A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ was not favorably impressed by these rabbis and, having made his opinion known, attracted their hostility. His directness and elitism earned him many enemies, even among the members of the school committees responsible for organizing contacts between the communities and the Alliance. The resulting frictions were aggravated when, in 1891, a new law augmented the hours devoted to Bulgarian, eliciting doubts in the minds of many regarding the very survival of an autonomous Jewish system of education in that country.¹⁸ In the conflicts that followed, Arié’s position became untenable, to the point that he left the country in 1893 to occupy the post of Alliance school director in Izmir and returned to Bulgaria only twenty years later.

      His years of absence, however, were those that saw the most important evolutions in the history of Jews in modern Bulgaria, with the emergence of Zionism as the majority ideology. The development of that movement was accompanied by violent conflicts between the Zionists and the Alliance Israélite Universelle.

      The anti-Zionism of the organization was deep. It emerged in the first place from profound ideological differences regarding the meaning of the Jewish historical experience. The Alliance ardently believed in the benefits of emancipation and assimilation: Jews were to become equal citizens in every country they lived in, and Judaism would be reformulated on a strictly denominational basis. Zionism, in contrast, was the belief that emancipation was a chimera and that antisemitism was a constant of history that would not disappear with Jews’ assimilation. Whereas the ideology of emancipation had its source in the liberal model of western Europe, Zionism came about in reaction to the persecutions the Jews had undergone in eastern Europe and to the obstacles in the way of emancipation in those regions.

      The rift between the Alliance and the Zionists became particularly serious at the local level with respect to the schools, as was the case in Bulgaria. The educational philosophy of the Zionists and that of the Alliance diverged considerably. The Alliance wanted to “civilize” the Jews by teaching them French and modernizing their daily existence. Their “regeneration” would prepare them to benefit one day from the advantages of citizenship in the East. The Zionists maintained that teaching in French would lead to de-Judaization and to the loss of the national Jewish spirit, and they emphasized the rebirth of Hebrew, the Jews’ national language, and its adoption as the language used in the schools. When community conflicts, class divisions, and rivalries between notables were added in, the differences between the Alliance and the Zionists created an explosive situation. Beginning in the last years of the nineteenth century, the Alliance schools were the object of attacks in numerous locations. But nowhere was the struggle so intense as in Bulgaria.

      From the beginning, Zionism made serious inroads within Bulgarian Jewry, and the community as a whole was largely Zionist by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The Alliance schools were taken over by Zionist school committees, which, in conformity with Bulgarian law, were elected by the communities. Practically all the Alliance schools were closed during the years that preceded the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The conflict ended with a complete rout of the organization.¹⁹

      Even during his absence, Arié remained abreast of the developments taking place in his native land, and he regretted the turn taken by the events. There was little doubt that, given his ideological options—shaped by the ideology of the Alliance and the course of his own career—and the intimacy of his relations with the leaders of the society, Arié would be anti-Zionist. In his letters to the Alliance, he gave an immediate account of any activity that smelled of Zionism, even when it took the form of societies working for the rebirth of Hebrew, such as Dorshei Leshon Ever (Friends of the Hebrew language), which was founded in Izmir in 1895 (see letter of 20 May 1895). He was full of consternation when an emigration movement to Palestine manifested itself within Bulgarian Jewry the same year, and he wrote frankly that the Jews of Bulgaria already had a nation and had no reason to leave (see letter of 28 November 1895).

      His return to Bulgaria coincided with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars and the fall of large Ottoman Jewish communities such as Salonika into the hands of new masters. The reports between Arié and the Alliance at that time expressed a faith in maintaining these communities under Bulgarian domination, a hope that vanished with the Bulgarian defeats of the Second Balkan War in 1913. It is nevertheless interesting to note that Arié was overflowing with plans regarding the policies the Alliance ought to pursue in the face of these new developments. His conservatism and his alliance with the notables are particularly obvious in this correspondence. In his eyes, it was the Jewish bourgeoisie that counted. According to his analysis, although the majority of Bulgarian Jews were Zionists, the notables remained close to the Alliance and sent their children to foreign schools rather than the community institutions managed by the Zionists. He suggested the Alliance return and create strictly private schools beyond community control, in order to attract this bourgeois clientele (see letter of 22 May 1913).

      All these plans came to nothing when World War I broke out. Arié lived through the war in Bulgaria. The defeat of that country began a period of great instability, particularly with the exacerbation of antisemitism, which was linked to Bulgaria’s irredentist claims on Macedonia. As usual, Arié was careful to give an account of all antisemitic incidents (see letters of 7 August 1919 and 2 February 1924). This unrest decreased quickly, however, and only began again in the 1930s.²⁰

      In the meantime, Arié’s social position as a notable—a position he had acquired through the Alliance, by virtue not only of his education but also of his status as representative of the organization in Bulgaria—was confirmed and reinforced by the growing prosperity he enjoyed in his business affairs. To a great extent, however, he was an outsider in the Jewish political life of Bulgaria, given the preponderant place of the Zionists in all community life (see letters of 17 September 1920 and 3 May 1924). His accounts affect the lofty attitude of an Olympian, and his interpretation of the Zionist activism of his fellow Jews adopts the paternalist language of an adult recounting the foolishness of spoiled children.

      Nevertheless, despite the criticism addressed to Zionists and the exhortations directed at his coreligionists, whom he called upon to become good Bulgarians, we find no fire in Arié’s writings on Bulgaria, no patriotic passion, no expression of regret when children or members of the family increasingly sought their livelihoods elsewhere. Although sensitive to Bulgarian antisemitism, he could not claim the situation in that regard was worse there than elsewhere. On the contrary, the Bulgarian balance sheet on this point was relatively positive, and Bulgarian Jewry did not have to suffer major persecutions until the Holocaust. And yet, in direct continuity with the Ottoman period, nothing indicates that the Jews were ever considered true Bulgarians or that they considered themselves as such.

      Notwithstanding his official attitude and his ideological assumptions, Arié’s true identity remained that of a Levantine Sephardi Jew, considerably Westernized, born in Bulgaria, from Bulgaria perhaps, but nevertheless not a Bulgarian. In fact, in keeping with the tradition whereby Jews of the Middle East became foreign subjects, Arié acquired Spanish nationality in his old age,²¹ most likely without renouncing his Bulgarian nationality. This acquisition of a new passport was the effect of a policy adopted by Spain in the interwar period attempting to redraw Sephardim into the Spanish orbit. Arié also became a chevalier in the order of Isabella the Catholic,²² a distinction that was at the very least ironic and paradoxical for someone whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492! In Arié, this rather dissonant configuration of identities, nationalities, and allegiances, characteristic of the Jews of the Levant in the modern period, coexisted with ideological views that were difficult to reconcile with it.

      Like the Alliance, Arié was fundamentally convinced of the need to reform and “regenerate” the “fallen” Jewish communities of the East. And help could only come from the West, which was showing the path to the future, leading the progress of civilization on a global scale. Arié’s attitude toward the West and the East exhibits signs characteristic of the first generation of Westernization. Europe represented progress and absolute good. The East was the quintessence of negativity and backwardness. Orientalist discourse, so common СКАЧАТЬ