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Introduction

PUBLIC LIFE

For his entire life, Gabriel Arié—instructor, pedagogue, community leader, notable, businessman, and historian—found himself caught between the East and the West. Born in the Balkans in 1863, in a remote province of the Ottoman Empire, he witnessed the disappearance of an old order that had lasted for centuries and its replacement by a new political organization, new ideas, and new ways of life, which would irreversibly change the shape of Jewish existence in the East.

As a child, Arié received a traditional Jewish education, soon to be followed by a Westernized education at the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Bulgaria and later in Istanbul (Constantinople) and finally at the organization’s institute for training its teachers, the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris. He moved without difficulty from the traditional Jewish world, which had been the natural environment of his family for generations, to a completely new universe, marked for him by the Western education he had received. His life was shaped by the use he made of the passport that had been granted him by the new culture he had acquired. In the end, it opened the possibility of a remarkable social ascension not only in his native Bulgaria but also in the Jewish world in general, where he became a trusted partner in the educational work undertaken by the primary Jewish organization of his time, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which propelled him to the rank of a Jewish notable.

The Jewish community into which Gabriel Arié was born was an integral part of the Judeo-Spanish culture area that had been constituted in the Ottoman Empire after the arrival en masse of exiles from the Iberian Peninsula, on their way to the eastern Mediterranean, at the end of the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth. Most Jews from Bulgaria were the descendants of those exiles, who had emigrated north along the trade routes linking the great commercial axis of the Danube to the port of Salonika on the Aegean Sea and, further to the east, to Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. The Jews had formed flourishing communities under the Ottomans and had been very active in the empire’s international commerce in the sixteenth century. Many of these communities also participated in regional commerce and acted as intermediaries between rural and urban markets.¹

Nonetheless, at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, the power of the Ottomans began to decline, and when the insecurity resulting from a weakening of the central authority began to have disastrous effects on commerce and the economy, the prosperity of Jewish communities in the Balkans experienced a considerable decline too. One of the aggravating circumstances was the rise of the Greek and Armenian bourgeoisie, who soon established close ties with the West and replaced the Jews in numerous sectors of the country’s economic life.² A few Jews did continue to play an important role in certain areas of the economy, however. A case in point is the maternal side of Gabriel Arié’s family; throughout the eighteenth century and during the first part of the nineteenth, it was one of the most important Jewish families in the Balkan economy.³ But the exceptions cannot hide the fact that the community, taken as a whole, had declined considerably in relation to its apogee in the sixteenth century and that, at the time of Arié’s birth, it needed outside help to get back on its feet.

With the exception of a few families of notables commanding enormous fortunes, the majority of Sephardi Jews in the East lived in poverty, and the endemic social frictions generated by that situation had created deep chasms in all the Jewish communities. These chasms proved to be particularly important during the era of Westernization and especially later, with the arrival of Zionism. Schools became the stakes in a conflict between rich and poor, modernizers and conservatives. But these schools also offered possibilities of social ascension to a certain number of poor children, who were able to use education to improve their condition. Such was the case for Gabriel Arié.

The weakness of the Ottoman government, with ensuing insecurity and turbulence in the provinces, played a role in the continuing poverty of the Jewish communities in the Balkans. At the end of the nineteenth century, the attitude of the state toward the Jews could be characterized as benign indifference. The Jews had never been a threat to the Ottomans, and though they had lost the utility they had had at the beginning of their residence in the area, they still constituted an important group. The principal preoccupation of the Ottoman governments toward most of their non-Muslim subjects concerned the collection of taxes. Aside from that, each non-Muslim community enjoyed relatively great internal autonomy in the management of its affairs. As far as the Jews were concerned, that translated into autonomous community leadership, with rabbinical authorities having the first word in Jewish public life.⁴ The Ottoman Empire was a mosaic of religious and ethnic groups brought together under a central authority that was dependent on the army; these groups maintained relations with the state that were essentially tributary. Of course, Muslims were privileged as the dominant group, and Islam was the official religion of the country. From every point of view, non-Muslims were legally and socially inferior to Muslims.⁵ Nonetheless, except in periods of trouble or in regions that were less subjugated to the control of the central power, this did not translate into oppression. Jews and Christians occupied firmly established positions in the Ottoman regime and generally coexisted in relative harmony with their masters, though in a clearly hierarchized context where they had to know their place. It was only when Christian groups began to pursue nationalist and separatist objectives that the situation deteriorated and the system as a whole collapsed, under the effect of the corrosive influence of a triumphant West and the arrival of the most Western of ideologies: nationalism.

Before the appearance of the modern nation-state in the region, community, religious, and ethnic identities were under no pressure to assimilate. In this context, the Judeo-Spanish language, culture, and identity remained intact and evolved according to their own internal dynamics—hence the survival of Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Gabriel Arié’s native tongue, and of the traditional way of life that marked his childhood. Later, in the new nation-states introduced into the formerly Ottoman regions, the influence of the old Ottoman paradigm of religious and ethnic hierarchies persisted under the Christian regimes, blocking successful integration, even though the equality of all citizens was stipulated in the constitutions. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire too, this paradigm remained at the foundation of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, despite reforms guaranteeing the equality of all citizens and the half-hearted intentions to bring all groups together under the Ottoman banner in order to check nationalist movements. There emerged no real will to integrate on either side.

Gabriel Arié was born in Samakov, a small provincial town in Ottoman Bulgaria, not very far from Sofia; it was the site of a regional market and had large iron mines nearby. The maternal branch of his family owned and operated some of these mines. They were a Jewish family originating in the Léon region of Spain who had been expelled in 1492 and, after many tribulations, had arrived in Vienna by the eighteenth century.⁶ Expelled once more in 1775, this time from Vienna by Maria Theresa, the family settled in Vidin on the banks of the Danube, with later branches in Sofia and Samakov. One of Gabriel Arié’s ancestors, Abraham Arié, established a business when he arrived in Vidin that experienced considerable expansion until the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. That branch of the family distinguished itself in the trade of grains and manufactured goods, the operation of iron mines, and banking, with bank branches in Europe and the East. The family also included patrons of the arts and displayed a certain artistic refinement. The Russo-Turkish War, which, along with Bulgaria’s independence, marked the beginning of a new era, put an end to that prosperity. Arié’s mother stemmed from this line. His father, in contrast, belonged to the poor side of the family, never succeeded in attaining a social position comparable to that of his in-laws, and struggled for subsistence his entire life, for the most part without great success.

Initially, Gabriel Arié received a traditional Jewish education in the local meldar, the equivalent of the Ashkenazi heder in eastern Europe. The meldar was a religious school where children learned to read Jewish prayers. The aim of this essentially religious education was not so much to diffuse knowledge as to pass on eternal truths and socialize the child, as a means of ensuring behavior in keeping with the precepts of Judaism and perpetuation of the community. At the apogee of that educational system in the Ottoman Empire, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many young people pursued their studies after the meldar in the talmudei-torah, where they could acquire a number of the more advanced Jewish disciplines. Although that continued to be the case in quite weakened form in certain of the large Jewish centers of the empire in the nineteenth century, a small provincial town such as Samakov offered few possibilities of the kind, and the experience Arié had in the traditional educational system lasted only a few years.⁷

Even though it cannot be said that the education Arié received at the meldar marked him profoundly, it seems to have left him with a certain knowledge and a certain tendency to mark all events in the cycle of Jewish life, to observe the rites associated with them, and to commemorate Jewish holidays. As we shall see, as a teacher for the Alliance, Arié was a vehement critic and adversary of the traditional system of education. His sense of sacred time and ritual, however, had been shaped by the traditional world in which he had lived his first years, and he was involved in certain important areas of public Jewish observance until his death. It is nonetheless true that the most important formative episode of his life was not his experience at the meldar but his attendance at the Alliance school opened in Samakov in 1874.

