Sanua, Victor D.

Victor D. Sanua, research professor in psychology and scholar of the Jewish community of Egypt, was born in Cairo on July 22, 1920 to a prominent family. Among his cousins were James Sanua, a writer and Egyptian nationalist, and Moise Sanua, who was the secretary to the Chief Rabbi of Egypt, Rabbi Nahum Effendi. Sanua’s mother was born in Turkey and his father, while born in Egypt, was of Turkish origin. However, the family held Italian citizenship and spoke mainly French, the language of commerce in Egypt, and Ladino. The family moved to Belgium when Victor was around seven, where they lived for several years until returning to Cairo in 1933. Sanua learned English in order to attend the Lincoln School, the preparatory school for the American University in Cairo, from which he graduated in 1939. After spending several years working at a number of jobs, including the Indian Red Cross, the British Army and the Office of War Information of the United States, he returned to the American University in Cairo and received his undergraduate degree in 1945 and an additional undergraduate degree in 1949.

Sanua immigrated to the United States in 1950 and obtained a degree in psychology from Bowling Green University and then his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Michigan State University in 1956, where he wrote his dissertation on differences of personality adjustment among different generations of American Jews and non-Jews. After interning at New York University’s Bellevue Medical Center, he became a Russell Sage Foundation Research Fellow at the Payne Whitney Clinic of the Cornell University Medical College and participated in the epidemiological mental health research of the MidTown Manhattan Study. Sanua then became a Research Fellow in Social Science and Medicine at the Harvard University Department of Social Relations and Psychiatry, where he began a cross-cultural research study in schizophrenia.

...