The idea of the Jewish contribution to civilization is generally understood as a Western counter-discourse that, often expressed in response to anti-Semitism, aims to change attitudes towards Jews. My examination of the appropriation of this idea by the Egyptian-Jewish writer Alfred Yallouz in the early 1940s proposes that he embedded it in his national and regional politics of Jewish cultural reform. Here, it served the aim of promoting Jewish belonging to Arab society by addressing historical Jewish contributions to Arab culture, and connecting these to Arab-Jewish relations in the present.

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