Under the Crescent

A sweeping epic of exile, endurance, and truth forgotten. From one of the most courageous and controversial historians of our time comes an electrifying trilogy of novels—Moïse, Élie, and Ghazal—that bring to life the vanished world of Middle Eastern Jewry and its dramatic dissolution under the rising tide of Arab nationalism and Islamist totalitarianism. Bat Ye’or—“Daughter of the Nile,” exile of Nasser’s Egypt, and indomitable witness to the historical fate of Jews and Christians under Islam—has spent a lifetime unearthing hidden truths. Her nonfiction has challenged prevailing myths. Now, in this monumental work of fiction, she turns to the intimate and epic, portraying the human faces behind the centuries of dhimmitude—a status of legal and spiritual inferiority imposed on non-Muslims—and the slow, devastating collapse of a civilization. Spanning the Cairo of the 19th century through the cataclysms of the World Wars to the final expulsion of Jews from Egypt in the 1950s, the trilogy follows three generations of one Jewish family whose members fight—through faith, rebellion, or resignation—to remain anchored in a homeland that steadily unravels around them. At once historical document and literary masterwork, this is a tale of memory and mourning, of identities stifled and voices rising, of lives swallowed by the Nile’s muddy tide and yet luminous in their witness. With the moral clarity of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the historical rigor of Primo Levi, and the lyrical power of Elsa Morante, Bat Ye’or renders an unforgettable account of the “numberless victims of history” and restores them to their rightful place in our collective memory. This is a story that had to be lived to be told—and must be told to be understood.