The arrival of the organization and its network of schools was a watershed event in the life of Sephardi Jews in modern times. The Alliance Israélite Universelle was founded in Paris in 1860 by a group of French Jewish intellectuals and militants. Its purpose was to struggle for the rights of Jews throughout the world, defend persecuted Jews, and bring about the legal emancipation of those who were still being treated as second-class citizens. Depending on transnational solidarity among Jews, the organization brought together through its programs a large number of members throughout the world. It was particularly effective as a mouthpiece for the Jewish world in international events such as the Congress of Berlin in 1878, where it contributed toward the granting of equal rights to the Jews of Romania. It continually struggled for the rights of Jews and often succeeded in obtaining reparation for injustices.⁸

Its principal work, however, was in the field of education. Civil and legal emancipation was not enough. The society incarnated all the impulses that had contributed toward the formation of a modern form of French Judaism after the French Revolution; it was the very crystallization of this new republican Franco-Judaism, which had emerged with such force by the second half of the nineteenth century. The Alliance and its leaders were deeply permeated by the message of the French Revolution and its implications for Jews. Jews were to be emancipated and become full citizens. The entire progress of history was perceived teleologically as leading to the act of emancipation. At the same time, having internalized the Enlightenment discourse on the Jews, which found one of its best expressions in the Abbé Grégoire, who defined the emancipatory model for the French Revolution, the Alliance also believed that Jews had to reform and civilize themselves, or “regenerate” themselves, to show they were worthy of becoming citizens. In practice, that meant abandoning as much as possible all forms of particularism—Jewish languages, for example—and “fusing” into modern civilization, of which French culture was considered the fulfillment. World Jewry as a whole was to reform itself, and all its members were to become modern emancipated citizens. In regions where the cultural level of Jews was considered to have fallen too low, the administration of a healthy dose of French culture was deemed to be an important factor in “regeneration.” The agent of that transformation, of course, would be the modern school.⁹

The Alliance embarked upon its self-imposed mission of reforming and “regenerating” the Jewish world. For various reasons, but in particular because the Russian government did not allow foreign organizations to influence any part of its population, the Alliance made no headway in the Ashkenazi world. That was not the case in Sephardi regions. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the time of triumphant imperialism, the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim states were greatly weakened, and none of them provided any resistance to the Alliance. Thus, the activities of the organization would be particularly important around the Mediterranean basin.

The first Alliance school was opened in Tetuan, Morocco, in 1862 and was soon followed by others elsewhere in North Africa and in the Middle East. By 1914, the Alliance had established a network of schools extending from Morocco in the west to Iran in the east and including 183 institutions, nearly 1,200 teachers, and 43,700 students. It had succeeded in eclipsing the traditional Jewish educational system and had even supplanted it in numerous places.¹⁰

In general, the Alliance intervened at the invitation of Jewish notables from the area, who felt that a diffusion of European education among local Jews would contribute to improving the economic situation of the community as a whole. In a context where the West had become a major partner in public life and in the economy, it was very clear that a knowledge of European methods and languages was a necessity. And it was the French language above all that served as lingua franca.

The institutions opened by the society were primary schools, where French was the language of instruction. Although greatly inspired by the curriculum in use in the French system of elementary education, in time these institutions developed their own programs, making a place for the study of local languages and Hebrew and for instruction in Jewish religion and history.¹¹ In a context where secular and European disciplines began to take on ever greater importance, the Jewish disciplines were quickly relegated to the background, losing the central place they had occupied in the traditional system of education. Although it was never the intention of the Alliance to minimize the importance of Jewish education, it is obvious that for many of its students, what counted above all was learning French.

The love affair that many Sephardim had with French is perfectly illustrated in Arié’s writings. He indicates that, for him, learning French in the Alliance school was a marvelous “game,” a real pleasure. Arié soon demonstrated his intellectual abilities and become the favorite of his teachers, a situation that was repeated when he pursued his studies in Paris. He had free access to the school library and became a voracious reader during his adolescence, consuming most of the French and foreign classics. His imagination was shaped by his readings, and he himself draws our attention to the fact that it was Fénelon’s Télémaque that marked him most profoundly, particularly its style. Through the French language, he entered the fabulous world of the West and began to live there vicariously, even though he was still in the Levant. The Gallomania that was increasingly to characterize Westernized Sephardim often had its roots in Alliance schools and in the initiation into the French language and its literature they had undergone there.

Arié arranged to pursue his studies at the Alliance school in Balat (a Jewish quarter of Istanbul) after the upheavals in Samakov at the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the Bulgarian declaration of independence. Along with thousands of Jews who fled the battles and became refugees, he reached the Ottoman capital, along with several members of his family, and entered the Alliance school at the first opportunity, In Istanbul, as in Samakov, Arié was the student of Nissim Béhar, one of the most important of the teachers of the organization and destined to have a remarkable career in the Alliance schools in Jerusalem, where he was particularly active in the rebirth of Hebrew.¹² Arié does not often mention Nissim Béhar and seems to have been more impressed by his wife, who was also an Alliance teacher and died very young in Balat. But there is no doubt that the Alliance schools in Samakov and Balat shaped the early years of the precocious child.

It was, therefore, very natural for Arié to choose the career that seemed the most promising to him, by becoming an Alliance teacher in his turn. His father was barely able to provide for his needs and was not in a position to offer his son an appealing way of earning a living. In addition, it is very clear that the attraction of the Alliance was irresistible to a young man such as Gabriel, who decided to join the organization that had liberated and emancipated him intellectually and that had opened entirely new worlds to his curious mind. The Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO) was the logical next stop in his itinerary.

Although, in the beginning, the Alliance sent French Jews to teach in its schools, it soon became quite clear that the society could not recruit an adequate number of instructors in France. The Central Committee decided to sign up the best of the schools’ alumni from the Middle East and North Africa, bring them to Paris to undergo intensive training for four years, and then send them back to teach in the schools. The ENIO opened its doors in 1867. The institution was first located in a Jewish trade school on rue des Rosiers in Paris and, after several moves, finally established its own campus in Auteuil in 1889. For many decades, the ENIO trained hundreds of young Sephardim destined to become the backbone of the society’s educational infrastructure.¹³

Like Arié, many had come from relatively humble backgrounds. The career of instructor was an excellent means for social ascension. At the ENIO, these Sephardim did not merely acquire pedagogical tools, however. They were also permeated with the ideological message of the Alliance, which they internalized; with the zeal of neophytes, they became in turn the missionaries of the ideology of emancipation and regeneration, the mark of the Alliance and of Franco-Judaism in the second half of the nineteenth century. They spread that ideology and that message throughout the Middle East and North Africa, establishing ties between the Jews of Europe and their Sephardi coreligionists and transforming themselves into effective agents of Westernization.

