A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ chain, a link whose fragility requires vigilance.”⁸³ Illness sometimes emerged as a mode of expression within the family. Arié himself alluded to the fact that his mother resorted to it to get attention and that she stopped doing so when her son or daughter-in-law became ill. As a result, illness became commonplace and no longer had the same meaning. This extended family, living within the same house, was suffocating, and manifested its discomfort in illness. Illness was also a distinctive sign of the family, whose members were affected by the century’s malady, tuberculosis. Gabriel Arié’s own son Sandro suffered from it and had to stay in Berck, France, for a long time. The son was at the seaside while the father was in the mountains. Diabetes was the second illness that affected the direct family: both his daughter Ida and his wife Rachel died of it. Arié especially associated defective lungs, the organ of breathing, with the family. It was to have the air he was lacking that he sought out heights, mountains, the symbolic place of healing. “The ill are people of the plains, who rise above their places and environments of origin, having to overcome anxiety, sometimes physical in nature, as a general rule.”⁸⁴ Gabriel Arié was destined to experience that anxiety inherent in his existence, which he tried to stifle in the enclosed worlds he chose for himself, but which in their turn suffocated him and from which he attempted to escape. He continually moved back and forth between these places and the outside, the symbol of deliverance. His illness, which in itself represents a break, linked Arié to the West, his universe of adoption, just as the family illnesses he bore within himself and the career he chose late in life linked him to his lineage and his cultural environment.

      The practice of a career associated with the intellectual domain had only been a parenthesis. And yet his wish to exercise a career other than commerce, the traditional career path for Jews, particularly in the East, manifested a desire to leave his environment. In business, Gabriel Arié continued to write and to find a place for himself in the intellectual realm. Always regretting what he was leaving behind, he was one of those beings whose choices exile them from the universe for which they were destined, and who are condemned to live in the duality and tensions exile produces.

      He attributed the causes of his illness not only to family heredity, which he experienced as fate, but also to external factors. These also stemmed from the environment he had wanted to reject: worries caused by the people of the Izmir community, who did not seem to appreciate him, and by the evil eye, a superstition anchored in the popular realm. Arié thus found himself once more prisoner to the same interpenetrating circles: family, community (the official family to which every Jew in traditional milieus belonged), and the cultural group in general, the Sephardim, the great ethnocultural family.

      From the beginning of his illness in 1898, he undertook a tour of spas and mountain villages. He was seeking purification, which would come about through water and air. The conquest of a new physical universe also signified the conquest of the new identity he was seeking. Arié moved a great deal. He hid his anxiety in each change of location—escape, combined with hyperactivity. As a teacher, he changed countries and cities several times; he traveled a great deal within and outside the Balkans; then, with his illness, he once more took to the road in pursuit of recovery, in all senses of the word. Gabriel Arié’s itinerary allows us to reconstitute the path of tuberculosis, where Switzerland was the locale of choice. From one sanatorium to another, he tried to kill off his death anxiety, to regulate it, to enclose it in these enclosed places, in order to familiarize himself with it and thus get around it. Death at an early age was also hereditary in his family. Would he inherit nothing from that family but illness and death? They hung about him continually. They made their mark on his relations with the family.

      Of course, Gabriel Arié was in the first stages of his illness, since sanatoria were open only to patients whom medicine considered curable. At one point, he thought about ending his life, but he continued to struggle to conquer obstacles, as he would throughout his life. During his stay in Switzerland, he looked within himself for the will to get well, putting an end to the regimentation of the sanatoria and the closed universe of illness and healing. There again, it was in activity that he found salvation. This was one way for him to reconnect with life and escape the exclusion that threatened anyone who transgressed. At no moment in his stay did he entirely set aside his profession or his family. He adapted to the new conditions and thus adapted his familiar universe to his new status. It is that adaptability that makes Gabriel Arié an interesting figure and a rich character. Like all those who took the path he did, adaptability was the condition sine qua non of success in the unknown.

      It was also in illness that Gabriel Arié crystallized his individual sense of self, his profound being, whose tribulations he narrated in his autobiography and journal. These works are the testimony of a long internal journey, written by an engaging and courageous man seeking the irreconcilable—a fate reserved at a certain moment for those Jews who had gone in search of modernity and had witnessed the slow crumbling of a world that had been theirs for centuries. A proud man, he wanted to show himself in his best light; yet the weaknesses of a tortured being also show through. These weaknesses contribute to his strength. His was the order and disorder of a full life, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century and underwent the transformations and upheavals affecting the Sephardi world in the East up to the eve of World War II. Arié did not have the misfortune of experiencing the horrors of that war. Instead of an exemplary life—which is not truly life—the memory of which he would have liked to pass on to his children. Arié leaves us a life example, the memory of a man and of an age-old Sephardi culture that he saw slowly disintegrate and disappear.

      1. For the latest overview of the history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, see Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans: The Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th Centuries (Oxford, 1995). See also Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1991); Walter Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity: A History of the Jews of Turkey (Lanham, 1992); Avigdor Levy, ed., The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 1994). For a general history of the Jews of Bulgaria, see Haim Keshales, History of the Jews of Bulgaria (in Hebrew), 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1969–73); and Vicki Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews: The History of a Dubious Symbiosis (New York, 1979).

      2. The economic role of the Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is analyzed by Halil Inalcik, “Jews in the Ottoman Economy and Finances,” in C. E. Bosworth, Charles Issawi, et al., eds., Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis: The Islamic World (Princeton, 1989), 531–50. For an analysis of the situation in the Balkans, see Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960): 234–313. See also the discussion in Benbassa and Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans, 36–49.

      3. See Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews, 64.

      4. For an analysis of community structures and leadership, see the studies published in Aron Rodrigue, ed., Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership (Bloomington, 1992).

      5. For a study of the legal status of Jews in the land of Islam, see Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, 1984). See also the discussion in Aron Rodrigue, “ ‘Difference’ and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by Nancy Reynolds,” Stanford Humanities Review 5/1 (1995): 81–90.

      6. See the manuscript in our possession tracing the history of the family between 1768 and 1914: [Nahim J. Arié and] Tchelebi Moshé Abraham Arié II, “Biography of the Arié Family” (in Judeo-Spanish), 4 vols., completed in 1914. This information is also contained in biographical notes provided by Gabriel Arié’s son Narcisse, which accompanied his father’s manuscript and are dated 8 November 1989.

      7. For a presentation of the traditional educational system in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of Westernization, see A. Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington, 1990), 35–38.

      8. For a general history of the Alliance, see André СКАЧАТЬ