A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
give no excuse for antisemites to launch an attack. That eminently conservative position, which Arié shared with most of the Jewish establishment in western Europe throughout the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, was indissociable from a criticism of traditional Judaism. Arié was irritated by the noise and disorder he observed in the synagogues of Izmir (see letter of 28 March 1900) and attributed the decline in the attendance of worship services to the absence of solemnity that characterized the traditional synagogue, going so far as to attempt to open an “oratory” at the Alliance school where services would be conducted with a certain amount of decorum.
Nevertheless, he was very concerned with the need to maintain and perpetuate Judaism and Jewish identity. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Alliance itself had become alarmed at the drop in religious observance in the Jewish communities of the Levant and had sent circulars to its teachers in which it insisted on the teaching of Jewish history and religion as the remedy to that situation. Arié fully shared that position. Taking stock of the situation prevailing in the Alliance schools, he criticized the fact that the school curriculum was very strong in nonabstract subject matter but much weaker in the area of “moral” education (see letter of 17 July 1896). Moralizing was the remedy, and the Alliance schools had to recognize they were “denominational” institutions and thus obliged to reach that objective by accurately and effectively transmitting the ethical message of Judaism. Arié greatly disapproved of the fact that local rabbis had the responsibility for religious instruction in the Alliance schools. He did not have a very high opinion of the Sephardi rabbinate. He had been scandalized by the hostility toward modern schools manifested by the rabbis of Ortaköy and wrote a sarcastic letter describing the funeral of one of the principal opponents of the Alliance, where his feelings on this subject were clear (see letter of 11 January 1884). He did not appreciate the “obscurantism” of the rabbis and their ignorance of the ethical specificity and essence of Judaism. It was imperative that the Alliance place the responsibility for the religious education of children with teachers capable of stressing this core aspect of the religion.
It is striking that Arié was systematically critical of each of the rabbis he met in the Levant, including those originally from the West, such as Dankovitz, Grünwald, and Ehrenpreis, chief rabbis of Bulgaria. He expressed admiration only for certain French rabbis such as Zadoc Kahn and Israël Lévy. Arié’s ideals were in keeping with a certain form of Enlightenment Judaism, namely, Franco-Judaism in its Third Republican form; any other manifestation of Jewish religiosity, any other style of Jewish leadership, left him cold. He had absorbed too much of the Alliance’s message to accept anything else.
That vision of Judaism and of the history of the Jews found its best expression in his Histoire juive depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours, published in Paris in 1923 and reissued in 1926. This book was a great success and was immediately adopted as a manual in the Jewish elementary schools in France (see letter from Israel Lévy, chief rabbi of France, dated 17 October 1923, reproduced in the second edition of the book, p. 5). It was to remain the standard textbook used in classrooms until World War II. The fact that Arié’s book could become the authorized narrative of the history of Jews, that it could be used to train the youth in his adopted culture, is excellent evidence of the extraordinary trajectory of this Sephardi Jew from an “obscure” region of the Levant, and of his capacity to assimilate the main principles of Franco-Judaism.
Arié’s interest in the history of the Jews was long-standing. His history-writing project began to take shape with the approach of the four hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; Arié regretted the fact that the classic work of the time, Théodore Reinach’s L’histoire des Israélites depuis la ruine de leur indépendance nationale jusqu’à nos jours, which appeared in 1884, did not deal with the history of the Sephardim. Thus, in February 1890, he began to consider working on the subject and to collect the necessary material: “So much the better if, in 1892, I can give my compatriots a sketch of our history that would help them reflect upon themselves.”24
The awakening of an interest in Jewish history was an integral part of the process of Westernization within the Sephardi intelligentsia in the second half of the nineteenth century. More generally, the opening toward the West relegated the production of writings in Hebrew to the background. Hebrew texts were now reserved for scholarly and religious milieus. A literature in Judeo-Spanish, the vernacular of Sephardi culture, began to flourish. That language was to constitute an important vehicle for Westernization among the masses, through the translation of works originally written in foreign languages and through the press, which also experienced considerable expansion at that time. French, Russian, Italian, and Hebrew history books and novels were translated, adapted to the tastes of the public, and published in shortened form in serials in the newspapers. Historical works, biographies, poetry collections, plays, books on morality, and pedagogical books in various areas were published. There was a desire to rapidly embrace what was happening in the West, to learn and adapt to the new context. And yet, despite the Westernization under way among the Sephardim, local publications were not in European languages. Moreover, the abundance of translations suffocated local literature, and we find few works that show signs of a specifically Sephardi originality.
The same drive also focused on the history of the Jews and tried to introduce the locals to it—a way of eliminating the isolation in the East, a region that had 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