Arié not only was deeply influenced by the education he received at the ENIO but also established a broad network of contacts there who would prove very useful during his career in Alliance schools. His fellow students Loria, Loupo, Niégo, Fresco, Nabon, Benveniste, and Navon belonged to the first generation of Alliance teachers and went on to form the elite of its faculty. Owing to the work of such young and enthusiastic followers, the organization was able to establish its network of schools and realize a number of the objectives it had set for itself. The esprit de corps that marked that generation was very strong, and Arié was to remain in contact with his colleagues throughout his life, exchanging letters with them and following developments in their lives and in the activities of the Alliance in the various regions where they were pursued.

Arié 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 already written by Narcisse Leven, who, given his advanced age, 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. But nowhere was the struggle so intense as in Bulgaria.

From the beginning, Zionism made serious inroads within Bulgarian Jewry, and the community as a whole was largely Zionist by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The Alliance schools were taken over by Zionist school committees, which, in conformity with Bulgarian law, were elected by the communities. Practically all the Alliance schools were closed during the years that preceded the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The conflict ended with a complete rout of the organization.¹⁹

Even during his absence, Arié remained abreast of the developments taking place in his native land, and he regretted the turn taken by the events. There was little doubt that, given his ideological options—shaped by the ideology of the Alliance and the course of his own career—and the intimacy of his relations with the leaders of the society, Arié would be anti-Zionist. In his letters to the Alliance, he gave an immediate account of any activity that smelled of Zionism, even when it took the form of societies working for the rebirth of Hebrew, such as Dorshei Leshon Ever (Friends of the Hebrew language), which was founded in Izmir in 1895 (see letter of 20 May 1895). He was full of consternation when an emigration movement to Palestine manifested itself within Bulgarian Jewry the same year, and he wrote frankly that the Jews of Bulgaria already had a nation and had no reason to leave (see letter of 28 November 1895).

His return to Bulgaria coincided with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars and the fall of large Ottoman Jewish communities such as Salonika into the hands of new masters. The reports between Arié and the Alliance at that time expressed a faith in maintaining these communities under Bulgarian domination, a hope that vanished with the Bulgarian defeats of the Second Balkan War in 1913. It is nevertheless interesting to note that Arié was overflowing with plans regarding the policies the Alliance ought to pursue in the face of these new developments. His conservatism and his alliance with the notables are particularly obvious in this correspondence. In his eyes, it was the Jewish bourgeoisie that counted. According to his analysis, although the majority of Bulgarian Jews were Zionists, the notables remained close to the Alliance and sent their children to foreign schools rather than the community institutions managed by the Zionists. He suggested the Alliance return and create strictly private schools beyond community control, in order to attract this bourgeois clientele (see letter of 22 May 1913).

All these plans came to nothing when World War I broke out. Arié lived through the war in Bulgaria. The defeat of that country began a period of great instability, particularly with the exacerbation of antisemitism, which was linked to Bulgaria’s irredentist claims on Macedonia. As usual, Arié was careful to give an account of all antisemitic incidents (see letters of 7 August 1919 and 2 February 1924). This unrest decreased quickly, however, and only began again in the 1930s.²⁰

In the meantime, Arié’s social position as a notable—a position he had acquired through the Alliance, by virtue not only of his education but also of his status as representative of the organization in Bulgaria—was confirmed and reinforced by the growing prosperity he enjoyed in his business affairs. To a great extent, however, he was an outsider in the Jewish political life of Bulgaria, given the preponderant place of the Zionists in all community life (see letters of 17 September 1920 and 3 May 1924). His accounts affect the lofty attitude of an Olympian, and his interpretation of the Zionist activism of his fellow Jews adopts the paternalist language of an adult recounting the foolishness of spoiled children.

Nevertheless, despite the criticism addressed to Zionists and the exhortations directed at his coreligionists, whom he called upon to become good Bulgarians, we find no fire in Arié’s writings on Bulgaria, no patriotic passion, no expression of regret when children or members of the family increasingly sought their livelihoods elsewhere. Although sensitive to Bulgarian antisemitism, he could not claim the situation in that regard was worse there than elsewhere. On the contrary, the Bulgarian balance sheet on this point was relatively positive, and Bulgarian Jewry did not have to suffer major persecutions until the Holocaust. And yet, in direct continuity with the Ottoman period, nothing indicates that the Jews were ever considered true Bulgarians or that they considered themselves as such.

Notwithstanding his official attitude and his ideological assumptions, Arié’s true identity remained that of a Levantine Sephardi Jew, considerably Westernized, born in Bulgaria, from Bulgaria perhaps, but nevertheless not a Bulgarian. In fact, in keeping with the tradition whereby Jews of the Middle East became foreign subjects, Arié acquired Spanish nationality in his old age,²¹ most likely without renouncing his Bulgarian nationality. This acquisition of a new passport was the effect of a policy adopted by Spain in the interwar period attempting to redraw Sephardim into the Spanish orbit. Arié also became a chevalier in the order of Isabella the Catholic,²² a distinction that was at the very least ironic and paradoxical for someone whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492! In Arié, this rather dissonant configuration of identities, nationalities, and allegiances, characteristic of the Jews of the Levant in the modern period, coexisted with ideological views that were difficult to reconcile with it.

Like the Alliance, Arié was fundamentally convinced of the need to reform and “regenerate” the “fallen” Jewish communities of the East. And help could only come from the West, which was showing the path to the future, leading the progress of civilization on a global scale. Arié’s attitude toward the West and the East exhibits signs characteristic of the first generation of Westernization. Europe represented progress and absolute good. The East was the quintessence of negativity and backwardness. Orientalist discourse, so common in the correspondence of Alliance teachers, also recurs in Arié’s account. His descriptions of the various communities he visited were largely influenced by a binary perception of the opposition between East and West. In fact, he often expressed himself explicitly in these terms, as in his letter of 23 April 1894, where he recounted his visit to Asia Minor and compared that region and the Jewish communities it sheltered to the zones of Africa where the rays of European civilization had not yet penetrated. He had only scorn for many aspects of the Eastern world, which he accused of being exclusively concerned with appearances (see letter of 25 March 1898). And when he was disappointed by the ICA’s refusal of his request to oversee the affairs of the school farm of Or Yehudah, which he had worked so hard to create, the best method he found to express his discontent was to once more apply the binary opposition he was in the habit of using. He expected hypocritical behavior from the Middle East, where it was “natural,” but he was disappointed to see it manifested in the West.

As it has done on so many Westernized non-Westerners, the idealized West never ceased to exert a seductive influence on Arié. It was identified with the enlightenment of civilization; and of course, in his case, it later represented a hope for a cure for his tuberculosis. Thus, for Arié, the Westernization of Eastern Judaism was an ultimate good. Salvation had come in the form of the Alliance. As he notes in a letter to Isidore Loeb in 1890, in which he asks for recommendations of books that would allow him to learn more about the history of Jews in Spain, the Alliance had “repair[ed] the effects of 1492,” which, in the long term, had led to the decay of Sephardi Jewry. Emancipation was of capital importance. The Jews had to be transformed into good citizens. That is why he continually recommended that the Jews of the Ottoman Empire be encouraged to learn Turkish and to attend government schools (see letter of 24 July 1894). He launched a similar appeal in Bulgaria, forcefully criticizing the Jewish community for not having become better integrated and for not yet speaking Bulgarian after thirty-two years of Bulgarian independence. It was important that the Jews be represented at all levels of public life in the country, that they even become deputies in the Bulgarian Chamber (see letter of 11 June 1911).

