A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ of those close to him. Like any bourgeois, he made it a duty to place his children on a firm financial footing and made sure they did not lose their class standing by the choice of an occupation or spouse whose status was unworthy of them.⁷² In fact, his male children, like himself, made careers in insurance. Arié’s solicitude extended to his less immediate family as well. First Davos, then summer stays in vacation spots abroad and in Bulgaria, became occasions for family reunions. Everyone moved through these places in a continual coming and going, which pointed to both the wealth of the family and the affection that linked its members together. Summer tourism in the mountains and spas or in the country became a habit, as in the European bourgeois family of the nineteenth century.⁷³

      Gabriel Arié welcomed his niece, whose health was fragile, to Davos, oversaw her education, and reproduced in exile the family atmosphere he was accustomed to. As in any family, in this case a large one, frictions were not lacking. Certain conflicts persisted and caused the author sorrow, most of them due to the touchiness of the protagonists. Questions of money were also a subject of conflicts, such as the one that broke out between him and his brother Elia. But Elia provided for his needs during his stay in Davos, testimony to the family solidarity that existed among the Ariés. And Gabriel did not at any moment reproduce the conflictual atmosphere that reigned between his impoverished father and the wealthy family of his mother, voluntarily coming to the aid of those in his family who needed him.

      The genealogical tree of the family, beginning in the eighteenth century, clearly testifies to the practice of endogamy, which was current at the time. It persisted even in the twentieth century, since the last son of Arié, Narcisse, married his cousin. Gabriel Arié himself tried to marry off his daughter to a cousin. Although long turned in upon itself, the Jewish family of the Balkans, progressively influenced by Westernization, began increasingly to look toward the outside. Marriages outside the clan became more and more frequent; leaving one’s birthplace and settling abroad began to occur; and travel was common. A number of family members of Gabriel Arié’s generation and that of his descendants established their homes outside Bulgaria, either in bordering countries or in Europe. Mobility—both vertical and horizontal—characterized this type of family, which was still in the minority. The geographical situation of Bulgaria, a gateway to the West, also facilitated that opening.

      Gabriel Arié had an “arranged” marriage.⁷⁴ He married the young Rachel Cohen, whom he knew in Ortaköy and whose family he visited frequently. The family was eager to bring about the marriage. The wedding was traditional and Arié received a dowry, following the local custom, which, in fact, was not particular to Sephardi culture. He himself attempted to arrange the marriage of his eldest daughter and of his brother; progressively, his other children chose their own spouses. Nonetheless, Gabriel Arié had very fixed ideas on the subject of marriage. He first had an amorous relationship with his colleague Rachel Lévy, whom he met when she was working in Ortaköy; he did not marry her, because her ways were too free. Later, in love with an Alliance teacher whom he met in Sofia only shortly before his marriage to Rachel Cohen, he sacrificed love to reason. Sara Ungar was an emancipated woman practicing a profession, was much older than Gabriel Arié, and had ways very different from those of the Eastern women around him in his family environment. She did not possess the necessary assets to become his wife; moreover, she was Ashkenazi. He did not dismiss the possibility of living with her as his mistress, but he did not envision marriage. In the end, he preferred the security of a domestic woman, the future mother of his children, which was a type familiar to him. Arié also probably wanted to keep his promise by marrying his fiancée. The sense of honor so valorized in that culture had to play a role in that decision. He preferred order. Is not the family “the cell of living order”?⁷⁵ After the birth of the Arié couple’s first child, Mile Ungar, offended and without hope, left the girls school in Sofia for another position.

      In marriage, Gabriel Arié behaved like any Western bourgeois. Marriage was the decisive element in advancement and a serious matter;⁷⁶ Gabriel was well aware of this. In the first place, he took a wife from a wealthy milieu. And given his position, the affair with Mile Ungar would have meant trouble at the beginning of his career. That did not prevent him from having relationships with other women later on, including Mile Julie Naar, another teacher, whom he imposed on his wife, establishing a kind of ménage à trois.

      Gabriel Arié criticized Eastern women, did not always appreciate the mores of emancipated women, married an Eastern woman to follow tradition, and yet was attracted by women teachers, symbols for the age of female emancipation in the environment he had grown up in. He was haunted by the image of Mme Béhar, née Melanie Rosenstrauss, whom he loved with an innocent and lasting love. Barely a year after the death of his wife in 1929, he married one of her friends, a Sephardi woman who had also led a public life and directed an orphanage. This contradiction between respect for the practices of his cultural environment and attraction for the Western universe he had conquered was inherent in the life of the man Arié, even though it was not verbalized. Gabriel Arié’s associations with women were limited to the Jewish circle. We find no indication of any relationship whatsoever in the non-Jewish world.

      As a privileged space of privacy, the family remained riveted to the Jewish sphere. Despite its Western ways, Arié’s family does not seem to have maintained relations with non-Jews, or if they did, these relations were exceptional and circumscribed, such as visits by doctors or the presence of a domestic staff during his stay in Europe and in Bulgaria itself. Nor does Gabriel Arié indicate the existence in his family of marriages with non-Jews. If, on the outside, there was some contact with non-Jews, with rare exceptions they were not introduced inside. Despite the openness toward the Western exterior that was occurring, the inside symbolized by the extended family remained Jewish, though this Judaism was not manifested in any consistent observance of religious precepts. This was an ethnic Judaism based on habit. Thus Gabriel Arié adopted a compartmentalized way of life common in that cultural environment, where the community lived relatively closed in upon itself as a result of denominational borders imposed from above, which penetrated everyday life and persisted even when the borders were officially abolished. The outside, the public arena, was the place for these interrelations—Gabriel Arié even joined a non-Jewish Masonic lodge—but they usually stopped at the threshold of the house. The family thus remained the place of memory, where the rites of the life cycle and the celebrations that mark time were respected.

      The Jewishness of the Arié family does not seem to have been affected by external influences, which it was able to integrate without losing its identity. That, in fact, is what made all the difference between him and the Jews of western Europe, who experienced a different process of emancipation and, as a result, of modernization, under the impulse of a strong state that imposed its values on the Jews. In the Levant, however, modernization was a choice for the elites. Since they had borrowed their new values from the outside, they did not have the force or means of a state at their disposal to impose them on the rest of the Jewish population, as they would have liked to do. The actions of the elites also did not have as much at stake as those of a state. That also contributed in great part to safeguarding Jewish identity and its routines among the wealthy Jewish strata and those most oriented toward the West, even when respect for the everyday precepts of Judaism had been eroded.

      Arié himself observed a similar kind of Judaism, and his intimate writings do not reveal a great religious sensibility. His bitter meditations, following the death of his father, on the vanity of all human efforts and all faith, are an expression of his sadness and grief, but they also convey a lack of the kind of assurance he might have drawn from a more solid Jewish faith and observance. In some sense, in a manner that points ironically to his criticism of Easterners, Arié acted out of concern for appearances, conserving certain external, and therefore social, signs of Jewish observance all his life. He observed the Jewish liturgical rite in mourning the death of his father, made sure that his sons were bar mitzvah (even teaching them the sections of the biblical text they were to recite for the occasion), was a member of a synagogue, and commemorated Jewish holidays. Nothing indicates, however, that he kept kosher, since this issue was never evoked in his writings, even in the context of his stay in Davos, where it probably СКАЧАТЬ