A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
was also in illness that Gabriel Arié crystallized his individual sense of self, his profound being, whose tribulations he narrated in his autobiography and journal. These works are the testimony of a long internal journey, written by an engaging and courageous man seeking the irreconcilable—a fate reserved at a certain moment for those Jews who had gone in search of modernity and had witnessed the slow crumbling of a world that had been theirs for centuries. A proud man, he wanted to show himself in his best light; yet the weaknesses of a tortured being also show through. These weaknesses contribute to his strength. His was the order and disorder of a full life, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century and underwent the transformations and upheavals affecting the Sephardi world in the East up to the eve of World War II. Arié did not have the misfortune of experiencing the horrors of that war. Instead of an exemplary life—which is not truly life—the memory of which he would have liked to pass on to his children. Arié leaves us a life example, the memory of a man and of an age-old Sephardi culture that he saw slowly disintegrate and disappear.
1. For the latest overview of the history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, see Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans: The Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th Centuries (Oxford, 1995). See also Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1991); Walter Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity: A History of the Jews of Turkey (Lanham, 1992); Avigdor Levy, ed., The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 1994). For a general history of the Jews of Bulgaria, see Haim Keshales, History of the Jews of Bulgaria (in Hebrew), 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1969–73); and Vicki Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews: The History of a Dubious Symbiosis (New York, 1979).
2. The economic role of the Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is analyzed by Halil Inalcik, “Jews in the Ottoman Economy and Finances,” in C. E. Bosworth, Charles Issawi, et al., eds., Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis: The Islamic World (Princeton, 1989), 531–50. For an analysis of the situation in the Balkans, see Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960): 234–313. See also the discussion in Benbassa and Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans, 36–49.
3. See Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews, 64.
4. For an analysis of community structures and leadership, see the studies published in Aron Rodrigue, ed., Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership (Bloomington, 1992).
5. For a study of the legal status of Jews in the land of Islam, see Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, 1984). See also the discussion in Aron Rodrigue, “ ‘Difference’ and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by Nancy Reynolds,” Stanford Humanities Review 5/1 (1995): 81–90.
6. See the manuscript in our possession tracing the history of the family between 1768 and 1914: [Nahim J. Arié and] Tchelebi Moshé Abraham Arié II, “Biography of the Arié Family” (in Judeo-Spanish), 4 vols., completed in 1914. This information is also contained in biographical notes provided by Gabriel Arié’s son Narcisse, which accompanied his father’s manuscript and are dated 8 November 1989.
7. For a presentation of the traditional educational system in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of Westernization, see A. Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington, 1990), 35–38.
8. For a general history of the Alliance, see André Chouraqui, Cent ans d’histoire: L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine (1860–1960) (Paris, 1965); and Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1939 (Seattle, 1993).
9. For an analysis of the ideology of emancipation and regeneration, see Jay Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century France (Detroit, 1989); Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 1–24; Rodrigue, Images.
10. See Rodrigue, Images, 15–21.
11. Ibid., 25–30.
12. On the activities of Nissim Béhar, see Shlomo Haramati, Three Who Preceded Ben Yehudah (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1978), 83–125.
13. See Rodrigue, Images, 34–67.
14. See Esther Benbassa and A. Rodrigue, “L’artisanat juif en Turquie à la fin du XIXe siècle: L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et ses oeuvres d’apprentissage,” Turcica 17 (1985): 113–26.
15. Georges Weill, “Charles Netter ou les oranges de Jaffa,” Nouveaux Cahiers 21 (summer 1970): 2–36; Rodrigue, Images, 94–104.
16. See Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 110–11.
17. See Keshales, History, 2:195–210.
18. Ibid., 173.
19. On Zionism, see Esther Benbassa, “Zionism in the Ottoman Empire at the End of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Studies in Zionism 11/2 (fall 1990): 127–40; Esther Benbassa, “Associational Strategies in Ottoman Jewish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Levy, ed., Jews of the Ottoman Empire, 457–84. See also Benbassa and Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans, 116–54.
20. See Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews, 126–31; Benbassa and Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans, 163.
21. Biographical information compiled by his son and dated 8 November 1989.
22. Ibid.
23. See Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews, 116.
24. Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, Bulgarie XII.E. 153a.
25. Gabriel Arié, Histoire juive depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1923), 1.
26. Ibid., 2.
27. Ibid., 65.
28. Ibid., 236.
29. Ibid., 262.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 278.
32. Ibid., 279.
33. Ibid., 337.
34. Gabriel Arié, Histoire juive depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours, 2d ed. (Paris, 1926), 3.
35. Ibid., 348.
36. Ibid., 349.
37. Ibid., 366.
38. Ibid.
39. Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, Suisse A, response by Bigart to a letter from Arié dated 15 January 1909.
40. Philippe Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France (Paris, 1971), 10.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 70.
43. Pierre Guillaume, “Tuberculose et montagne: Naissance d’un mythe,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 30 (April–June 1991): 36–37.
44. Béatrice Didier, Le journal intime (Paris, 1976), 18.
45. Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 210.
46. Ibid., 216.
47. Ibid., 210.
48. See n. 6 above.
49. Mme Mathilde Arié of Israel, wife of Félix, nephew of G. Arié, sent us three genealogical trees: the first goes from 1780, the date the ancestor of the line, Abraham Arié, arrived in Samakov, until 1890, and was no doubt compiled by the father of G. Arié; the second was compiled by G. Arié himself; and the third is a later, supplementary copy. Different members of the family, who are dispersed in various countries and who sometimes do not know one another, possess copies of these trees.
50. Didier, Le journal intime, 63.
51. Ibid.
52.