Like the Alliance, Arié was vigilant when faced with any manifestation of antisemitism. In the famous affair involving an accusation of ritual murder in Vratsa,²³ the accused Jews were acquitted owing to his efforts and to the financial aid for their defense that he succeeded in obtaining from the Alliance. Like other Alliance instructors, Arié gave a meticulous account of any antisemitic incident to the Central Committee.

Always in the spirit of Alliance ideology, which echoed Enlightenment discourse on the Jews, Arié was also firmly convinced of the need for Jews to show they “deserved” emancipation and to earn the “esteem” of their compatriots. Although antisemitism was an absolute evil, Arié was persuaded it was often exacerbated by the behavior of Eastern Jewry itself, which was not yet sufficiently “regenerated.” It was important that the behavior of Jews themselves 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 in the annals of humanity. That is why, without neglecting any important event, we have particularly sought to shed light on the history of ideas that constitute the essence of Judaism. We have thus dedicated some discussion to the Prophets, to the organization of the faith, to religious sects, to the Mishnah, to the Talmud, to the origins and foundation of Christianity and Islam, and to all the Jewish thinkers and writers, whose principal works we have analyzed.²⁶

This insistence on the essence of Judaism implicitly disputed the validity of the formalism that traditional Judaism in decline was accused of perpetuating. The distinction between essence and form was at the center of debates on modern Judaism, in which most nineteenth-century Jewish reformers were engaged, and it is not surprising to rediscover it in a writer such as Arié.

In fact, the “mission” of Judaism, which purportedly consisted in ensuring the triumph of monotheism in the world, appears at the beginning of Histoire juive, with the evocation of Abraham. All biblical history is placed in that light, to the point of making the Greek translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, a crucial turning point in the history of the Jews. For Arié, that translation was the first Jewish apostle sent out into the world to begin to exert a profound influence on the history of civilization.²⁷

Arié’s narrative presents itself as the evolution and development of the principles of monotheism and of justice through the Bible, the Mishnah, and the rationalist Jewish thought of the Middle Ages. The Jews and their ideas resisted constant persecutions and flourished under the most difficult conditions. Following Graetz, Arié has the age of obscurantism begin within Judaism itself, with the triumph of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbala, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like his role model and like most historians of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism), Arié could not tolerate the irrationalism of the Kabbala and called that period “an age of shadows and superstitions, which constitutes a kind of Jewish Middle Ages.”²⁸ It had led to the deadly messianic excesses of the false messiah Shabbatai Zvi and to a growing mediocrity among rabbis. The emergence of Hasidism (a religious movement that was mystical in inspiration and appeared in eastern Europe in the eighteenth century), which Arié perceived negatively, was associated with these developments and with the “aridity of Talmudic education in Poland.”²⁹ Having arrived at this point in his analysis, Arié judged traditional Judaism at the dawn of the modern age in these terms: “The decadence of Judaism ran deep.”³⁰

Renaissance and renewal came with the Haskalah and the French Revolution. Moïse Mendelssohn redeemed Judaism from the inside, making its authentic meaning appear, while the revolution emancipated the Jews and began a new era in Jewish history. Echoing the Alliance’s discourse, Arié was quick to indicate that “regeneration” followed rapidly: “French Jews knew how to make themselves worthy of the act of justice and generosity that had been granted them and became sincerely attached to their nation.… Under the regime of liberty that was henceforth their own, they quickly lost the humble and fearful ways that had so often exposed them to ridicule.”³¹

Arié felt sympathy for Reform Judaism in Germany and saw it as a remedy for some of the problems of extreme assimilation, such as the conversions occurring in Germany during the age of emancipation, and for the excesses of traditional Judaism: “Those who clung to the past did not want to tolerate any change in religion and instruction; they even refused to modify the loud and disgraceful way the faith was celebrated in the synagogues.”³²

As might be expected, the founding of the Alliance and its subsequent activities occupied a privileged place in Arié’s history, and the organization was presented as the principal defender of the cause of world Jewry in all situations. Two entire chapters are devoted to the history of the Alliance, depicted as the catalyst for the best and most noble impulses of modern Judaism. It is interesting to note that it was only through these activities that the history of the Sephardim in the contemporary period succeeded in making a brief appearance in the book. Like most modern European historiography dedicated to the Jews—even up to our own time—Arié’s narrative did not allow the post-1492 Sephardim to speak, nor did it consider them actors after the expulsion from Spain and the wrong turn taken with Sabbateanism (the movement composed of followers of the false messiah Shabbatai Zvi). They came into existence only with the West as reference point and when they were the object of the activities of Western Jewry, in particular, those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. This vision was shared by most Alliance teachers, who were, of course, themselves Sephardim. As neophytes of Western civilization, they could interpret their own history only through the prism of their adopted culture.

In clear contrast on this point to Leven’s Cinquante ans d’histoire, Arié’s text adopted a more somber and less optimistic tone when he discussed modern antisemitism. He focused on the birth of modern antisemitism and racism and on the ravages caused by the pogroms in Russia, and he established a direct parallel between the situation prevailing in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth and the darkest days of the Middle Ages. Even his beloved France was not free from such symptoms, and Arié reported the vicissitudes of the Dreyfus affair in the greatest detail. His own evaluation of the importance of the affair, worthy of the perspicacious observer that he was, hit the mark: “The republicans have understood it is the very principles of the Revolution that the clericals are combating behind the cover of the Jews. From now on, the cause of the Jews can no longer be separated from the cause of the Republic, and that is the most fortunate consequence of the Dreyfus affair for the Jews of France.”³³ The voice of Franco-Judaism finds expression here. A remarkable premonition also echoes in these words, illuminated by the subsequent developments under Vichy.

It was in discussing Zionism that Arié began the most delicate part of his Histoire juive. Given the conflicts between the Alliance and the Zionists and the situation in Bulgaria, he had to proceed with caution in his presentation. He could not allow himself to alienate either the Alliance or the broader public to which he addressed his book. His presentation of Zionism is in fact rather positive and laudatory. The growing importance of the movement in the Jewish world and the persistence of antisemitism led him to clarify his position in his preface to the second edition of the book in 1926:

Our preference for the political conceptions of the Alliance has not prevented us from setting out with impartiality and sympathy the efforts by Zionism to find a solution to the Jewish question that many good minds judge contrary to the true interests of Judaism. The aspirations of sincere Zionists proceed from such respectable convictions and are the echo of voices that have reverberated in Jewish consciousness for so many centuries that criticism of them would have been at the very least out of place in a book such as ours, especially at a time when the decline we are witnessing in liberal ideas is accompanied by such a sharp outbreak of antisemitism throughout the world.³⁴

Arié also added to this second edition an entirely new chapter on the birth of modern Hebrew and modern Hebrew literature, which immediately preceded his presentation of Zionism. He saw the emergence of that literature as a powerful civilizing force for the Jews, and he was not afraid to give an account of the literary activities of Hebrew authors who were linked to Zionism. The fact that the chapter devoted to this movement immediately followed the chapter on Hebrew showed that in Arié’s view the two things were inextricably associated.

