These are images of the cover and first page, handwritten in French, of the “Minutes of Cairo Lodge No. 687, B’nei B’rit, Cairo 1911-1912.” The B’nei B’rit is one of the world’s oldest Jewish service organizations, which was established in 1843 in a Jewish coffeehouse in New York City, and its lodges in Egypt were among the first outside the United States. It was modelled after fraternities such as the Free Masons, which were popular in the 19^th century; women’s lodges of the B’nei B’rit were established in Cairo and Alexandria already in 1939. In Cairo, Lodge 687 was a Sephardi one, established in 1911 after an older lodge, called Magen David, was closed down. An Ashkenazi lodge, called Maimonides, was established in Cairo in 1887. The membership of these Jewish fraternities was made up of the rising commercial and professional middle class in Egypt. They were preoccupied with extensive charity work and community building, as well as with reforming and modernizing the existing Jewish communal organizations, often in opposition to what they saw as a traditional, conservative, and elitist leadership. The B’nei B’rit lodges were also concerned with Jewish cultural revival, advocating for Jewish causes in Egypt and around the world, and contending with the rise of Zionism. The minutes from the meetings of the B’nei B’rit lodges are, therefore, crucial for understanding the social, organizational, and political history of the Jewish community in Egypt in the 20^th century.

The minutes of meetings from both lodge 687, and from the Maimonides lodge (for the years 1924-1928), are both part of Penn’s newly acquired microfilm copy of The Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection: Records of the Jewish Community of Cairo, 1886-1961 at Yeshiva University Libraries. This extensive, albeit fragmented and incomplete, collection consists of account books, by-laws, case files, certificates, correspondence, legal documents, minutes, photographs and reports from various institutions of the Sephardic Jewish community in Cairo, and to a lesser extent, of the Ashkenazi community there as well. The most important institutions featured in this collection are the Jewish Community Council, the Chief Rabbinate, the various charity organizations, and the B'nai B'rith lodges. This makes the Lehmann Collection the most extensive and important archival source that is freely accessible to researchers today about the post-Geniza social and political history of the Jewish community in Egypt.1