Samy Ibrahim, an Egyptian of Jewish descent on his father’s side, had never paid much attention to his family story. It was not until 2015, when he joined the calls to revive Drop of Milk, an association dedicated to the preservation of Egypt’s rich Jewish heritage, that Ibrahim, then 48, became curious about Judaism and its legacy.

Up until that moment, he barely knew that his grandmother’s family was originally from Eastern Europe and that his grandfather, Jack, came from Turkey. His family name, Arie, which means "lion" in Hebrew, had never sparked his curiosity. “This is all we knew,” Ibrahim recounted to Al-Monitor. “Until I started to dig into the family’s history.”

Going through the family archive earlier this year, Ibrahim first found two documents issued by the Spanish Embassy in Cairo at the beginning of the 1930s for the stateless parents of his grandmother, Matilde Goldenberg. The papers that marked his first connection with Spain turned out to be old documents of protection.

During the British Protectorate in Egypt and until the late 30s, the prospects of legal and fiscal privileges reserved to foreign minorities under the Capitulations — a treaty under which one state permits another to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction over its own nationals within its territory — made it more beneficial for them to seek protection from Western states. The states were largely open to granting it, first in the form of citizenship and then as protégés, since they considered those minorities well placed in Egypt’s society.