Arié presented the birth of Zionism as linked to the persistence of antisemitism in eastern Europe and to the absence of emancipation for Russian Jewry. Nevertheless, he did not fail to credit Western Jews, especially the famous philanthropist Moses Montefiore and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, with the redemption of the Holy Land. Returning to a theme dear to his heart, Arié focused on the school farm Mikveh Yisrael and the role it played in the creation of modern agriculture in Palestine. The Alliance was thus considered one of the protagonists in reestablishing a Jewish presence in Palestine, even though Arié did not forget to indicate explicitly that many Jews from western Europe were hostile to Zionism and that as late as 1923 the society had professed its “neutrality” toward the movement.³⁵

Arié underscored what the Zionists had been able to achieve in Palestine: the progress in agriculture and the creation of Jewish colonies and cities. He nonetheless pointed out the problems that remained, from the persistence of Arab hostility toward the movement to the ambiguous attitude adopted by the English mandatory government. In conclusion, his verdict was mixed:

It appears today that Zionism can only be a partial solution to the Jewish question; it must not therefore exclude the other solution, the emancipation of Jews and their civil assimilation into their respective countries. But even if it cannot satisfy all the hopes it has awakened, Zionism will have the indisputable merit of having intensified, among oppressed and persecuted Jews, the feeling of their value and the awareness of their dignity.³⁶

Even as he recognized the importance of Zionism, Arié maintained his faith in the ideology of emancipation.

This faith, however, was now tempered by a strong dose of realism. In his analysis of the persistence of antisemitism and in his interpretation of the situation in the East, Arié proved to be much more perspicacious than the leaders of the Alliance, who until Vichy were to cling tenaciously to the emancipatory vision of the nineteenth century. In the conclusion of his book, he recognized that the era of emancipation had not solved all the problems. Whereas in the West, the Jews could continue to “live as a religious denomination with the same status as Christianity,” that could not be the case in the East, where they had to “constitute themselves as a national minority.”³⁷ Arié again paid tribute to the Alliance by concluding that unity would come if all the forces of Jewry rallied around the principles of fraternity and solidarity incarnated by the organization.³⁸ Nonetheless, he had clearly broken with the linear vision of the Alliance, which considered emancipation and assimilation the only path to follow among Jews throughout the world. For Arié, the “national” path taken by many was a fact and had come to constitute a second option.

It is important to note that that divergence from the Alliance went back a long time, having first been expressed in a letter to Bigart in 1909 (see letter of 15 January 1909). Bringing up the question of whether to write Juif and Israélite with initial capital letters, Arié made a distinction between the West, where Judaism had become simply a denomination and where lowercasing was therefore called for, and the East, in particular the Ottoman Empire, where Jews were legally treated as a “nation” and continued to exist as such, that is, as a clearly defined ethnic group for whom an initial capital letter was necessary. This suggestion was angrily rejected by Bigart, who insisted that no concession be made to the nationalist use of the term.³⁹ It is therefore probably no coincidence that Arié, though he was not absolutely systematic on this point, wrote Juif with a capital letter throughout almost the entire book. But it is undoubtedly more significant that he chose to conclude his study by putting the spotlight on the two different paths of modern Jewish existence, without deciding absolutely which one was or ought to prevail.

Arié’s approach was in fact symptomatic of his position midway between the East and the West. This man whose intellectual life was a pure product of western European emancipationist Judaism, who had devoted most of his public career to spreading this message, nevertheless remained in the East, and a man of the East. Unquestionably, Arié never became a Zionist and remained anti-Zionist his whole life. And yet, as a perceptive observer of the world around him, he could not be unaware that the western European path of Jewish emancipation seemed unable to succeed in the East, where ethnic and religious ties appeared to attach people most profoundly and lastingly to their particular and particularist identities. In the East, the nation-state whose birth Arié had witnessed, though it used the vocabulary and the language of Western liberal nationalism, had remained anchored in the hierarchical power relationships specific to the multiplicity of groups that constituted the Levant. With group identities remaining of capital importance, the Western path of emancipation could not suit the majority of Jews in the region. Jewish individuals such as Arié could effectively opt for radical Westernization, but none of them succeeded in carrying out that program at the collective level.

To a certain extent, Arié’s life and career illustrate both the realization and the contradiction of the Westernization of a portion of Jews in the Levant. That movement, progressively carrying with it entire generations of Sephardim, opened many new prospects for progress and individual freedom. But at the same time, that vision of the world in general and of the Jew in particular was peculiarly ill-adapted to Levantine realities. In the end, many experienced Westernization vicariously, and the ideal world remained separate from the real world in which they lived. Arié’s life, his career, and his writings are the expression of that double, divided, and in the end dissonant existence. At another level of course, that existence represents the very essence of modernity, which bears within it a corrosive shattering of accepted truths in all areas. Paradoxically, in living the very contradictions of the process of Westernization, the Judeo-Spanish intelligentsia, of which Arié was a major representative, had finally become truly modern. The autobiography and journal he wrote are a remarkable expression of this development.

PRIVATE LIFE

Autobiography and the journal did not constitute common literary genres in the Sephardi world of the nineteenth century, or even later on. “Like the intimate journal, which appeared at the same period, autobiography is one of the signs of a transformation in the notion of person and is intimately tied to the beginning of industrial civilization and the coming to power of the bourgeoisie.”⁴⁰ Two questions arise: Are the two main documents by Gabriel Arié published here an autobiography or a journal? And was there truly a transformation in the notion of person in the Sephardi cultural environment from which the author originated?

We have purposely presented the text in two parts, which we have titled, respectively, “Autobiography” and “Journal.” If we consider autobiography to be a life narrative centered on the personality, this first part qualifies as an example of that genre.⁴¹ Like any other, Arié’s autobiography is a retrospective and global narrative tending toward synthesis, but it covers his life only from 1863, the date of his birth, until 1906, the year that saw the aggravation of his illness and the beginning of his long stay in Davos, Switzerland. It was also in 1906 that the author definitively abandoned his post as director of the boys school in Izmir and, in doing so, his duties as an instructor in the service of the Alliance. His stays in Switzerland for his health began in 1902. Beginning in February 1905, he settled in Davos, leaving that city only in 1913. The autobiography was probably drafted between February 1905 and October 1906.

