A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

      Preface to the English Edition

      This is a slightly revised version, in translation, of a book that appeared in Paris in 1992 under the title Un vie judéo-espagnole à l’Est: Gabriel Arié (1863–1939). It contains the autobiography, journal, and selections from the correspondence of Gabriel Arié. Arié was born in Bulgaria in the last years of Ottoman rule, was educated by and became a teacher and major actor in the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the foremost Jewish organization of the time, and created and directed important Jewish schools and institutions in Ottoman Turkey. Upon his return to Bulgaria after ending his teaching career because of tuberculosis, Arié went on to become a successful businessman and an important notable and participant in Jewish politics. He also wrote most of the two volumes of the official history of the Alliance, Cinquante ans d’histoire, which appeared in print under the authorship of the organization’s president, Narcisse Leven, and which was until recently the definitive history of the diplomatic and educational work of the institution. He also published a history of the Jews, Histoire juive depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours (1923), which was adopted as a textbook for Jewish schools in France until World War II.

      The public work and activities of this Sephardi figure became familiar to us as we conducted research in the archives of the Alliance for a variety of projects over the years. It was by chance that Aron Rodrigue’s De l’instruction à l’émancipation caught the eye of Gabriel Arié’s grandson Dr. Elie Arié of Paris, who contacted him to reveal that he was in possession of his grandfather’s autobiographical manuscripts. Writings of this kind are quite rare in the Judeo-Spanish world, and this provided us with a unique opportunity to publish and to analyze both the public and the private lives of one of its important personalities. Together with selections from his letters to the Alliance Central Committee about a variety of political and educational matters, Arié’s writings provide a special perspective on the political, economic, and cultural changes undergone by the eastern Sephardi community, in the decades before its dissolution, in regions where it had been constituted since the expulsion from Spain in 1492. They also offer insight into these changes from the unique vantage point of an individual life and throw light on representations of the self by one of the members of the first generation of Westernizing Sephardim.

      Arié’s writings are organized into two parts in this book. Part I contains the autobiography that he wrote in 1906, when he thought that he would not survive tuberculosis, and a selection from his correspondence to the Alliance up till that year. Part II presents the yearly journal entries that he made to the manuscript after this period until his death, again accompanied by a selection of his letters.

      The publication of this book would not have been possible without Gabriel Arié’s son Narcisse Arié and his grandson Dr. Elie Arié, who provided us with the manuscripts of the autobiography and the journal, with the photographs and the genealogical data, and with all the information that could be of use to us. We also extend our thanks to Lisette Blottière (née Arié), Mathilde Arié, and Nancen Arié of Bulgaria, and to Eli Arieh of Israel, who were kind enough to help us in this work by providing us with information and documents.

      We thank Bernard Lory, lecturer at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and specialist on Bulgaria, whose erudition was of immense help in our project.

      We are grateful to the entire staff of the library and archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, from which we have taken excerpts from the correspondence of Gabriel Arié.

      We thank the Maurice Amado Foundation (United States) and the Ministère de la Recherche et de l’Espace (Délégation à l’Information Scientifique et Technique, France) for subsidizing the cost of the translation.

      We are also grateful for the ever-welcome input by Jean-Christophe Attias.

      A Note on the Documents

      This edition remains faithful to Gabriel Arié’s text. We have conserved his spelling of the names of individuals. We have also replicated his transliteration of Hebrew, giving a more precise one in a note when that seemed necessary. We have corrected a few spelling errors here and there. Gabriel Arié often gives two dates for a single event, that of the Julian calendar and that of the Gregorian calendar, which are thirteen days apart; we have maintained them. We have systematically compared the information in the narrative with that in the genealogical tree provided by the family and have noted any possible discrepancies. We were unable to identify certain names of cities cited by Arié. We have changed the place names to reflect the English usage of the time to facilitate the reader’s comprehension, giving modern equivalents in brackets or in the notes upon first mention. The principal cities of Bulgaria appear on the map; we give information in a note only on the smaller towns. Generally, we have been careful in our notes to give an accurate idea of the itineraries followed by Arié and his family throughout Bulgaria and Europe in the principal vacation spots and health centers. Finally, a few pages were missing from the manuscript that came to us; we have signaled them in a note.

      The reader will find a map of Bulgaria and its neighboring regions and the immediate genealogy of Gabriel Arié at the beginning of the book.

      Map of Bulgaria and neighboring regions

      A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe

      The Autobiography and Journal of Gabriel Arié, 1863–1939

      Genealogy of Gabriel Arié based on the manuscripts and documents of the Arié family

      Introduction

      PUBLIC LIFE

      For his entire life, Gabriel Arié—instructor, pedagogue, community leader, notable, businessman, and historian—found himself caught between the East and the West. Born in the Balkans in 1863, in a remote province of the Ottoman Empire, he witnessed the disappearance of an old order that had lasted for centuries and its replacement by a new political organization, new ideas, and new ways of life, which would irreversibly change the shape of Jewish existence in the East.

      As a child, Arié received a traditional Jewish education, soon to be followed by a Westernized education at the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Bulgaria and later in Istanbul (Constantinople) and finally at the organization’s institute for training its teachers, the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris. He moved without difficulty from the traditional Jewish world, which had been the natural environment of his family for generations, to a completely new universe, marked for him by the Western education he had received. His life was shaped by the use he made of the passport that had been granted him by the new culture he had acquired. In the end, it opened the possibility of a remarkable social ascension not only in his native Bulgaria but also in the Jewish world in general, where he became a trusted partner in the educational work undertaken by the primary Jewish organization of his time, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which propelled him to the rank of a Jewish notable.

      The Jewish community into which Gabriel Arié was born was an integral part of the Judeo-Spanish culture area that had been constituted in the Ottoman Empire after the arrival en

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