Yaqub Sanu

Origins and early life

Yaqub Sanu, who signed himself James Sanua in Europe, was born in Cairo on 9 February 1839 to an Egyptian Jewish mother and to Raphael Sanua, a Sephardi Jew from Livorno who worked as an adviser to an Egyptian prince, and no conversion is documented; he remained a Jew and argued all his life for an Egypt in which Muslims, Christians and Jews were one people.

Work and career

Sent to Livorno at thirteen on the prince's stipend, he studied there and came home speaking Italian, French, English and Hebrew alongside Arabic. He taught at the polytechnic in Cairo, and in 1870 he founded the first theatre company performing in Egyptian colloquial Arabic rather than in literary Arabic or in European languages, writing some thirty plays that satirised marriage customs, corrupt officials and European pretensions; the khedive Ismail called him the Molière of Egypt before closing his theatre in 1872 for mocking him.

In 1877 he founded Abu Naddara Zarqa, the man with the blue glasses, the first Egyptian satirical journal, written in colloquial Arabic and illustrated with caricatures, which attacked the khedive and the British presence. Exiled in 1878, he continued to print it in Paris and smuggle it into Egypt for thirty years, reaching a readership far beyond the literate class through its drawings. He is counted as the founder of both Egyptian popular theatre and Arabic political caricature, and he died in Paris in 1912.