In this autobiography, which is divided into sections, past and present intersect, thus opening the way for the yearly journal entries that follow. Arié was not yet a professional writer, but he did nourish some ambition of writing, which led to the drafting of historical works and to contributions to pedagogical magazines. From his education and profession, models of the genre of autobiography were not unfamiliar to him. Nevertheless, although his concern for an agreeable, and especially a correct, writing style was constant, he did not intend to produce the work of a literary writer. His autobiography is closer to a chronicle, a collection of memories. At the beginning of the second part of his text, which we have called a “journal” and which comes after a break he himself introduced, the author indicates that until that time he had recorded a series of events from his life and that he intends to do the same in what follows. In fact, he titled the second part simply “Notes constituting the rest of my memories.” Arié wrote his text in French, his intellectual language, perhaps in the secret hope of seeing it published in France, his adopted environment. His work resembles many others written by unknowns, at least those works that escaped the oblivion that lies in wait for this kind of enterprise when it is practiced by unknowns.⁴²

Apparently, the concern that guided Arié in the beginning was to leave to his children a positive balance sheet of his existence, at a time when he believed he did not have very long to live. A victim of tuberculosis, Arié saw his condition worsening from one day to the next. That was the reason for seeking salvation in Davos, following a custom that originated in Switzerland and that recommended a stay in the mountains, which were considered beneficial for tuberculosis patients. This practice was later exalted in the novel—most famously in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.⁴³

The retrospective of Arié’s childhood and youth is combined with the evocation of a very recent past, continuing right up to the day before the manuscript as a whole ends. Thus a continuity is established between the author’s past and his present, without any break in temporal linearity. The laws of the genre are somewhat bent in the process, allowing for the inclusion of the journal, where the “present” is recounted from a year’s distance. This in turn goes against the laws of the genre of the journal, whose temporal unity usually pertains to a single day. Arié’s journal is an annual chronicle, a log book, and an account book all in one; in it, the author calculates the balance sheet, judging the positive and the negative. Thus, in the case of Gabriel Arié, “journal” does not mean a work written day by day.⁴⁴ But in his autobiography as in his journal, Arié’s “self”—that of a sick man who fears he will die at any moment—dominates.

“The act of writing [of autobiography] presents itself to each of its addressees as a demand for recognition or love, or as a defense plea, destined to depict and impose an image of oneself as lovable. It is a plea able to disarm the other’s gaze.”⁴⁵ That is exactly what Gabriel Arié did when he offered his history as an example to the family. At that time, the audience of autobiography was above all the family.⁴⁶ For the author, his life was a lesson in morality for his children. At the end of his autobiography. Arié wrote:

In a sense, I can consider myself a happy man, since, having come to the end of the day, I can rest a little and can depart with the awareness that I leave my children, in the absence of a fortune, the example of a life of work, probity, and devotion. I would be happy with them if, in their own lives, they found inspiration in these principles, even while avoiding the faults and excess of zeal to which I may have succumbed. It is to help them avoid the latter and to acquire the former that I thought it useful to recount to them in all sincerity what my life was.

In the end, he erected himself as a model for his descendants, a paterfamilias who had nothing to hide and whose life was exemplary, founded on the values of work and honesty. As a result, sincerity became the raison d’être of the act of writing, an act that would memorialize the history of a man in order to pass it on to his descendants, as a legacy capable of guiding the life of those who perpetuate his line. This legacy would stand in for an inheritance that could be converted into cash; at the time of the writing, Arié had not yet amassed the fortune that was to come to him after World War I.

Arié’s text casts a somewhat nostalgic gaze on the past, a traditional world in the process of disappearing; the author evokes it with tenderness, even though he remains merciless in regard to a number of its aspects. It is no accident that this man, initiated into Western values but not entirely cut off from his origins, wrote an autobiography and spent so much time on his family’s past. “Autobiography appears at the point where traditional civilization becomes fissured, but appears in the most diverse forms. It is first of all linked to social mobility.”⁴⁷ Gabriel Arié measured the distance traveled, not without some pride. His autobiography was not only the narrative of social ascension but also the written record of the “lost paradise” he would never find again. And throughout the narrative, the history of a family, anchored for centuries in the region after its expulsion from Spain, also emerged in writing.

The chronicle, a relatively rare genre in the Sephardi world, was already familiar within that family; we can thus cite the chronicle by Nahim J. Arié (1849–1907) and Tchelebi Moshé Abraham Arié II (1849–1919), written in Judeo-Spanish and never published in its entirety in any Western language.⁴⁸ A relatively complete genealogical tree⁴⁹ of the Arié family was established in 1963 by one of its members, Joseph Abraham Arié, an equally rare undertaking on the part of those from the Sephardi culture area. It was constructed from the chronicle already mentioned, from documents belonging to the family line, from data gathered and systematized by Gabriel Arié himself for the period 1766–1929, and from a genealogical tree elaborated in 1901 and transmitted to the compiler by his father, Abraham Joseph Arié, in 1944. That tree goes back to the arrival of the Ariés in Bulgaria in the eighteenth century, during the Ottoman era. Its last architect, Joseph Abraham Arié, who in fact continued Gabriel Arié’s work for the period 1923–63, belongs to the branch of the family that emigrated to Israel; we thus better understand the wish to preserve the memory of a name that was illustrious in its time in Bulgaria.

The tradition of transmitting the family memory to future generations, out of a kind of pride nourished by the awareness of belonging to an elite group, an aristocracy, was thus persistent in the Arié clan, and also in Gabriel, who was involved in the different stages of this transmission. Like aristocrats, the Ariés made up and passed on genealogical trees. Gabriel did not just follow this tradition in turn but went beyond it, writing a book on the history of the Jewish people and thus moving from personal to general history. Once we know that this was a pedagogical work for use in Jewish primary schools, we understand even better his search for transmission on a more general level. Hence, Gabriel Arié combined the preservation of his own experience with the preservation of that of his people, a sign both of openness and of modernity, if only by virtue of the form he adopted to transmit to others the history of a people without land at that time, a history that was also his own. His history writing developed in concentric circles, growing ever larger: from the fragile self, liable to disappear at any moment because of an incurable illness; to his family; his cultural group; his professional group, the Alliance, whose history he wrote in part; and finally, to the ethnic or denominational group to which he belonged, the Jewish people, whose history he also retraced. These circles interpenetrate at different moments of his own history and are an integral part of the protagonist. The same self expresses itself through these detours, which all come together to form a totality. Of course, Arié was backed into writing the history of the Alliance, acting as ghostwriter for the president of the organization, a man he admired so much that he named his younger son, Narcisse, after him. This undertaking once more reflects Arié’s dependence on the Alliance, a financial and moral dependence, where the very selfhood of the author was effaced behind an institution and an ideology. (That ideology influenced him so much that, by his own free will, he was led to denigrate a large part of his own Sephardi culture.) We know that the name “Arié” does not figure on the book’s cover, which bore the signature of Narcisse Leven. Later, in contrast, the book on the history of the Jewish people was written on his own initiative. He drafted it at the beginning of World War I, after the Balkan Wars, at a time when everything was beginning to collapse in Europe. It was when humanity, and therefore his own people, were in danger that Arié felt the need to consign his people’s history to paper. Disappearance and death always occupied a central place in his existence, and it was by writing his own history, and history in general, that he brought them under control, transforming them into “memory,” into a kind of symbolic immortality.

At the same time, the move from autobiography to the journal constitutes the move from the definitive to the provisional. Until that time, the author had reported a past that he controlled and looked upon with the distance implied in the notion of retrospection, though he made the leap into the present at the end, preparing the way for the journal. This immediate present links the journal, recounted at a year’s distance (a distance that, conversely, introduces distanciation and longer-term perspective), to the autobiography that precedes it. It is on this level that the interrelation between the two genres intervenes. We are now in the register of a present time relegated to the past—a kind of hoarding of time, hence of life, because the future is unforeseeable. We might even wonder whether Gabriel succeeded in living in the present, given the place occupied in his everyday life by his illness and its inexorable ritual. The year was quantified according to the number of times he spit blood, the days of fever, and the days spent in bed. A drop in that number was transformed into a sign of improvement, hence a triumph over the illness. The rhythm followed was that of the illness; that triumph was tangible only in the overall accounting of the year, since another year of life amounted to postponing death for a year. It was not the day that marked the journal but the year, and especially the year gone by, since the past was reassuring to the gravely ill Arié. The journal thus became a chronicle of the past year; the day would have been a present too close to the future, a future Arié could not even imagine. He begins his journal this way: “In a first notebook, I noted the important events in my life until 1906. I now propose to continue the account and to note each year, as long as Providence will allow me, the important facts concerning my family and myself.”

