A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ at all cost to efface any reminder of the East. Sometimes in very Europeanized photographs, a fez, the traditional male head covering, recalls the origin of the photographed subjects, which is otherwise lost in the accumulation of Western signifiers, especially in wedding photographs. These photographs are X-rays of the Levantine bourgeoisie and of its composite identity.

      These same wealthy strata also adopted Western ways in diet, behavior, interior decoration, and leisure activities. They went to the country every summer, as much for medical reasons (“fresh air”) as for the pleasure of escaping the heat of the city. With the progress in Western education among the middle and wealthy strata came a penchant, especially among the daughters, for certain European bourgeois principles of childrearing and education. Owing to the Alliance schools, a certain number of poor girls also had access to that education.⁶⁷ There was a tendency to focus on the question of manners, on the signifier, which is the most easily detectable. As Gallicization took hold, even in homes of the middle strata, families began to speak French, which would long remain the distinctive sign of social ascension. This language began to replace Judeo-Spanish, without supplanting it altogether. And with the formation of nation-states in the former Ottoman territories, the languages of the country also began to be introduced very slowly into Jewish homes, depending on the degree of integration. Women were an important vehicle from the base for Westernization and Gallicization.

      Everything coming from the West was appreciated and thus sought out: fabric, knickknacks, decorative objects, etc. The foreign-language press spread the latest novelties in dress. The West became the referent. But the traditions and customs that had come with the family and with the social heritage of the bourgeois environment⁶⁸ were not those of the West; they stemmed from Levantine specificity, itself heterogeneous, from the denominational and ethnic diversity of this Greek, Armenian, European, and Jewish bourgeoisies. Each group had a particular identity as well as elements of convergence. The signifiers borrowed from the West were added to these already heterogeneous identities.

      Arié’s Westernization was not limited to these signifiers but went beyond with the act of writing an autobiography and a journal, which was linked intimately to his type of trajectory; it expressed the uniqueness of his approach, his originality.

      Contrary to what happened in the second half of the nineteenth century, when literature and history written in the West were imported and presented to the local public in the vernacular, Gabriel Arié wrote his history books in a Western language, that of the Alliance. That organization had given him access to the West, with which he then felt familiar. But he also wrote the history of the Jewish people, a manual intended for French Jewish children. This reverse approach deserves mention, if only because of its rarity. Not only did Arié submit to Western influence, but he also transformed himself into a protagonist of the culture he so admired. In contrast, though he had planned to write the history of his cultural environment, the history of Sephardim, he did not have the means at his disposal to do so (or did not really want to do so?). Was he still too close to a kind of Sephardism that prevented him from taking the necessary distance, or was he, in contrast, sufficiently Westernized to believe his own history minor next to that of a Jewish people more easily accessible to the French public he intended to address? His failure to complete this undertaking reveals the complexity of the man Arié. But by a happy chance, his intimate writings were published a hundred years later, at the commemoration of the five hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of his ancestors from Spain.

      It is undeniable that Gabriel Arié’s personality also played a primary role in the choice of that mode of writing. He describes himself as rather withdrawn as a child, with a pronounced taste for reading. He began very early to retreat from the daily life of the family to indulge in that solitary pleasure. He also alludes to melancholy, which he calls a family malady. In that environment, isolating himself was already a modern act, a way of asserting himself as an individual in the collectivity. Family still meant extended family, and living arrangements meant that the neighborhood was omnipresent in everyday life, further enlarging the family circle. The Jews, because of their status, were part of a community, circumscribed as such and defined as a denomination; this reinforced the community identity, of which the family was the nucleus, and did not favor the development of individual identity. There were, in addition, the imperatives of Jewish traditional life and its social control. Autobiography and the journal require a certain withdrawal, an entrenchment, and a certain intimacy; at the same time, they are the proper site of that entrenchment. “To write one’s journal is thus to rediscover a sanctuary of peace and interiority, to reintegrate that lost paradise ‘inside.’ ”⁶⁹

      At the beginning of Westernization, did anyone really have the notion that a world was disappearing? Autobiographies and journals are written to be repositories of recollections and may constitute true memoirs.⁷⁰ It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that an awareness of the passing of an era emerged and that people began to write history, as amateurs of course, but in a way that revealed the necessary distancing taking hold, as Sephardi Jews in the Levant experienced change and as irreversible losses occurred. There was a turn toward history, a concrete tool for fixing time.

      Gabriel Arié was a man whose past was gone and who made the leap toward modernity; the terrain was favorable for such an undertaking; the tendency toward interiority aided him; and his illness was the ultimate trigger. Tuberculosis distanced Arié from his profession, cut him off from his habitual social environment, and forced him to uproot himself temporarily to a foreign region. His writing was situated in that rift, in that break from his place of origin, his profession, his health, and his past. In fact, he began his autobiography in the no-man’s-land of Switzerland, a neutral place propitious for the distancing necessary for retrospection. It was in Europe, the site of his culture of adoption, that he began to write. Hence, the act of writing his autobiography came about in the very place of the genre’s origin. The journal began in the same context and was continued in, hence transplanted to, Gabriel Arié’s native environment, thus making the transition between these two universes to which the author himself belonged. The journal that followed ensured continuity: Gabriel Arié returned to his native country and lived there until the end of his life. His autobiography and journal were the culmination of his Westernization and his social ascension, and above all of the distance taken from his own environment, which was both familiar and strange.

      Family and illness were the two poles of the life of this man and were closely linked. Arié believed that the family transmitted illness. He blamed his grandparents and parents for having passed illnesses on to him. He attributed his physical defects to them. He also evoked his father under the sign of illness. The focus of his ills was thus the family. But he did not succeed in doing without family and established relations of a familial kind with the Other. The relations he had with the teacher Mme Béhar, with the Alliance, with his future in-laws in Ortaköy, and with his uncle in Galata were all of a kind. He created a large family, lived for a time with his mother and wife in the same house, brought mother, brother, and sister to Izmir after the death of his father and provided for their needs, married off brothers and sisters, took care of them when their material situation was not as good as it might have been, worried about their material future, brought his family to Davos during his illness, brought his children into his business, and maintained long-term relationships with the different members of his family throughout his life. As a newlywed, Gabriel Arié lived with his parents; later, his mother, younger brother, and sister moved in with him. He shared the same building with his brother, and then his son came to live with him. We thus have a portrait of the typical Sephardi family, where young and old lived together. Arié tried to break with this practice numerous times, but in the end was obliged to go along with it. There was a gap between his own aspirations and local contingencies. This was not yet the framework of the contemporary urban family of the nineteenth century, where intergenerational solidarity dissolved.⁷¹

      To a great extent, Gabriel Arié also conducted his business with members of his family, and later with his descendants. His sense of family was very developed and his penchant toward egocentrism did not prevent him from managing his family relationships as a powerful and omnipresent—but СКАЧАТЬ