A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
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linked,61 and “the intimate journal rests entirely on the belief in a ‘self,’ the desire to know it, to cultivate it, to have a relationship with it, to record it on paper.”62 It was in fact during the nineteenth century that the sense of individual identity and its representation increasingly crystallized.63 Hence it is no accident that autobiography and the intimate journal experienced a real expansion in the nineteenth century and that they were closely linked to the bourgeois context of the West. At that time, however, the East had not yet produced a bourgeois class in the Western sense of the term, because it had not experienced the same political, economic, and social evolution. The Eastern bourgeoisie, for the most part non-Muslim groups in the Ottoman Empire who were at the forefront of commerce and trade, had neither the same status in society nor the same values as their Western counterpart. In the new nation-states, it would be a long time before a national bourgeoisie would come into being; in the meantime, the old multiethnic bourgeoisie continued to hold ground despite the upheavals provoked by the change of masters. This Levantine bourgeoisie, characteristic of the entire Middle East, mimicked that of the West, and the petty bourgeoisie, composed of salesmen and shop owners, imitated it in turn. These were the wealthy classes, who, owing to their fortunes, distinguished themselves from the autochthonous peoples through their style of life; yet they still conserved some of their specificities. The non-Muslim bourgeoisie in the Ottoman East had neither its own ideology nor the possibility of producing one. Since there was no local model to follow, it turned toward the Western model—which reaffirmed its specific Levantine character, a specific mix of East and West.
Westernization, the result of the impact of a particular type of civilization from Europe, marked the local scene increasingly as the nineteenth century wore on.64 In Gabriel Arié’s time, the Westernization of Levantine Jewry was in its infancy. Western values were reaching that part of the East, which was opening up to the West, but were mediated through various levels.65 The Jewish elite, in keeping with their counterparts in western Europe, imported Westernization and attempted to impose it through the modern networks of communication, associations, the press, literature translated from foreign languages, and—the most effective tool of all—European-type schools. Westernization did not run deep, however. A selection took place locally, as is generally the case, with the local peoples opting for the aspects that suited them best. For a long time, these local Jewish populations, like the non-Jewish environment, experienced a fragile Westernization. It was the middle strata who extracted the greatest benefits. The process followed a progressive vertical movement, from the top down. Those at the bottom took a long time to be permeated by it and remained the closest to Jewish traditional values and to those borrowed from the Muslim environment. Arié had grown up there. In his childhood, he was awash in that atmosphere, a mixture of the traditional Jewish school, family life, and the synagogue and of the influences of the Turkish environment (such as the Turkish music sung and played in his home). In the beginning, nothing predestined this young man for the life he would know. Nonetheless, by his own choices, his frequent travels to the West, and his extended stays there for his health, he lived in osmosis with Europe. Yet he never entirely lost certain cultural particularities of his original environment.
Westernization occurred first at the level of the signifier. Western dress was introduced into wealthy families, to the detriment of the traditional costume worn by the older people. This evolution is clearly visible in the photographs from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: in front of scenery depicting pleasure gardens, decorative fabrics, columns, drapery, and landscapes, old people in traditional costumes and the young in European dress, seated in European-style armchairs or standing, serious, often rigid, or barely cracking a smile, pose for eternity in the studio.66 This was the golden age of photography. The wealthier the client, the more often he went to renowned photographers, not only to fix the great events of life with the requisite props—modern hats and dresses, city clothes for the men—but also to indulge a taste for souvenirs. At the beginning of the century, traditional costumes progressively disappeared from the photographs, and nothing distinguished these Jews, at least in their appearance, from Westerners, except for a few decorative touches in the background of the photographs that betray their Eastern origin: a pointing minaret or a floral pattern on the fabrics, for example. These Eastern signifiers are more numerous in the photographs taken by less renowned photographers, frequented in general by the middle class because of their lower prices. In fact, those who went to these photographers were often not yet Westernized to the point of wishing at all cost to efface any reminder of the East. Sometimes in very Europeanized photographs, a fez, the traditional male head covering, recalls the origin of the photographed subjects, which is otherwise lost in the accumulation of Western signifiers, especially in wedding photographs. These photographs are X-rays of the Levantine bourgeoisie and of its composite identity.
These same wealthy strata also adopted Western ways in diet, behavior, interior decoration, and leisure activities. They went to the country every summer, as much for medical reasons (“fresh air”) as for the pleasure of escaping the heat of the city. With the progress in Western education among the middle and wealthy strata came a penchant, especially among the daughters, for certain European bourgeois principles of childrearing and education. Owing to the Alliance schools, a certain number of poor girls also had access to that education.67 There was a tendency to focus on the question of manners, on the signifier, which is the most easily detectable. As Gallicization took hold, even in homes of the middle strata, families began to speak French, which would long remain the distinctive sign of social ascension. This language began to replace Judeo-Spanish, without supplanting it altogether. And with the formation of nation-states in the former Ottoman territories, the languages of the country also began to be introduced very slowly into Jewish homes, depending on the degree of integration. Women were an important vehicle from the base for Westernization and Gallicization.
Everything coming from the West was appreciated and thus sought out: fabric, knickknacks, decorative objects, etc. The foreign-language press spread the latest novelties in dress. The West became the referent. But the traditions and customs that had come with the family and with the social heritage of the bourgeois environment68 were not those of the West; they stemmed from Levantine specificity, itself heterogeneous, from the denominational and ethnic diversity of this Greek, Armenian, European, and Jewish bourgeoisies. Each group had a particular identity as well as elements of convergence. The signifiers borrowed from the West were added to these already heterogeneous identities.
Arié’s Westernization was not limited to these signifiers but went beyond with the act of writing an autobiography and a journal, which was linked intimately to his type of trajectory; it expressed the uniqueness of his approach, his originality.
Contrary to what happened in the second half of the nineteenth century, when literature and history written in the West were imported and presented to the local public in the vernacular, Gabriel Arié wrote his history books in a Western language, that of the Alliance. That organization had given him access to the West, with which he then felt familiar. But he also wrote the history of the Jewish people, a manual intended for French Jewish children. This reverse approach deserves mention, if only because of its rarity. Not only did Arié submit to Western influence, but he also transformed himself into a protagonist of the culture he so admired. In contrast, though he had planned to write the history of his cultural environment, the history of Sephardim, he did not have the means at his disposal to do so (or did not really want to do so?). Was he still too close to a kind of Sephardism that prevented him from taking the necessary distance, or was he, in contrast, sufficiently Westernized to believe his own history minor next to that of a Jewish people more easily accessible to the French public he intended to address? His failure to complete this undertaking reveals the complexity of the man Arié. But by a happy chance, his intimate writings were published a hundred years later, at the commemoration of the five hundredth anniversary of the expulsion of his ancestors from Spain.
It is undeniable that Gabriel Arié’s personality also played a primary role in the choice of that mode of writing. He describes himself as rather withdrawn as a child, with a pronounced taste for reading. He began very early to retreat from the daily life of the family to indulge in that solitary pleasure. He also alludes to melancholy, which he calls a family malady. In that environment, isolating himself was already a modern act, a