Why did Gabriel Arié keep a journal? We are no longer dealing with the issue of exemplarity, the moral scope of autobiography, a monument erected to his glory and given as an offering to his descendants. “Prisoner of his illness and traveler into his own abyss, the ill man will have a tendency to keep a journal, which sometimes helps him get well and, in any case, can have medical value.”⁵⁰ Arié’s journal, begun when he was extremely sick in Davos, was continued until the author’s death in 1939. Did he write it for himself? We know that the journal both is and is not addressed to the Other.⁵¹ It would be very risky to question the sincerity of this journal. Why must a journal be sincere, even when, fundamentally, its author aspires toward sincerity? In what way is sincerity an asset in this kind of writing? We might presume that everything can be said in a journal, but we know that, in fact, all kinds of prohibitions and taboos intervene and form obstacles.

Arié’s journal is permeated by the theme of illness, which, once the illness stabilizes, is transformed into the theme of professional success and money. Illness and money are often linked and interchangeable. Illness is a factor that takes away one’s security, while the lack of money does the same. Throughout the pages of this journal the fear of being without money and the satisfaction of possessing it recur; the benefits money procures are given less importance than the security it provides. We know that money problems generally have an important place in journals.⁵² Year after year, Arié tallies up the money amassed and looks with satisfaction on the distance traveled. From being a mere teacher, obliged to take odd jobs to make ends meet, then an invalid supported by his brother or living on the pension granted by the Alliance, he slowly made his way later on. Between 1885 and 1887, he tried his luck at business, resigning for the first time from the Alliance, his protective mother. He returned to the fold after his failure. It was only after he left Davos that he began to make a name for himself in insurance and banking. By the 1920s he was a rich man, free from want. Even though he never tallied up his fortune, he noted that he was wealthy. In any case, his many trips abroad and his photographs attest to his bourgeois way of life. His relative recovery also delivered him from his lack of self-confidence. For him, becoming an instructor in the Alliance schools had represented the beginning of financial security, as opposed to what he had known at his parents’ home, since his father’s economic situation had always been mediocre. For a long time, he lived haunted by the idea that what had happened to his father—a series of humiliations endured from his employers, his mother’s brothers—would be replicated in his own life. His first business failure confirmed him in his fears. The departure from Davos in 1913 was thus accompanied by a new social and economic departure. The parenthesis had lasted eight years.

Family also occupies a preponderant place, but it is not always spared, which is common in journals in general.⁵³ Individualism is subordinated to family life, a trait of bourgeois civilization.⁵⁴ The Other occupies an important place and situates the author in relation to those who surround him, even though the primary protagonist remains the omnipresent self. The author also dwells on misfortunes and good fortune, more on the first than on the second; there is nothing astonishing in this either. And although in the journal it is common to record everything relating to one’s love life,⁵⁵ Gabriel Arié does so with a great deal of circumspection, thus conforming to local mores, which obliged him to say little and to resort to subterfuges when doing so. We nevertheless find, next to certain explicit confessions, others that are barely outlined but easily discernible.

“The journal allows for a certain leveling of events. A war or revolution often holds no more place than a headache or the purchase of a pair of shoes.”⁵⁶ Arié does not completely escape that constant, even though he remains relatively sensitive to what is going on around him in society. In fact, it was as much to complete the public aspect of the individual, of this self with which one becomes familiar throughout the text, as to situate him in the social and political context of his age that we added a selection of letters written to the Alliance. We have thus been led to mark the text and establish the exchange between the private and the public man, even while respecting the text’s original continuity and linearity. Of course, the letters are administrative in nature, of a kind one finds by the thousand in the Alliance archives. The Alliance teachers had a style particular to them, which corresponded above all to the imperatives of the leadership, who were very keen on spelling and syntax. In addition, there was the ideological mold into which instructors poured everything, so as not to cross the leadership and thus bring trouble upon themselves. Gabriel Arié was no exception, but for most of his life he had the privilege of addressing the leadership as an equal. It is through this relationship that we discover certain of the traits of the man Arié, who adopted a way of expressing himself proper to himself even though he shared the ideas in force within the organization. Arié expected nothing from the Alliance except a certain respectability, which he no longer needed after Davos once his fortune had bestowed it upon him. It was within this space of freedom created by his independence that we begin, by seeking the public man, to find the private man, once the masks have been removed. The correspondence itself, read at a second level, links up with the autobiography and the journal, completes and enriches them; at certain times, the public and the private combine regardless of the lines separating them, as they do in life. The man in his completeness offers himself, flees, and reemerges beyond the conventions imposed by the institutional correspondence. Nonetheless, we would have liked to have his private correspondence, which would have allowed us to encounter him somewhere else, once more, and perhaps differently.

Properly speaking, Arié’s journal is not an examination of his conscience, as is often the case in this genre of writing; even less is it an act of contrition for sins committed.⁵⁷ The confession aspect, with its secret side, does not truly appear. There again the character’s circumspection is manifest; we no longer know if he was writing his journal for himself or for others. The dialogue with himself does not leap out from the page. In a society turned toward the outside, could the individualist act par excellence—the writing of a journal—also be turned entirely toward the outside, in this case toward his immediate family? The author provides a balance sheet of the facts marking the year, with the event taking precedence over analysis, except on a few occasions. Accumulation, a prominent trait of Arié’s conduct, returns at different stages in both the autobiography and the journal. As a young man, he accumulated readings, livelihoods, women, businesses, moves, and, to a certain extent, children, if he is compared to other members of his immediate family, who belonged to that generation where adopting the Western bourgeois values led, for the wealthy strata, to a progressive drop in the birthrate. Was it by class reflex that he accumulated personal property and real estate the way the bourgeoisie stores up money, or was it first of all a manifestation of his insecurity?

The author judges others more than he judges himself, and there sometimes emanates from the text the satisfaction he feels in contemplating himself, especially when he succeeds at his new departure in life. Does he contemplate himself in relation to others or in relation to what he once was? In any case, the distance traveled is not negligible. Once again the exemplarity of the man leaps out, the example of a life worthy of being recounted, one that could serve as a model for his descendants. The author does what he must to be equal to his ambition. This trait links the journal to the autobiography, which also aimed for exemplarity. The circle is completed. Less than two years before his death he wrote: “In sum, I have reason to be satisfied with my health, which causes me worry but not torment, and with my excellent material situation, which causes me no concern, and with my children, who are following the path of honor and work. Can one ask for more out of life? No, and that is why I am ready to leave them when it pleases God, praising Providence for having all in all given me the good life in this world.” Arié passed on not only his business and his fortune to his children but also his example. The nineteenth-century bourgeois family was also, as we know, the vehicle of patrimony,⁵⁸ ensuring continuity and reproduction.

