A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ opened entirely new worlds to his curious mind. The Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO) was the logical next stop in his itinerary.

      Although, in the beginning, the Alliance sent French Jews to teach in its schools, it soon became quite clear that the society could not recruit an adequate number of instructors in France. The Central Committee decided to sign up the best of the schools’ alumni from the Middle East and North Africa, bring them to Paris to undergo intensive training for four years, and then send them back to teach in the schools. The ENIO opened its doors in 1867. The institution was first located in a Jewish trade school on rue des Rosiers in Paris and, after several moves, finally established its own campus in Auteuil in 1889. For many decades, the ENIO trained hundreds of young Sephardim destined to become the backbone of the society’s educational infrastructure.¹³

      Like Arié, many had come from relatively humble backgrounds. The career of instructor was an excellent means for social ascension. At the ENIO, these Sephardim did not merely acquire pedagogical tools, however. They were also permeated with the ideological message of the Alliance, which they internalized; with the zeal of neophytes, they became in turn the missionaries of the ideology of emancipation and regeneration, the mark of the Alliance and of Franco-Judaism in the second half of the nineteenth century. They spread that ideology and that message throughout the Middle East and North Africa, establishing ties between the Jews of Europe and their Sephardi coreligionists and transforming themselves into effective agents of Westernization.

      Arié not only was deeply influenced by the education he received at the ENIO but also established a broad network of contacts there who would prove very useful during his career in Alliance schools. His fellow students Loria, Loupo, Niégo, Fresco, Nabon, Benveniste, and Navon belonged to the first generation of Alliance teachers and went on to form the elite of its faculty. Owing to the work of such young and enthusiastic followers, the organization was able to establish its network of schools and realize a number of the objectives it had set for itself. The esprit de corps that marked that generation was very strong, and Arié was to remain in contact with his colleagues throughout his life, exchanging letters with them and following developments in their lives and in the activities of the Alliance in the various regions where they were pursued.

      Arié was very different from his fellow students in one respect, however. He was one of the rare alumni of the ENIO to enjoy the absolute trust of the leaders of the Alliance. In fact, in the annals of the society, the level of intimacy in the friendships he developed with members of the Central Committee is unequaled. Even at the ENIO, he proved his value to Maurice Marx, the severe and authoritarian director of the institution, and was chosen by him to direct the school in his absence. In his first post, at the Alliance school of Ortaköy (Ortakeuy; a Jewish quarter of Istanbul), he earned the friendship of Félix Bloch, secretary of the Regional Committee of the Alliance in Istanbul, soon becoming his right arm on inspection tours of the schools in the capital, which elicited the jealousy of his colleagues. The close relations he had established with members of the Central Committee proved to be very important when, having resigned from the Alliance for financial reasons in 1885, he managed to be reinstated in 1887 as director of the Alliance school in Sofia. The Alliance never looked kindly on the resignation of its instructors for whatever reason, and it was altogether exceptional on its part to rehire them. Not only did his career with the Alliance not end with his resignation, but in finding himself in the right place at the right time, when a good school director was needed in Sofia, Arié showed how indispensable he was to the organization. The secretary general, the scholar Isidore Loeb, helped him obtain funds for constructing a new school building during his trip to Paris in 1891. It was also during that stay that Arié met Jacques Bigart, who was to occupy the post of secretary general following Isidore Loeb’s death. The relations between the two men were very close. Not only did they meet frequently during vacations and Arié’s visits to Switzerland, but Arié also regularly frequented the home of Bigart’s sister, who lived in Geneva. Bigart also visited Arié during his stay at the Montana sanatorium in 1903. This seems at the very least remarkable, given the widespread image of Bigart as cold, reserved, distant, and authoritarian, which we find in the correspondence of the Alliance teachers.

      His status as “favorite son” of the Alliance opened many doors. He was greatly appreciated by the president of the organization, Narcisse Leven, whom he often introduced as a close friend. At the Alliance, his closest friend seems to have been Sylvain Bénédict, inspector of schools, on whom he exerted a great influence. Owing to these ties, Arié also met Zadoc Kahn, chief rabbi of France, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the famous philanthropist, and Rabbi Moses Gaster and Frederic David Mocatta, two influential personalities among English Jews at the time. This network of relations allowed Arié to influence a number of decisions made by the Alliance and by other Jewish leaders in matters concerning the Sephardi Jews of the East. His perspicacious and incisive analysis of events and problems made him an important source of information for the leaders of Western Jewry.

      Of course, the whirlwind of activities Arié became involved in to advance the work of the Alliance made him all the more appreciated by that body. Like his colleagues, he was not merely a teacher or school director, occupied exclusively with questions of a pedagogical nature. To a degree that went far beyond the extracurricular activities of most of the organization’s instructors, Arié was also remarkably active in constituting a complete associational structure around the school. From the beginning of his career in Ortaköy (1881–85), he actively organized regular meetings between Alliance teachers throughout the city to debate pedagogical problems. He also participated in the apprenticeship program of the schools; the placement of students with artisans to learn a trade was one of the means used by the society to modify the socioeconomic profile of Eastern Jewry.¹⁴

      Arié showed the same energy while director of the Alliance school in Sofia, between 1887 and 1893. During his trip to Paris in 1891, he succeeded in obtaining the support of the Central Committee for the construction of a new school and considerably increased the number of students recruited for it. But it was during the years when he was director of the boys school in Izmir, particularly between 1893 and 1902 (the date when tuberculosis obliged him to cut back his activities considerably), that Arié showed what he was capable of accomplishing. At that time, he worked to found the Alliance school in Karataş (Karatash), a suburb of Izmir. He also visited various Jewish communities of Asia Minor and established schools in the cities of Turgutlu (Cassaba), Tire (Tireh), and Aydin in Turkey. In Izmir, he formed a Jewish workers association to encourage the development of institutions of mutual aid within the Jewish community. He created the alumni association for the Alliance in Izmir, which brought together all the former students of the town’s schools, and the Cercle Israélite, a Jewish reading club, hoping to help calm the discords that divided the community. Even though many of these institutions survived for only a few years, Arié remained indefatigable and continued to believe firmly in the modern principles of associational life as a way of strengthening the community and extending the “regenerative” work of the Alliance.

      Arié was also behind the establishment of a school farm for the Alliance in Asia Minor. One of the society’s articles of faith was that the transformation and “regeneration” of world Jewry could not be fully realized without the creation of a substantial group of Jews living from agriculture. The work carried out by the schools and by the apprenticeship program would be fully effective only if a portion of Jewish young people were directed toward cultivating the land. Only in that way would the destructive influence of centuries of commercial activities and peddling be effaced and thousands of people who had been living from hand to mouth on odd jobs engage in healthy manual work. The Alliance took this productivization program very seriously; beginning with the Enlightenment, it had been a constant in the modern social thinking of European Jews.¹⁵ The society founded the first agricultural school in Palestine, Mikveh Yisrael, with the goal of teaching the latest agricultural techniques to students recruited from its institutions who were destined to become farmers. This was the first school of its kind in Palestine, and the leadership of the Alliance attached a great deal of importance to it.

      In 1891, the founding of the Jewish Colonisation СКАЧАТЬ