Togo Mizrahi

Origins and early life

Togo Mizrahi, born Joseph Elie Mizrahi at Alexandria on 2 June 1901, came from a well-off Jewish family of Italian origin long established in Egypt and holding Italian nationality, and he remained a Jew.

Work and career

He studied commerce in Italy and France, and in 1929 he built a film studio at Alexandria, one of the first in the Arab world, and began directing under the name Togo Mizrahi. Between 1930 and 1946 he made about thirty feature films in Arabic and four in Greek, an output that made him one of the two or three men who created the Egyptian film industry, then the dominant cinema of the Arabic-speaking world. His comedies of the 1930s built the careers of the actor Ali al-Kassar and of the Jewish-Egyptian comedian Chalom, and they played on the mingling of Alexandria's communities, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Greek and Italian, treating that mixture as ordinary and as funny.

He then made the musicals that turned Layla Murad into the biggest star in Egypt, six films with her between 1938 and 1944.

Later years

His career ended with the political turn against Egypt's Jews after 1948; he was stripped of his Egyptian citizenship in the 1950s and left for Italy, where he lived until his death in Rome on 5 October 1986. His work was largely written out of Egyptian film history and was restored to it by the research of Deborah Starr, published by the University of California Press.