927–2012) was an Egyptian Jewish communist who spent a total of 11 years
in various prisons in Cairo and was deported from Egypt twice. Throughout the period of her
activism and long incarceration, she persisted in “the democratic struggle”, all while resisting
her exclusion from Egypt and from her political family. Yet, the historiography of the commu
nist movement in Egypt is almost devoid of any mention of her name or existence. Noémie’s
experience—and her subsequent invisibility in the historiography—was shaped by her being a
woman and a so-called “foreign” Jewish communist in post-colonial Egypt. I examine hundreds
of letters written by her and about her in the period 1948–59, to analyze the gendered nature of
communist activism in mid-century Egypt, and to argue that her feminized role in the movement
entailed the complete fusion of her personal and political being and aspirations. On the other
hand, I trace in Noémie’s prison letters the increasingly precarious position of the communist
Jews of Egypt, and, in response, their embrace of post-colonial nationalism and their striving
towards their “Egyptianization”. In the case of Noémie, both her being a woman and a “foreign”
Jewish communist made contingent her personal fate and her emotional well-being upon the fate
of the movement, and particularly upon the fate of the increasingly excluded Jewish communists
of Egypt. Ultimately the defeat of the movement, and the inability of Egypt’s Jewish communists
to maintain their place in it or in the country, meant her personal defeat and desolation.