A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ worthy of the perspicacious observer that he was, hit the mark: “The republicans have understood it is the very principles of the Revolution that the clericals are combating behind the cover of the Jews. From now on, the cause of the Jews can no longer be separated from the cause of the Republic, and that is the most fortunate consequence of the Dreyfus affair for the Jews of France.”³³ The voice of Franco-Judaism finds expression here. A remarkable premonition also echoes in these words, illuminated by the subsequent developments under Vichy.

      It was in discussing Zionism that Arié began the most delicate part of his Histoire juive. Given the conflicts between the Alliance and the Zionists and the situation in Bulgaria, he had to proceed with caution in his presentation. He could not allow himself to alienate either the Alliance or the broader public to which he addressed his book. His presentation of Zionism is in fact rather positive and laudatory. The growing importance of the movement in the Jewish world and the persistence of antisemitism led him to clarify his position in his preface to the second edition of the book in 1926:

      Our preference for the political conceptions of the Alliance has not prevented us from setting out with impartiality and sympathy the efforts by Zionism to find a solution to the Jewish question that many good minds judge contrary to the true interests of Judaism. The aspirations of sincere Zionists proceed from such respectable convictions and are the echo of voices that have reverberated in Jewish consciousness for so many centuries that criticism of them would have been at the very least out of place in a book such as ours, especially at a time when the decline we are witnessing in liberal ideas is accompanied by such a sharp outbreak of antisemitism throughout the world.³⁴

      Arié also added to this second edition an entirely new chapter on the birth of modern Hebrew and modern Hebrew literature, which immediately preceded his presentation of Zionism. He saw the emergence of that literature as a powerful civilizing force for the Jews, and he was not afraid to give an account of the literary activities of Hebrew authors who were linked to Zionism. The fact that the chapter devoted to this movement immediately followed the chapter on Hebrew showed that in Arié’s view the two things were inextricably associated.

      Arié presented the birth of Zionism as linked to the persistence of antisemitism in eastern Europe and to the absence of emancipation for Russian Jewry. Nevertheless, he did not fail to credit Western Jews, especially the famous philanthropist Moses Montefiore and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, with the redemption of the Holy Land. Returning to a theme dear to his heart, Arié focused on the school farm Mikveh Yisrael and the role it played in the creation of modern agriculture in Palestine. The Alliance was thus considered one of the protagonists in reestablishing a Jewish presence in Palestine, even though Arié did not forget to indicate explicitly that many Jews from western Europe were hostile to Zionism and that as late as 1923 the society had professed its “neutrality” toward the movement.³⁵

      Arié underscored what the Zionists had been able to achieve in Palestine: the progress in agriculture and the creation of Jewish colonies and cities. He nonetheless pointed out the problems that remained, from the persistence of Arab hostility toward the movement to the ambiguous attitude adopted by the English mandatory government. In conclusion, his verdict was mixed:

      It appears today that Zionism can only be a partial solution to the Jewish question; it must not therefore exclude the other solution, the emancipation of Jews and their civil assimilation into their respective countries. But even if it cannot satisfy all the hopes it has awakened, Zionism will have the indisputable merit of having intensified, among oppressed and persecuted Jews, the feeling of their value and the awareness of their dignity.³⁶

      Even as he recognized the importance of Zionism, Arié maintained his faith in the ideology of emancipation.

      This faith, however, was now tempered by a strong dose of realism. In his analysis of the persistence of antisemitism and in his interpretation of the situation in the East, Arié proved to be much more perspicacious than the leaders of the Alliance, who until Vichy were to cling tenaciously to the emancipatory vision of the nineteenth century. In the conclusion of his book, he recognized that the era of emancipation had not solved all the problems. Whereas in the West, the Jews could continue to “live as a religious denomination with the same status as Christianity,” that could not be the case in the East, where they had to “constitute themselves as a national minority.”³⁷ Arié again paid tribute to the Alliance by concluding that unity would come if all the forces of Jewry rallied around the principles of fraternity and solidarity incarnated by the organization.³⁸ Nonetheless, he had clearly broken with the linear vision of the Alliance, which considered emancipation and assimilation the only path to follow among Jews throughout the world. For Arié, the “national” path taken by many was a fact and had come to constitute a second option.

      It is important to note that that divergence from the Alliance went back a long time, having first been expressed in a letter to Bigart in 1909 (see letter of 15 January 1909). Bringing up the question of whether to write Juif and Israélite with initial capital letters, Arié made a distinction between the West, where Judaism had become simply a denomination and where lowercasing was therefore called for, and the East, in particular the Ottoman Empire, where Jews were legally treated as a “nation” and continued to exist as such, that is, as a clearly defined ethnic group for whom an initial capital letter was necessary. This suggestion was angrily rejected by Bigart, who insisted that no concession be made to the nationalist use of the term.³⁹ It is therefore probably no coincidence that Arié, though he was not absolutely systematic on this point, wrote Juif with a capital letter throughout almost the entire book. But it is undoubtedly more significant that he chose to conclude his study by putting the spotlight on the two different paths of modern Jewish existence, without deciding absolutely which one was or ought to prevail.

      Arié’s approach was in fact symptomatic of his position midway between the East and the West. This man whose intellectual life was a pure product of western European emancipationist Judaism, who had devoted most of his public career to spreading this message, nevertheless remained in the East, and a man of the East. Unquestionably, Arié never became a Zionist and remained anti-Zionist his whole life. And yet, as a perceptive observer of the world around him, he could not be unaware that the western European path of Jewish emancipation seemed unable to succeed in the East, where ethnic and religious ties appeared to attach people most profoundly and lastingly to their particular and particularist identities. In the East, the nation-state whose birth Arié had witnessed, though it used the vocabulary and the language of Western liberal nationalism, had remained anchored in the hierarchical power relationships specific to the multiplicity of groups that constituted the Levant. With group identities remaining of capital importance, the Western path of emancipation could not suit the majority of Jews in the region. Jewish individuals such as Arié could effectively opt for radical Westernization, but none of them succeeded in carrying out that program at the collective level.

      To a certain extent, Arié’s life and career illustrate both the realization and the contradiction of the Westernization of a portion of Jews in the Levant. That movement, progressively carrying with it entire generations of Sephardim, opened many new prospects for progress and individual freedom. But at the same time, that vision of the world in general and of the Jew in particular was peculiarly ill-adapted to Levantine realities. In the end, many experienced Westernization vicariously, and the ideal world remained separate from the real world in which they lived. Arié’s life, his career, and his writings are the expression of that double, divided, and in the end dissonant existence. At another level of course, that existence represents the very essence of modernity, which bears within it a corrosive shattering of accepted truths in all areas. Paradoxically, in living the very contradictions of the process of Westernization, the Judeo-Spanish intelligentsia, of which Arié was a major representative, had finally become truly modern. The autobiography and journal he wrote are a remarkable expression of this development.

      PRIVATE LIFE

      Autobiography СКАЧАТЬ