A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
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was not in a position to finish the book. Nothing better expresses the Alliance leaders’ confidence in Arié than the way they turned to him to write their official history. When he finished that work, Arié became, on his own initiative, the editor of a new periodical, the Bulletin des Ecoles de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, designed to provide the staff of the Alliance with a glimpse of pedagogical literature. Another publication, the Revue des Ecoles de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, had already appeared between 1901 and 1904 but had been suspended by the organization because of the independent and often negative criticisms the instructors had increasingly come to express. Arié’s Bulletin des Ecoles clearly followed the party line of the Central Committee and did not allow for the expression of any dissent.
The favor in which the Central Committee held Arié was not only due to the esteem he elicited by his zeal in pursuing his activities in the service of the organization. There existed as well a more extensive affinity of style between the leaders of the Alliance and Arié. Although the society began as a relatively radical organization, by the turn of the century it had become an integral part of the French Jewish establishment and, as a result, more and more conservative. The leaders of the Alliance were comfortable in a world where the notables led and the masses followed. When, for example, their leadership was called into question by the bulk of their membership, as it was in Germany in 1911 (members wanted a greater voice in the management of the society), the Alliance suspended the system of direct elections to the Central Committee and replaced it with appointments by committee members. This politics of notables was a style of leadership that conformed to Arié’s temperament. He was not a democrat. He hated local committees whose function was to represent the community in the management of the schools, and he was delighted to discover there was no such local committee in Izmir. He denounced the “absurd” Bulgarian law stipulating the election of school committees and saw it as the root of all the Alliance’s problems in that country (see his letter of 22 May 1913).
Arié’s conservatism was also apparent in his approach to the internal functioning of the organization. When, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the instructors began collective bargaining with the Alliance leadership for certain retirement benefits, Arié immediately broke ranks with his colleagues (see letter of 5 November 1905). Although he complained bitterly about the meager retirement pay provided by the Alliance and had a keen sense of his rights (he even toyed with the idea of suing the society), he greatly preferred solving this kind of problem individually with the Central Committee. His politics were founded on respect, and finding himself closely associated with the Alliance leadership, he adopted the behavior of primus inter pares in his relations with the leading personalities of the organization and expected that those who did not occupy as high a position as himself would show him consideration. The intense feeling of insecurity underlying this attitude was in part appeased by an identification with “important” personalities, with whom he was henceforth linked.
Arié was also infatuated with discipline. While a growing number of instructors were demanding more and more from the Central Committee, he forthrightly blamed the growing “laxity” of the ENIO (in his letters of 29 September and 13 October 1905). He criticized the education given by the school as too liberal and even libertarian. He was also a critic of the large number of outings allowed students in Paris; he feared these would expose students to negative influences and the spirit of revolt, which he considered part of the mal du siècle. His ideal was the missionary institution, in which future teacher-missionaries would be strictly kept from too close a contact with the external world. He also criticized the disappearance of direct relationships between the students and the leaders of the Alliance, which had been caused by moving the ENIO to Auteuil. He evoked as the good old days the time of his own studies, when students were in daily contact with the leading personalities of the Alliance, were invited to their homes, and could thus learn to follow their example. His perception of the Alliance as an organization was that of a large family, and his vision of the world in general was largely marked by his paternalism. That fit perfectly with the paternalism of the Alliance leadership and with the relation of guardianship it maintained with its teachers and with the Jewish communities in the East generally.
This paternalist attitude and its predilection for the politics of notables characterized all his relations as a community leader, especially in Bulgaria. This was the case not only during the years when he was the director of the school in Sofia, between 1887 and 1893, but also when he returned there definitively after his recovery in 1913, having officially retired as an instructor but continuing as the official representative of the Alliance in that country.
Arié’s writings about Bulgaria reveal an interesting perception of the developments experienced by that country and their impact on the Jews. Bulgarian Jewry is particularly important in that it was the first Eastern Sephardi community of some size to encounter the modern nation-state. That community, most of whose members lived in Sofia, Plovdiv (Philippopolis), Ruse (Ruschuk), and Vidin, had until that time been a satellite of larger centers of Ottoman Jewry such as Salonika, Edirne (Adrianople), and Istanbul. It now found itself cut off from the traditional multiethnic and multireligious organization of the Ottoman Empire and developed in the ever more nationalist context of a new unitary state.
Whereas the beginning of Bulgarian domination had been difficult, with thousands fleeing the hostilities and advances of the Russian armies in 1878, the new state was quick to grant complete equality to Jews, with the Constitution of Tirnovo in 1879. The local synagogue was recognized by the state as the fundamental Jewish structure, and the chief rabbi was elected by the communities. Very often, Ashkenazim from abroad were chosen, and that is how Shimeon Dankovitz, Moritz Grünwald, and Marcus Ehrenpreis were elected to represent Bulgarian Jewry.17
Arié was not favorably impressed by these rabbis and, having made his opinion known, attracted their hostility. His directness and elitism earned him many enemies, even among the members of the school committees responsible for organizing contacts between the communities and the Alliance. The resulting frictions were aggravated when, in 1891, a new law augmented the hours devoted to Bulgarian, eliciting doubts in the minds of many regarding the very survival of an autonomous Jewish system of education in that country.18 In the conflicts that followed, Arié’s position became untenable, to the point that he left the country in 1893 to occupy the post of Alliance school director in Izmir and returned to Bulgaria only twenty years later.
His years of absence, however, were those that saw the most important evolutions in the history of Jews in modern Bulgaria, with the emergence of Zionism as the majority ideology. The development of that movement was accompanied by violent conflicts between the Zionists and the Alliance Israélite Universelle.
The anti-Zionism of the organization was deep. It emerged in the first place from profound ideological differences regarding the meaning of the Jewish historical experience. The Alliance ardently believed in the benefits of emancipation and assimilation: Jews were to become equal citizens in every country they lived in, and Judaism would be reformulated on a strictly denominational basis. Zionism, in contrast, was the belief that emancipation was a chimera and that antisemitism was a constant of history that would not disappear with Jews’ assimilation. Whereas the ideology of emancipation had its source in the liberal model of western Europe, Zionism came about in reaction to the persecutions the Jews had undergone in eastern Europe and to the obstacles in the way of emancipation in those regions.
The rift between the Alliance and the Zionists became particularly serious at the local level with respect to the schools, as was the case in Bulgaria. The educational philosophy of the Zionists and that of the Alliance diverged considerably. The Alliance wanted to “civilize” the Jews by teaching them French and modernizing their daily existence. Their “regeneration” would prepare them to benefit one day from the advantages of citizenship in the East. The Zionists maintained that teaching in French would lead to de-Judaization and to the loss of the national Jewish spirit, and they emphasized the rebirth of Hebrew, the Jews’ national language, and its adoption as the language used in the schools. When community conflicts, class divisions, and rivalries between notables were added in, the differences between the Alliance and the Zionists created an explosive situation. Beginning in the last years of the nineteenth century, the Alliance schools were the object of attacks in numerous locations.