A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
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was very different from his fellow students in one respect, however. He was one of the rare alumni of the ENIO to enjoy the absolute trust of the leaders of the Alliance. In fact, in the annals of the society, the level of intimacy in the friendships he developed with members of the Central Committee is unequaled. Even at the ENIO, he proved his value to Maurice Marx, the severe and authoritarian director of the institution, and was chosen by him to direct the school in his absence. In his first post, at the Alliance school of Ortaköy (Ortakeuy; a Jewish quarter of Istanbul), he earned the friendship of Félix Bloch, secretary of the Regional Committee of the Alliance in Istanbul, soon becoming his right arm on inspection tours of the schools in the capital, which elicited the jealousy of his colleagues. The close relations he had established with members of the Central Committee proved to be very important when, having resigned from the Alliance for financial reasons in 1885, he managed to be reinstated in 1887 as director of the Alliance school in Sofia. The Alliance never looked kindly on the resignation of its instructors for whatever reason, and it was altogether exceptional on its part to rehire them. Not only did his career with the Alliance not end with his resignation, but in finding himself in the right place at the right time, when a good school director was needed in Sofia, Arié showed how indispensable he was to the organization. The secretary general, the scholar Isidore Loeb, helped him obtain funds for constructing a new school building during his trip to Paris in 1891. It was also during that stay that Arié met Jacques Bigart, who was to occupy the post of secretary general following Isidore Loeb’s death. The relations between the two men were very close. Not only did they meet frequently during vacations and Arié’s visits to Switzerland, but Arié also regularly frequented the home of Bigart’s sister, who lived in Geneva. Bigart also visited Arié during his stay at the Montana sanatorium in 1903. This seems at the very least remarkable, given the widespread image of Bigart as cold, reserved, distant, and authoritarian, which we find in the correspondence of the Alliance teachers.
His status as “favorite son” of the Alliance opened many doors. He was greatly appreciated by the president of the organization, Narcisse Leven, whom he often introduced as a close friend. At the Alliance, his closest friend seems to have been Sylvain Bénédict, inspector of schools, on whom he exerted a great influence. Owing to these ties, Arié also met Zadoc Kahn, chief rabbi of France, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, the famous philanthropist, and Rabbi Moses Gaster and Frederic David Mocatta, two influential personalities among English Jews at the time. This network of relations allowed Arié to influence a number of decisions made by the Alliance and by other Jewish leaders in matters concerning the Sephardi Jews of the East. His perspicacious and incisive analysis of events and problems made him an important source of information for the leaders of Western Jewry.
Of course, the whirlwind of activities Arié became involved in to advance the work of the Alliance made him all the more appreciated by that body. Like his colleagues, he was not merely a teacher or school director, occupied exclusively with questions of a pedagogical nature. To a degree that went far beyond the extracurricular activities of most of the organization’s instructors, Arié was also remarkably active in constituting a complete associational structure around the school. From the beginning of his career in Ortaköy (1881–85), he actively organized regular meetings between Alliance teachers throughout the city to debate pedagogical problems. He also participated in the apprenticeship program of the schools; the placement of students with artisans to learn a trade was one of the means used by the society to modify the socioeconomic profile of Eastern Jewry.14
Arié showed the same energy while director of the Alliance school in Sofia, between 1887 and 1893. During his trip to Paris in 1891, he succeeded in obtaining the support of the Central Committee for the construction of a new school and considerably increased the number of students recruited for it. But it was during the years when he was director of the boys school in Izmir, particularly between 1893 and 1902 (the date when tuberculosis obliged him to cut back his activities considerably), that Arié showed what he was capable of accomplishing. At that time, he worked to found the Alliance school in Karataş (Karatash), a suburb of Izmir. He also visited various Jewish communities of Asia Minor and established schools in the cities of Turgutlu (Cassaba), Tire (Tireh), and Aydin in Turkey. In Izmir, he formed a Jewish workers association to encourage the development of institutions of mutual aid within the Jewish community. He created the alumni association for the Alliance in Izmir, which brought together all the former students of the town’s schools, and the Cercle Israélite, a Jewish reading club, hoping to help calm the discords that divided the community. Even though many of these institutions survived for only a few years, Arié remained indefatigable and continued to believe firmly in the modern principles of associational life as a way of strengthening the community and extending the “regenerative” work of the Alliance.
Arié was also behind the establishment of a school farm for the Alliance in Asia Minor. One of the society’s articles of faith was that the transformation and “regeneration” of world Jewry could not be fully realized without the creation of a substantial group of Jews living from agriculture. The work carried out by the schools and by the apprenticeship program would be fully effective only if a portion of Jewish young people were directed toward cultivating the land. Only in that way would the destructive influence of centuries of commercial activities and peddling be effaced and thousands of people who had been living from hand to mouth on odd jobs engage in healthy manual work. The Alliance took this productivization program very seriously; beginning with the Enlightenment, it had been a constant in the modern social thinking of European Jews.15 The society founded the first agricultural school in Palestine, Mikveh Yisrael, with the goal of teaching the latest agricultural techniques to students recruited from its institutions who were destined to become farmers. This was the first school of its kind in Palestine, and the leadership of the Alliance attached a great deal of importance to it.
In 1891, the founding of the Jewish Colonisation Association (it was known as the ICA), in response to needs related to the settlement of the growing number of migrants fleeing the pogroms in Russia, further highlighted the necessity of developing new skills among the Jewish masses. The Alliance and the ICA were closely linked, sharing the same president, Narcisse Leven. The Alliance created another school farm in Djedeida, Tunisia, in 1895 to advance its plans for the agricultural training of Jews in North Africa.16
Gabriel Arié was fully convinced of the need to spread a knowledge of agriculture among the Jews of Asia Minor, one of the most fertile regions of the Middle East. His predecessor in Izmir, Shemtob Pariente, had already bought a farm for the Alliance. After numerous inspections, Arié decided the soil of that farm would not ensure good results, and with the authorization of the Alliance, he sold the property in 1895. During the next few years, he moved throughout the region, sending long reports to the ICA on the possibilities for establishing a future school farm. On his recommendation, a farm close to the Turkish town of Akhisar (Axar) was bought and in 1900 became the school farm Or Yehudah, placed under the authority of the ICA. Arié’s zeal in this matter was a determining factor.
Arié’s value for the Alliance and the ties of friendship he had established with its leading personalities did not disappear when he was forced to stop working because of illness. Rather remarkably from an institution little known for its financial generosity toward its staff, the Central Committee allowed him to settle in Switzerland and live in a climate more favorable to his health, which had been ruined by tuberculosis. It did not suspend his salary for four full years. When it finally had Arié take his retirement because it seemed unlikely he would ever be able to return to full-time employment, it still extended a supplemental income to him, adding to his retirement pension a salary remunerating his work for the official book being prepared on the history of the Alliance. This work finally appeared in two volumes in 1911 and 1920, under the title Cinquante ans d’histoire: L’Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1910, bearing Narcisse Leven’s name. The second volume, relating to the history of the Alliance schools, was written entirely by Arié. He had maintained a voluminous correspondence with his colleagues in various institutions of the organization, asking them to compile histories of their schools based on the documentation conserved in their archives. Once he had received these minihistories of the schools, he edited them, inserting them into the framework of a unified narration. He was also the author of a large part of the first volume: he completed the hundred pages