A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
on their way to the eastern Mediterranean, at the end of the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth. Most Jews from Bulgaria were the descendants of those exiles, who had emigrated north along the trade routes linking the great commercial axis of the Danube to the port of Salonika on the Aegean Sea and, further to the east, to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. The Jews had formed flourishing communities under the Ottomans and had been very active in the empire’s international commerce in the sixteenth century. Many of these communities also participated in regional commerce and acted as intermediaries between rural and urban markets.1
Nonetheless, at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the power of the Ottomans began to decline, and when the insecurity resulting from a weakening of the central authority began to have disastrous effects on commerce and the economy, the prosperity of Jewish communities in the Balkans experienced a considerable decline too. One of the aggravating circumstances was the rise of the Greek and Armenian bourgeoisie, who soon established close ties with the West and replaced the Jews in numerous sectors of the country’s economic life.2 A few Jews did continue to play an important role in certain areas of the economy, however. A case in point is the maternal side of Gabriel Arié’s family; throughout the eighteenth century and during the first part of the nineteenth, it was one of the most important Jewish families in the Balkan economy.3 But the exceptions cannot hide the fact that the community, taken as a whole, had declined considerably in relation to its apogee in the sixteenth century and that, at the time of Arié’s birth, it needed outside help to get back on its feet.
With the exception of a few families of notables commanding enormous fortunes, the majority of Sephardi Jews in the East lived in poverty, and the endemic social frictions generated by that situation had created deep chasms in all the Jewish communities. These chasms proved to be particularly important during the era of Westernization and especially later, with the arrival of Zionism. Schools became the stakes in a conflict between rich and poor, modernizers and conservatives. But these schools also offered possibilities of social ascension to a certain number of poor children, who were able to use education to improve their condition. Such was the case for Gabriel Arié.
The weakness of the Ottoman government, with ensuing insecurity and turbulence in the provinces, played a role in the continuing poverty of the Jewish communities in the Balkans. At the end of the nineteenth century, the attitude of the state toward the Jews could be characterized as benign indifference. The Jews had never been a threat to the Ottomans, and though they had lost the utility they had had at the beginning of their residence in the area, they still constituted an important group. The principal preoccupation of the Ottoman governments toward most of their non-Muslim subjects concerned the collection of taxes. Aside from that, each non-Muslim community enjoyed relatively great internal autonomy in the management of its affairs. As far as the Jews were concerned, that translated into autonomous community leadership, with rabbinical authorities having the first word in Jewish public life.4 The Ottoman Empire was a mosaic of religious and ethnic groups brought together under a central authority that was dependent on the army; these groups maintained relations with the state that were essentially tributary. Of course, Muslims were privileged as the dominant group, and Islam was the official religion of the country. From every point of view, non-Muslims were legally and socially inferior to Muslims.5 Nonetheless, except in periods of trouble or in regions that were less subjugated to the control of the central power, this did not translate into oppression. Jews and Christians occupied firmly established positions in the Ottoman regime and generally coexisted in relative harmony with their masters, though in a clearly hierarchized context where they had to know their place. It was only when Christian groups began to pursue nationalist and separatist objectives that the situation deteriorated and the system as a whole collapsed, under the effect of the corrosive influence of a triumphant West and the arrival of the most Western of ideologies: nationalism.
Before the appearance of the modern nation-state in the region, community, religious, and ethnic identities were under no pressure to assimilate. In this context, the Judeo-Spanish language, culture, and identity remained intact and evolved according to their own internal dynamics—hence the survival of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Gabriel Arié’s native tongue, and of the traditional way of life that marked his childhood. Later, in the new nation-states introduced into the formerly Ottoman regions, the influence of the old Ottoman paradigm of religious and ethnic hierarchies persisted under the Christian regimes, blocking successful integration, even though the equality of all citizens was stipulated in the constitutions. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire too, this paradigm remained at the foundation of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, despite reforms guaranteeing the equality of all citizens and the half-hearted intentions to bring all groups together under the Ottoman banner in order to check nationalist movements. There emerged no real will to integrate on either side.
Gabriel Arié was born in Samakov, a small provincial town in Ottoman Bulgaria, not very far from Sofia; it was the site of a regional market and had large iron mines nearby. The maternal branch of his family owned and operated some of these mines. They were a Jewish family originating in the Léon region of Spain who had been expelled in 1492 and, after many tribulations, had arrived in Vienna by the eighteenth century.6 Expelled once more in 1775, this time from Vienna by Maria Theresa, the family settled in Vidin on the banks of the Danube, with later branches in Sofia and Samakov. One of Gabriel Arié’s ancestors, Abraham Arié, established a business when he arrived in Vidin that experienced considerable expansion until the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. That branch of the family distinguished itself in the trade of grains and manufactured goods, the operation of iron mines, and banking, with bank branches in Europe and the East. The family also included patrons of the arts and displayed a certain artistic refinement. The Russo-Turkish War, which, along with Bulgaria’s independence, marked the beginning of a new era, put an end to that prosperity. Arié’s mother stemmed from this line. His father, in contrast, belonged to the poor side of the family, never succeeded in attaining a social position comparable to that of his in-laws, and struggled for subsistence his entire life, for the most part without great success.
Initially, Gabriel Arié received a traditional Jewish education in the local meldar, the equivalent of the Ashkenazi heder in eastern Europe. The meldar was a religious school where children learned to read Jewish prayers. The aim of this essentially religious education was not so much to diffuse knowledge as to pass on eternal truths and socialize the child, as a means of ensuring behavior in keeping with the precepts of Judaism and perpetuation of the community. At the apogee of that educational system in the Ottoman Empire, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many young people pursued their studies after the meldar in the talmudei-torah, where they could acquire a number of the more advanced Jewish disciplines. Although that continued to be the case in quite weakened form in certain of the large Jewish centers of the empire in the nineteenth century, a small provincial town such as Samakov offered few possibilities of the kind, and the experience Arié had in the traditional educational system lasted only a few years.7
Even though it cannot be said that the education Arié received at the meldar marked him profoundly, it seems to have left him with a certain knowledge and a certain tendency to mark all events in the cycle of Jewish life, to observe the rites associated with them, and to commemorate Jewish holidays. As we shall see, as a teacher for the Alliance, Arié was a vehement critic and adversary of the traditional system of education. His sense of sacred time and ritual, however, had been shaped by the traditional world in which he had lived his first years, and he was involved in certain important areas of public Jewish observance until his death. It is nonetheless true that the most important formative episode of his life was not his experience at the meldar but his attendance at the Alliance school opened in Samakov in 1874.
The arrival of the organization and its network of schools was a watershed event in the life of Sephardi Jews in modern times. The Alliance Israélite Universelle was founded in Paris in 1860 by a group of French Jewish intellectuals and militants. Its purpose was to struggle for the rights of Jews throughout the world, defend persecuted Jews, and bring about the legal emancipation of those who were still being treated as second-class citizens. Depending on transnational solidarity among Jews, the organization brought together through its programs a large