Jacqueline Shohet was born in Cairo, Egypt, on May 18, 1917. Her mother, Yvonne Chemla, was born in Egypt to a family of Tunisian Jews who owned the Chemla Frères department store in Cairo. Jacqueline’s father, Joseph Shohet, immigrated to Egypt from Iraq with his parents and became a successful cotton trader. Jacqueline grew up in a multilingual household; the family spoke French at home, but her father was most comfortable speaking and reading Arabic. The Shohet family was sufficiently well-off to employ a series of British nannies and governesses in their home to educate Jaqueline and her sister Josette in English. 

Jacqueline attended the Lycée Français in Cairo and in 1935 earned her Baccalaureate—the French national academic qualification taken at the end of high school. In 1938-1939, she studied French law in Cairo, just at the time the mixed courts—the legal system in which French law was practiced in Egypt—were being disbanded. At this time she also began exhibiting her acute social awareness in early pieces she published in Francophone literary journals such as Images. Some light-hearted sketches she published in the late 1930s aimed to accurately represent the experiences of young women in Cairo. 

In 1940, Jacqueline married Israel Margoliash, an Jews of European origin and their descendants, including most of North and South American Jewry.Ashkenazi resident of Cairo who held United States citizenship, and she sailed to America. The couple settled in Chicago; Israel lived in residence at the hospital where he trained, while Jacqueline, living on her own, enrolled in secretarial courses at the Central YMCA College and took odd jobs. 

In 1942 Jacqeline left Chicago—and her husband—for New York, where she enrolled in Columbia University, earning a BA in History (1944) and an MA in Journalism (1945). She also took courses at the New School, where she circulated with European intellectuals who had found refuge in the United States from the war in Europe, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Alexander Koyré, and Claude Vigée. Jacqueline became intellectually and romantically involved with Lévi-Strauss at a critical moment in their respective intellectual development.

While in New York, Jacqueline began writing and publishing short stories that reflected her keen attention to ethnographic detail. She would later use the term “sociologically honest” to describe her approach to writing fiction. In 1946, her story “Such is Rachel” won an Atlantic First prize and was published in The Atlantic. She was awarded a Houghton Mifflin fellowship to develop the story into a novel, published as Jacob’s Ladder (1951). These semi-autobiographical works of fiction described the coming of age of a bourgeois Egyptian Jewish girl trying to assert her voice within in her patriarchal Lit. "Eastern." Jew from Arab or Muslim country.Mizrahi family, to wrest her independence from her overbearing British nannies, and to express her solidarity with Egyptian nationalists, even as she recognizes her exclusion from their movement. 

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In November 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat visited Israel, launching peace negotiations that culminated in the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. These developments were closely followed and celebrated by members of the Egyptian Jewish diaspora. In articles published between 1977 and 1979, Shohet Kahanoff expressed her hopes for a warm peace between Israel and Egypt. She sent a copy of From East the Sun to Jehan Sadat, the Egyptian first lady. 

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In English

Jacob’s Ladder. London: Harvill Press, 1951.

Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, edited by Deborah Starr and Sasson Somekh. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. 

In Hebrew

Mi Mizrah Shemesh [From East the Sun]. Tel Aviv: Yariv, 1978. 

Ben shene ʻolamot [Between Two Worlds], edited by David Ohana. Jerusalem: Keter, 2005.

Ba-Levant Noladu Kulanu [We were all born in the Levant], edited by David Ohana. Carmel, 2022.