I. Fustat and Islamic Cairo
Medieval Jewish life concentrated in Fustat (Old Cairo). Benjamin of Tudela described a major community with Palestinian and Iraqi-rite synagogues.
This was the milieu in which Maimonides settled — legislating Torah-scroll standards and writing Judeo-Arabic works.
II. Scribal Hub and the Genizah
Samuel ben Jacob completed the Leningrad Codex in Cairo in 1008. The Ben Ezra Synagogue accumulated the Cairo Genizah. Solomon Schechter's 1896 expedition reshaped modern scholarship.
III. Modern Egypt and the Exodus
By the early twentieth century Cairo's Jews numbered in the tens of thousands. The 1948 war, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and Nasser's nationalizations triggered mass emigration.