A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ him. It was within this space of freedom created by his independence that we begin, by seeking the public man, to find the private man, once the masks have been removed. The correspondence itself, read at a second level, links up with the autobiography and the journal, completes and enriches them; at certain times, the public and the private combine regardless of the lines separating them, as they do in life. The man in his completeness offers himself, flees, and reemerges beyond the conventions imposed by the institutional correspondence. Nonetheless, we would have liked to have his private correspondence, which would have allowed us to encounter him somewhere else, once more, and perhaps differently.

      Properly speaking, Arié’s journal is not an examination of his conscience, as is often the case in this genre of writing; even less is it an act of contrition for sins committed.⁵⁷ The confession aspect, with its secret side, does not truly appear. There again the character’s circumspection is manifest; we no longer know if he was writing his journal for himself or for others. The dialogue with himself does not leap out from the page. In a society turned toward the outside, could the individualist act par excellence—the writing of a journal—also be turned entirely toward the outside, in this case toward his immediate family? The author provides a balance sheet of the facts marking the year, with the event taking precedence over analysis, except on a few occasions. Accumulation, a prominent trait of Arié’s conduct, returns at different stages in both the autobiography and the journal. As a young man, he accumulated readings, livelihoods, women, businesses, moves, and, to a certain extent, children, if he is compared to other members of his immediate family, who belonged to that generation where adopting the Western bourgeois values led, for the wealthy strata, to a progressive drop in the birthrate. Was it by class reflex that he accumulated personal property and real estate the way the bourgeoisie stores up money, or was it first of all a manifestation of his insecurity?

      The author judges others more than he judges himself, and there sometimes emanates from the text the satisfaction he feels in contemplating himself, especially when he succeeds at his new departure in life. Does he contemplate himself in relation to others or in relation to what he once was? In any case, the distance traveled is not negligible. Once again the exemplarity of the man leaps out, the example of a life worthy of being recounted, one that could serve as a model for his descendants. The author does what he must to be equal to his ambition. This trait links the journal to the autobiography, which also aimed for exemplarity. The circle is completed. Less than two years before his death he wrote: “In sum, I have reason to be satisfied with my health, which causes me worry but not torment, and with my excellent material situation, which causes me no concern, and with my children, who are following the path of honor and work. Can one ask for more out of life? No, and that is why I am ready to leave them when it pleases God, praising Providence for having all in all given me the good life in this world.” Arié passed on not only his business and his fortune to his children but also his example. The nineteenth-century bourgeois family was also, as we know, the vehicle of patrimony,⁵⁸ ensuring continuity and reproduction.

      Gabriel Arié created a history for himself in writing it down,⁵⁹ his history and that of his family. That history is also a true memoir of the incipient Sephardi and Levantine bourgeoisie of the time, in the Balkans in evolution, though it is a bourgeoisie seen through the eyes of Gabriel Arié, restored as a function of what he wanted to transmit, or was able to transmit, to us. That history has been conserved almost intact despite the vulnerability of this type of writing, which is very often reworked by members of the family, sometimes obfuscated through the allusions of the author—or simply destroyed.⁶⁰ Other than a few insignificant cuts made by the family, Gabriel Arié’s autobiography and journal have been faithfully handed down to us.

      Autobiography and individualism are closely linked,⁶¹ and “the intimate journal rests entirely on the belief in a ‘self,’ the desire to know it, to cultivate it, to have a relationship with it, to record it on paper.”⁶² It was in fact during the nineteenth century that the sense of individual identity and its representation increasingly crystallized.⁶³ Hence it is no accident that autobiography and the intimate journal experienced a real expansion in the nineteenth century and that they were closely linked to the bourgeois context of the West. At that time, however, the East had not yet produced a bourgeois class in the Western sense of the term, because it had not experienced the same political, economic, and social evolution. The Eastern bourgeoisie, for the most part non-Muslim groups in the Ottoman Empire who were at the forefront of commerce and trade, had neither the same status in society nor the same values as their Western counterpart. In the new nation-states, it would be a long time before a national bourgeoisie would come into being; in the meantime, the old multiethnic bourgeoisie continued to hold ground despite the upheavals provoked by the change of masters. This Levantine bourgeoisie, characteristic of the entire Middle East, mimicked that of the West, and the petty bourgeoisie, composed of salesmen and shop owners, imitated it in turn. These were the wealthy classes, who, owing to their fortunes, distinguished themselves from the autochthonous peoples through their style of life; yet they still conserved some of their specificities. The non-Muslim bourgeoisie in the Ottoman East had neither its own ideology nor the possibility of producing one. Since there was no local model to follow, it turned toward the Western model—which reaffirmed its specific Levantine character, a specific mix of East and West.

      Westernization, the result of the impact of a particular type of civilization from Europe, marked the local scene increasingly as the nineteenth century wore on.⁶⁴ In Gabriel Arié’s time, the Westernization of Levantine Jewry was in its infancy. Western values were reaching that part of the East, which was opening up to the West, but were mediated through various levels.⁶⁵ The Jewish elite, in keeping with their counterparts in western Europe, imported Westernization and attempted to impose it through the modern networks of communication, associations, the press, literature translated from foreign languages, and—the most effective tool of all—European-type schools. Westernization did not run deep, however. A selection took place locally, as is generally the case, with the local peoples opting for the aspects that suited them best. For a long time, these local Jewish populations, like the non-Jewish environment, experienced a fragile Westernization. It was the middle strata who extracted the greatest benefits. The process followed a progressive vertical movement, from the top down. Those at the bottom took a long time to be permeated by it and remained the closest to Jewish traditional values and to those borrowed from the Muslim environment. Arié had grown up there. In his childhood, he was awash in that atmosphere, a mixture of the traditional Jewish school, family life, and the synagogue and of the influences of the Turkish environment (such as the Turkish music sung and played in his home). In the beginning, nothing predestined this young man for the life he would know. Nonetheless, by his own choices, his frequent travels to the West, and his extended stays there for his health, he lived in osmosis with Europe. Yet he never entirely lost certain cultural particularities of his original environment.

      Westernization occurred first at the level of the signifier. Western dress was introduced into wealthy families, to the detriment of the traditional costume worn by the older people. This evolution is clearly visible in the photographs from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: in front of scenery depicting pleasure gardens, decorative fabrics, columns, drapery, and landscapes, old people in traditional costumes and the young in European dress, seated in European-style armchairs or standing, serious, often rigid, or barely cracking a smile, pose for eternity in the studio.⁶⁶ This was the golden age of photography. The wealthier the client, the more often he went to renowned photographers, not only to fix the great events of life with the requisite props—modern hats and dresses, city clothes for the men—but also to indulge a taste for souvenirs. At the beginning of the century, traditional costumes progressively disappeared from the photographs, and nothing distinguished these Jews, at least in their appearance, from Westerners, except for a few decorative touches in the background of the photographs that betray their Eastern origin: a pointing minaret or a floral pattern on the fabrics, for example. These Eastern signifiers are more numerous in the photographs taken by less renowned photographers, frequented in general by the middle class because of their lower prices. In fact, those who went to these photographers were often СКАЧАТЬ