Egypt is considered to be one of the few countries in which Arab culture flourished among the Jews, in both the popular and the canonical fields. Some of Jews, such as Yacqūb Ṣanūc (James Sanua) (1839-1912), Togo Mizraḥī (1901-1987), and Laylā Murād (1918-1995), rose to prominence. However, on the whole, Jewish involvement was relatively limited in comparison to Iraq, probably because Arabic had low status among Egyptian Jews. A Jew as “a carbon copy of ibn al-balad” was never a desired option for most of the Egyptian-Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals. Due to the peculiar demographic structure of Egyptian Jewry, the dreams of its members were much more infused with the spirit of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, which was the product of a limited period and singular history – that of the crumbling Ottoman Empire.