A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
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given his position, the affair with Mile Ungar would have meant trouble at the beginning of his career. That did not prevent him from having relationships with other women later on, including Mile Julie Naar, another teacher, whom he imposed on his wife, establishing a kind of ménage à trois.
Gabriel Arié criticized Eastern women, did not always appreciate the mores of emancipated women, married an Eastern woman to follow tradition, and yet was attracted by women teachers, symbols for the age of female emancipation in the environment he had grown up in. He was haunted by the image of Mme Béhar, née Melanie Rosenstrauss, whom he loved with an innocent and lasting love. Barely a year after the death of his wife in 1929, he married one of her friends, a Sephardi woman who had also led a public life and directed an orphanage. This contradiction between respect for the practices of his cultural environment and attraction for the Western universe he had conquered was inherent in the life of the man Arié, even though it was not verbalized. Gabriel Arié’s associations with women were limited to the Jewish circle. We find no indication of any relationship whatsoever in the non-Jewish world.
As a privileged space of privacy, the family remained riveted to the Jewish sphere. Despite its Western ways, Arié’s family does not seem to have maintained relations with non-Jews, or if they did, these relations were exceptional and circumscribed, such as visits by doctors or the presence of a domestic staff during his stay in Europe and in Bulgaria itself. Nor does Gabriel Arié indicate the existence in his family of marriages with non-Jews. If, on the outside, there was some contact with non-Jews, with rare exceptions they were not introduced inside. Despite the openness toward the Western exterior that was occurring, the inside symbolized by the extended family remained Jewish, though this Judaism was not manifested in any consistent observance of religious precepts. This was an ethnic Judaism based on habit. Thus Gabriel Arié adopted a compartmentalized way of life common in that cultural environment, where the community lived relatively closed in upon itself as a result of denominational borders imposed from above, which penetrated everyday life and persisted even when the borders were officially abolished. The outside, the public arena, was the place for these interrelations—Gabriel Arié even joined a non-Jewish Masonic lodge—but they usually stopped at the threshold of the house. The family thus remained the place of memory, where the rites of the life cycle and the celebrations that mark time were respected.
The Jewishness of the Arié family does not seem to have been affected by external influences, which it was able to integrate without losing its identity. That, in fact, is what made all the difference between him and the Jews of western Europe, who experienced a different process of emancipation and, as a result, of modernization, under the impulse of a strong state that imposed its values on the Jews. In the Levant, however, modernization was a choice for the elites. Since they had borrowed their new values from the outside, they did not have the force or means of a state at their disposal to impose them on the rest of the Jewish population, as they would have liked to do. The actions of the elites also did not have as much at stake as those of a state. That also contributed in great part to safeguarding Jewish identity and its routines among the wealthy Jewish strata and those most oriented toward the West, even when respect for the everyday precepts of Judaism had been eroded.
Arié himself observed a similar kind of Judaism, and his intimate writings do not reveal a great religious sensibility. His bitter meditations, following the death of his father, on the vanity of all human efforts and all faith, are an expression of his sadness and grief, but they also convey a lack of the kind of assurance he might have drawn from a more solid Jewish faith and observance. In some sense, in a manner that points ironically to his criticism of Easterners, Arié acted out of concern for appearances, conserving certain external, and therefore social, signs of Jewish observance all his life. He observed the Jewish liturgical rite in mourning the death of his father, made sure that his sons were bar mitzvah (even teaching them the sections of the biblical text they were to recite for the occasion), was a member of a synagogue, and commemorated Jewish holidays. Nothing indicates, however, that he kept kosher, since this issue was never evoked in his writings, even in the context of his stay in Davos, where it probably would have been impossible to find kosher food. Yet all this did not prevent Arié from returning to Hebrew studies at the end of his life.
The new nation-states that had formed in the region were still weak and could not take decisive action to enforce “assimilation.” When they did manifest the will to do so, the Jews were already confronting the new option that presented itself to them, Jewish nationalism and Zionism, which contributed toward reinforcing Jewish identity among a large part of the population in countries such as Bulgaria, for example. Of course, the members of the elite long remained hesitant about that option, which placed their positions as notables within the community at risk, since those positions were progressively taken over by nationalist militants.77 This time, the base imposed its will on the elites, who, in spite of themselves, bowed to the new context in the nation-states, including Bulgaria and even, in part, Greece.
At first glance, at least at the level of signifier, the Arié family was indistinguishable from the petit bourgeois family and, later, from the urban bourgeois family of the West at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Family photographs are testimony to this. The prolonged stay by Gabriel Arié in the West made him feel more at ease in the role of the bourgeois. While still in Davos, he began to have a house rebuilt in Sofia, a city that had undergone great transformations. Homes, the material foundation of the family and pillar of the social order, are also property, investments.78 That is what Gabriel Arié’s behavior manifested: he intended to draw on the revenues from the rental of the stores and apartments in the building, while his brother lived in another part of the house. Upon his return, he also lived there. Toward the end of his stay in Davos, he slowly introduced himself into business and later made his fortune. Thus, he made the transition from illness to a new enterprise in life. The mere fact of having a house built signified the hope that he would get well.
Even during his long years of being somewhat cut off socially and economically, he was free from want, owing to the Alliance, his brother, and his own ingenuity. Money was very attractive to Arié. Knowing well the material difficulties that confronted instructors, he directed his children toward more lucrative careers. They and other members of the family made their careers in insurance, a modern profession in the tertiary sector. They founded and directed local representations of foreign insurance companies or merely sought employement there—which linked them even professionally to the West.
Distrustful by nature and sure of his own abilities as an instructor, Arié intermittently took on the education of his children and his niece, not trusting the school. In that, he conformed with fathers who, in bourgeois families, act as teachers, at least for their sons.79 Arié attached a particular importance to the instruction and upbringing of his younger son, Narcisse. In addition, he earned part of his living in Davos from tutoring. In Sofia, he continued to concern himself with the education of his daughters by giving them French lessons. His ambition for them was that of a bourgeois of his time: his daughter Jeanne enrolled in the Weill and Kahn Institute, where Alliance teachers were trained, but Arié also requested piano, dance, and needlework lessons for her—an ambivalent attitude characteristic of the man.
Above all, Gabriel Arié’s autobiography and journal are the testimony of a self-made man who carries within himself the stigmata of those who force the hand of “destiny.” Life struggle was the credo of this man, who, by his own will, climbed the rungs of the social ladder and succeeded in conquering illness. Beneath this voluntarist lay a fragile, insecure self who needed to be loved, needed to be the center of attention. Anxious by nature, he hid behind order, which protected him from anything unforeseen that might have generated anxiety. He bore no illusions. Both intellectual and pragmatic, he knew men through their actions and did not always see them in their best light. The bitterness he sometimes expressed bore witness to this. And knowing human beings, he also seems to have known how to get around them, to manage them (in the best cases), which permitted him to constitute an entire network of relations. He rarely used them for himself personally, since he was not really an opportunist and was better at giving than at taking, with a kind of pride characteristic of his cultural universe. In contrast, he called on their services when advancing a public, rather than a personal, cause. At the same time, this was a man with direct ways,