A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ where children learned to read Jewish prayers. The aim of this essentially religious education was not so much to diffuse knowledge as to pass on eternal truths and socialize the child, as a means of ensuring behavior in keeping with the precepts of Judaism and perpetuation of the community. At the apogee of that educational system in the Ottoman Empire, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many young people pursued their studies after the meldar in the talmudei-torah, where they could acquire a number of the more advanced Jewish disciplines. Although that continued to be the case in quite weakened form in certain of the large Jewish centers of the empire in the nineteenth century, a small provincial town such as Samakov offered few possibilities of the kind, and the experience Arié had in the traditional educational system lasted only a few years.⁷

      Even though it cannot be said that the education Arié received at the meldar marked him profoundly, it seems to have left him with a certain knowledge and a certain tendency to mark all events in the cycle of Jewish life, to observe the rites associated with them, and to commemorate Jewish holidays. As we shall see, as a teacher for the Alliance, Arié was a vehement critic and adversary of the traditional system of education. His sense of sacred time and ritual, however, had been shaped by the traditional world in which he had lived his first years, and he was involved in certain important areas of public Jewish observance until his death. It is nonetheless true that the most important formative episode of his life was not his experience at the meldar but his attendance at the Alliance school opened in Samakov in 1874.

      The arrival of the organization and its network of schools was a watershed event in the life of Sephardi Jews in modern times. The Alliance Israélite Universelle was founded in Paris in 1860 by a group of French Jewish intellectuals and militants. Its purpose was to struggle for the rights of Jews throughout the world, defend persecuted Jews, and bring about the legal emancipation of those who were still being treated as second-class citizens. Depending on transnational solidarity among Jews, the organization brought together through its programs a large number of members throughout the world. It was particularly effective as a mouthpiece for the Jewish world in international events such as the Congress of Berlin in 1878, where it contributed toward the granting of equal rights to the Jews of Romania. It continually struggled for the rights of Jews and often succeeded in obtaining reparation for injustices.⁸

      Its principal work, however, was in the field of education. Civil and legal emancipation was not enough. The society incarnated all the impulses that had contributed toward the formation of a modern form of French Judaism after the French Revolution; it was the very crystallization of this new republican Franco-Judaism, which had emerged with such force by the second half of the nineteenth century. The Alliance and its leaders were deeply permeated by the message of the French Revolution and its implications for Jews. Jews were to be emancipated and become full citizens. The entire progress of history was perceived teleologically as leading to the act of emancipation. At the same time, having internalized the Enlightenment discourse on the Jews, which found one of its best expressions in the Abbé Grégoire, who defined the emancipatory model for the French Revolution, the Alliance also believed that Jews had to reform and civilize themselves, or “regenerate” themselves, to show they were worthy of becoming citizens. In practice, that meant abandoning as much as possible all forms of particularism—Jewish languages, for example—and “fusing” into modern civilization, of which French culture was considered the fulfillment. World Jewry as a whole was to reform itself, and all its members were to become modern emancipated citizens. In regions where the cultural level of Jews was considered to have fallen too low, the administration of a healthy dose of French culture was deemed to be an important factor in “regeneration.” The agent of that transformation, of course, would be the modern school.⁹

      The Alliance embarked upon its self-imposed mission of reforming and “regenerating” the Jewish world. For various reasons, but in particular because the Russian government did not allow foreign organizations to influence any part of its population, the Alliance made no headway in the Ashkenazi world. That was not the case in Sephardi regions. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the time of triumphant imperialism, the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim states were greatly weakened, and none of them provided any resistance to the Alliance. Thus, the activities of the organization would be particularly important around the Mediterranean basin.

      The first Alliance school was opened in Tetuan, Morocco, in 1862 and was soon followed by others elsewhere in North Africa and in the Middle East. By 1914, the Alliance had established a network of schools extending from Morocco in the west to Iran in the east and including 183 institutions, nearly 1,200 teachers, and 43,700 students. It had succeeded in eclipsing the traditional Jewish educational system and had even supplanted it in numerous places.¹⁰

      In general, the Alliance intervened at the invitation of Jewish notables from the area, who felt that a diffusion of European education among local Jews would contribute to improving the economic situation of the community as a whole. In a context where the West had become a major partner in public life and in the economy, it was very clear that a knowledge of European methods and languages was a necessity. And it was the French language above all that served as lingua franca.

      The institutions opened by the society were primary schools, where French was the language of instruction. Although greatly inspired by the curriculum in use in the French system of elementary education, in time these institutions developed their own programs, making a place for the study of local languages and Hebrew and for instruction in Jewish religion and history.¹¹ In a context where secular and European disciplines began to take on ever greater importance, the Jewish disciplines were quickly relegated to the background, losing the central place they had occupied in the traditional system of education. Although it was never the intention of the Alliance to minimize the importance of Jewish education, it is obvious that for many of its students, what counted above all was learning French.

      The love affair that many Sephardim had with French is perfectly illustrated in Arié’s writings. He indicates that, for him, learning French in the Alliance school was a marvelous “game,” a real pleasure. Arié soon demonstrated his intellectual abilities and become the favorite of his teachers, a situation that was repeated when he pursued his studies in Paris. He had free access to the school library and became a voracious reader during his adolescence, consuming most of the French and foreign classics. His imagination was shaped by his readings, and he himself draws our attention to the fact that it was Fénelon’s Télémaque that marked him most profoundly, particularly its style. Through the French language, he entered the fabulous world of the West and began to live there vicariously, even though he was still in the Levant. The Gallomania that was increasingly to characterize Westernized Sephardim often had its roots in Alliance schools and in the initiation into the French language and its literature they had undergone there.

      Arié arranged to pursue his studies at the Alliance school in Balat (a Jewish quarter of Istanbul) after the upheavals in Samakov at the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the Bulgarian declaration of independence. Along with thousands of Jews who fled the battles and became refugees, he reached the Ottoman capital, along with several members of his family, and entered the Alliance school at the first opportunity, In Istanbul, as in Samakov, Arié was the student of Nissim Béhar, one of the most important of the teachers of the organization and destined to have a remarkable career in the Alliance schools in Jerusalem, where he was particularly active in the rebirth of Hebrew.¹² Arié does not often mention Nissim Béhar and seems to have been more impressed by his wife, who was also an Alliance teacher and died very young in Balat. But there is no doubt that the Alliance schools in Samakov and Balat shaped the early years of the precocious child.

      It was, therefore, very natural for Arié to choose the career that seemed the most promising to him, by becoming an Alliance teacher in his turn. His father was barely able to provide for his needs and was not in a position to offer his son an appealing way of earning a living. In addition, it is very clear that the attraction of the Alliance was irresistible to a young man such as Gabriel, who decided to join the organization that had liberated СКАЧАТЬ