A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ remained somewhat apart from the great upheavals experienced by the Jewish people in the West. The rapprochement that resulted between the two branches of Judaism also entailed a knowledge of history, the shared history that could justify that rapprochement. The Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah), in full flower in the Ashkenazi East in the nineteenth century, and the contacts between educated men and scholars from the two spheres of the East—the Sephardi and the Ashkenazi—were at the origin of these intellectual currents that developed in Sephardi culture. Gabriel Arié’s attraction to history is part of this context contemporary to him. Other intellectuals, all autodidacts, began to take an interest in Jewish history. Thus Abraham Danon, Moïse Franco, Salomon Rozanès, and Abraham Galanté wrote books on the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, laying the foundations for scholarly study to come on the history of the Sephardim of the East. Arié was in contact with certain of these historians, including Abraham Danon and Salomon Rozanès (see letter of 3 February 1908) and wanted them to participate in the history project on the Alliance schools.

      Nevertheless, though representative of that generation of historians, Arié was also different in that he did not conduct any original research on the history of Ottoman Jewry, being content to compile a synthesis of the history of the Jews as a whole. His declared goal in his Histoire juive was limited: summarize the major nineteenth-century text of Jewish history, that of Heinrich Graetz, and bring it up to date by summarizing Narcisse Leven’s Cinquante ans d’histoire.²⁵ Long chapters in Cinquante ans d’histoire had in fact been written by him. Furthermore, that book ended with World War I. Arié continued the narrative to include the peace treaties signed after the war and discussed the principal developments occurring in the Jewish world, such as Zionism and the Balfour Declaration. In the end, the Histoire juive reflected his own views; in the chapters dealing with the modern period in particular, the book was much more than a paraphrase of the works of Graetz or Leven.

      In a general way, Arié’s history is the consummate expression of the liberal emancipatory ideology of western European Jewry, particularly the French, an ideology that was to remain dominant in the western European Jewish world for a good part of the first half of the twentieth century. Echoing a number of themes of the Jewish Enlightenment and certain aspects of Reform Judaism, it systematically emphasized the “message” of Judaism, namely, the monotheism and justice propounded by the prophets, and its “mission,” the diffusion of these ideas and concepts among nations. Arié was explicit on this point from the very beginning: “We took it as a rule … to focus primarily on what makes up the intellectual and moral past of the Jewish people.” The sentences that follow announce the recurrent theme of the book:

      The political role of Israel was always minor, but its literature and its religious conceptions exerted such a profound and decisive influence on a large part of the human race that we must know them in some detail if we wish to understand the considerable place that the small Jewish population occupies in the annals of humanity. That is why, without neglecting any important event, we have particularly sought to shed light on the history of ideas that constitute the essence of Judaism. We have thus dedicated some discussion to the Prophets, to the organization of the faith, to religious sects, to the Mishnah, to the Talmud, to the origins and foundation of Christianity and Islam, and to all the Jewish thinkers and writers, whose principal works we have analyzed.²⁶

      This insistence on the essence of Judaism implicitly disputed the validity of the formalism that traditional Judaism in decline was accused of perpetuating. The distinction between essence and form was at the center of debates on modern Judaism, in which most nineteenth-century Jewish reformers were engaged, and it is not surprising to rediscover it in a writer such as Arié.

      In fact, the “mission” of Judaism, which purportedly consisted in ensuring the triumph of monotheism in the world, appears at the beginning of Histoire juive, with the evocation of Abraham. All biblical history is placed in that light, to the point of making the Greek translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, a crucial turning point in the history of the Jews. For Arié, that translation was the first Jewish apostle sent out into the world to begin to exert a profound influence on the history of civilization.²⁷

      Arié’s narrative presents itself as the evolution and development of the principles of monotheism and of justice through the Bible, the Mishnah, and the rationalist Jewish thought of the Middle Ages. The Jews and their ideas resisted constant persecutions and flourished under the most difficult conditions. Following Graetz, Arié has the age of obscurantism begin within Judaism itself, with the triumph of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbala, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like his role model and like most historians of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism), Arié could not tolerate the irrationalism of the Kabbala and called that period “an age of shadows and superstitions, which constitutes a kind of Jewish Middle Ages.”²⁸ It had led to the deadly messianic excesses of the false messiah Shabbatai Zvi and to a growing mediocrity among rabbis. The emergence of Hasidism (a religious movement that was mystical in inspiration and appeared in eastern Europe in the eighteenth century), which Arié perceived negatively, was associated with these developments and with the “aridity of Talmudic education in Poland.”²⁹ Having arrived at this point in his analysis, Arié judged traditional Judaism at the dawn of the modern age in these terms: “The decadence of Judaism ran deep.”³⁰

      Renaissance and renewal came with the Haskalah and the French Revolution. Moïse Mendelssohn redeemed Judaism from the inside, making its authentic meaning appear, while the revolution emancipated the Jews and began a new era in Jewish history. Echoing the Alliance’s discourse, Arié was quick to indicate that “regeneration” followed rapidly: “French Jews knew how to make themselves worthy of the act of justice and generosity that had been granted them and became sincerely attached to their nation.… Under the regime of liberty that was henceforth their own, they quickly lost the humble and fearful ways that had so often exposed them to ridicule.”³¹

      Arié felt sympathy for Reform Judaism in Germany and saw it as a remedy for some of the problems of extreme assimilation, such as the conversions occurring in Germany during the age of emancipation, and for the excesses of traditional Judaism: “Those who clung to the past did not want to tolerate any change in religion and instruction; they even refused to modify the loud and disgraceful way the faith was celebrated in the synagogues.”³²

      As might be expected, the founding of the Alliance and its subsequent activities occupied a privileged place in Arié’s history, and the organization was presented as the principal defender of the cause of world Jewry in all situations. Two entire chapters are devoted to the history of the Alliance, depicted as the catalyst for the best and most noble impulses of modern Judaism. It is interesting to note that it was only through these activities that the history of the Sephardim in the contemporary period succeeded in making a brief appearance in the book. Like most modern European historiography dedicated to the Jews—even up to our own time—Arié’s narrative did not allow the post-1492 Sephardim to speak, nor did it consider them actors after the expulsion from Spain and the wrong turn taken with Sabbateanism (the movement composed of followers of the false messiah Shabbatai Zvi). They came into existence only with the West as reference point and when they were the object of the activities of Western Jewry, in particular, those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This vision was shared by most Alliance teachers, who were, of course, themselves Sephardim. As neophytes of Western civilization, they could interpret their own history only through the prism of their adopted culture.

      In clear contrast on this point to Leven’s Cinquante ans d’histoire, Arié’s text adopted a more somber and less optimistic tone when he discussed modern antisemitism. He focused on the birth of modern antisemitism and racism and on the ravages caused by the pogroms in Russia, and he established a direct parallel between the situation prevailing in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth and the darkest days of the Middle Ages. Even his beloved France was not free from such symptoms, and Arié reported the vicissitudes of the Dreyfus affair in the greatest СКАЧАТЬ