Joseph Aslan Cattaui Pacha

Origins and early life

Joseph Aslan Cattaui was born in Cairo in 1861 into the Cattaui family, the leading Jewish banking dynasty of Egypt, whose members had served the khedives as treasurers since the early nineteenth century; his father Yacoub Cattaui, president of the Jewish community of Cairo, had been made a bey and then a pasha.

Work and career

Joseph studied engineering in Paris at the École Centrale, worked in the Egyptian ministry of public works, and then turned to the family's businesses, founding sugar refineries and helping to create in 1920, with Talaat Harb, Bank Misr, the first bank owned by Egyptian capital. A convinced Egyptian patriot, he was one of the members of the delegation that went to London in 1922 to negotiate the country's independence from Britain, sat in the committee of thirty that drafted the constitution of 1923, and was elected to the first parliament of the kingdom.

In 1924 King Fuad made him minister of finance in the first government after independence, and in 1925 minister of communications; he was appointed to the Senate in 1927 and sat there until his death. He was president of the Sephardi Jewish community of Cairo from 1924 to 1942, a period when Egypt's Jews numbered some 75,000 and lived at the heart of the country's economic and cultural life, and his wife Alice Suarès Cattaui was lady-in-waiting to Queen Nazli.

His position as a Jewish minister of an Arab state, plainly stated here, was unremarkable in the Egypt of the 1920s and became unthinkable a generation later. He wrote on Egyptian finances and on the Copts and Jews of Egypt, and died in Cairo in 1942, before the events that would scatter the community he led.