How this artist went from hiding to embracing her Mizrahi heritage

Sydney artist Camille Fox is perhaps best known for her vibrant oil paintings of Egyptian Jewry’s bygone era. Yet for decades, Fox rarely disclosed that she’s fourth-generation Egyptian, instead telling people she was French.

“When you say you're from Egypt, people think you're an Arab … I didn’t want to be mistaken. And it was difficult to explain,” she tells The Jewish Independent in an interview for Mizrahi Heritage Month.

With French as her first language, it was easy for Fox to obscure her Mizrahi origins. It was only after she reluctantly agreed to travel to Egypt from Israel – by which time she was already in her 50s – that Fox changed her perspective. Since then, Egypt is the theme that the figurative artist keeps returning to in her work. But it’s an Egypt that’s alive only in memory. 

Fox’s series Halcyon Days, for example, depicts the everyday life of Egypt’s bourgeoisie in the 1930s. This was the heyday of Fox’s grandparents, when, as Fox writes on her website, “Christians, Muslims and Jews celebrated each other's festivals and attended each other's weddings, played cards, enjoyed afternoon tea on sunny terraces in the winters of Cairo and sailed in Alexandria's harbour in summer.” 

However, the establishment of Israel in 1948, the fall of King Farouk in 1952 and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship combined to create hostility towards Jews, culminating in confiscation of property, persecution and expulsion. Of the 80,000 Jews living in Egypt in 1948, nearly all of them left; Fox’s family among them – Fox was just six when she and her parents fled Alexandria for Israel in 1954.