Gabriel Arié created a history for himself in writing it down,⁵⁹ his history and that of his family. That history is also a true memoir of the incipient Sephardi and Levantine bourgeoisie of the time, in the Balkans in evolution, though it is a bourgeoisie seen through the eyes of Gabriel Arié, restored as a function of what he wanted to transmit, or was able to transmit, to us. That history has been conserved almost intact despite the vulnerability of this type of writing, which is very often reworked by members of the family, sometimes obfuscated through the allusions of the author—or simply destroyed.⁶⁰ Other than a few insignificant cuts made by the family, Gabriel Arié’s autobiography and journal have been faithfully handed down to us.

Autobiography and individualism are closely 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 way of asserting himself as an individual in the collectivity. Family still meant extended family, and living arrangements meant that the neighborhood was omnipresent in everyday life, further enlarging the family circle. The Jews, because of their status, were part of a community, circumscribed as such and defined as a denomination; this reinforced the community identity, of which the family was the nucleus, and did not favor the development of individual identity. There were, in addition, the imperatives of Jewish traditional life and its social control. Autobiography and the journal require a certain withdrawal, an entrenchment, and a certain intimacy; at the same time, they are the proper site of that entrenchment. “To write one’s journal is thus to rediscover a sanctuary of peace and interiority, to reintegrate that lost paradise ‘inside.’ ”⁶⁹

At the beginning of Westernization, did anyone really have the notion that a world was disappearing? Autobiographies and journals are written to be repositories of recollections and may constitute true memoirs.⁷⁰ It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that an awareness of the passing of an era emerged and that people began to write history, as amateurs of course, but in a way that revealed the necessary distancing taking hold, as Sephardi Jews in the Levant experienced change and as irreversible losses occurred. There was a turn toward history, a concrete tool for fixing time.

Gabriel Arié was a man whose past was gone and who made the leap toward modernity; the terrain was favorable for such an undertaking; the tendency toward interiority aided him; and his illness was the ultimate trigger. Tuberculosis distanced Arié from his profession, cut him off from his habitual social environment, and forced him to uproot himself temporarily to a foreign region. His writing was situated in that rift, in that break from his place of origin, his profession, his health, and his past. In fact, he began his autobiography in the no-man’s-land of Switzerland, a neutral place propitious for the distancing necessary for retrospection. It was in Europe, the site of his culture of adoption, that he began to write. Hence, the act of writing his autobiography came about in the very place of the genre’s origin. The journal began in the same context and was continued in, hence transplanted to, Gabriel Arié’s native environment, thus making the transition between these two universes to which the author himself belonged. The journal that followed ensured continuity: Gabriel Arié returned to his native country and lived there until the end of his life. His autobiography and journal were the culmination of his Westernization and his social ascension, and above all of the distance taken from his own environment, which was both familiar and strange.

Family and illness were the two poles of the life of this man and were closely linked. Arié believed that the family transmitted illness. He blamed his grandparents and parents for having passed illnesses on to him. He attributed his physical defects to them. He also evoked his father under the sign of illness. The focus of his ills was thus the family. But he did not succeed in doing without family and established relations of a familial kind with the Other. The relations he had with the teacher Mme Béhar, with the Alliance, with his future in-laws in Ortaköy, and with his uncle in Galata were all of a kind. He created a large family, lived for a time with his mother and wife in the same house, brought mother, brother, and sister to Izmir after the death of his father and provided for their needs, married off brothers and sisters, took care of them when their material situation was not as good as it might have been, worried about their material future, brought his family to Davos during his illness, brought his children into his business, and maintained long-term relationships with the different members of his family throughout his life. As a newlywed, Gabriel Arié lived with his parents; later, his mother, younger brother, and sister moved in with him. He shared the same building with his brother, and then his son came to live with him. We thus have a portrait of the typical Sephardi family, where young and old lived together. Arié tried to break with this practice numerous times, but in the end was obliged to go along with it. There was a gap between his own aspirations and local contingencies. This was not yet the framework of the contemporary urban family of the nineteenth century, where intergenerational solidarity dissolved.⁷¹

To a great extent, Gabriel Arié also conducted his business with members of his family, and later with his descendants. His sense of family was very developed and his penchant toward egocentrism did not prevent him from managing his family relationships as a powerful and omnipresent—but attentive—paterfamilias, preoccupied with the material future of those close to him. Like any bourgeois, he made it a duty to place his children on a firm financial footing and made sure they did not lose their class standing by the choice of an occupation or spouse whose status was unworthy of them.⁷² In fact, his male children, like himself, made careers in insurance. Arié’s solicitude extended to his less immediate family as well. First Davos, then summer stays in vacation spots abroad and in Bulgaria, became occasions for family reunions. Everyone moved through these places in a continual coming and going, which pointed to both the wealth of the family and the affection that linked its members together. Summer tourism in the mountains and spas or in the country became a habit, as in the European bourgeois family of the nineteenth century.⁷³

Gabriel Arié welcomed his niece, whose health was fragile, to Davos, oversaw her education, and reproduced in exile the family atmosphere he was accustomed to. As in any family, in this case a large one, frictions were not lacking. Certain conflicts persisted and caused the author sorrow, most of them due to the touchiness of the protagonists. Questions of money were also a subject of conflicts, such as the one that broke out between him and his brother Elia. But Elia provided for his needs during his stay in Davos, testimony to the family solidarity that existed among the Ariés. And Gabriel did not at any moment reproduce the conflictual atmosphere that reigned between his impoverished father and the wealthy family of his mother, voluntarily coming to the aid of those in his family who needed him.

The genealogical tree of the family, beginning in the eighteenth century, clearly testifies to the practice of endogamy, which was current at the time. It persisted even in the twentieth century, since the last son of Arié, Narcisse, married his cousin. Gabriel Arié himself tried to marry off his daughter to a cousin. Although long turned in upon itself, the Jewish family of the Balkans, progressively influenced by Westernization, began increasingly to look toward the outside. Marriages outside the clan became more and more frequent; leaving one’s birthplace and settling abroad began to occur; and travel was common. A number of family members of Gabriel Arié’s generation and that of his descendants established their homes outside Bulgaria, either in bordering countries or in Europe. Mobility—both vertical and horizontal—characterized this type of family, which was still in the minority. The geographical situation of Bulgaria, a gateway to the West, also facilitated that opening.

Gabriel Arié had an “arranged” marriage.⁷⁴ He married the young Rachel Cohen, whom he knew in Ortaköy and whose family he visited frequently. The family was eager to bring about the marriage. The wedding was traditional and Arié received a dowry, following the local custom, which, in fact, was not particular to Sephardi culture. He himself attempted to arrange the marriage of his eldest daughter and of his brother; progressively, his other children chose their own spouses. Nonetheless, Gabriel Arié had very fixed ideas on the subject of marriage. He first had an amorous relationship with his colleague Rachel Lévy, whom he met when she was working in Ortaköy; he did not marry her, because her ways were too free. Later, in love with an Alliance teacher whom he met in Sofia only shortly before his marriage to Rachel Cohen, he sacrificed love to reason. Sara Ungar was an emancipated woman practicing a profession, was much older than Gabriel Arié, and had ways very different from those of the Eastern women around him in his family environment. She did not possess the necessary assets to become his wife; moreover, she was Ashkenazi. He did not dismiss the possibility of living with her as his mistress, but he did not envision marriage. In the end, he preferred the security of a domestic woman, the future mother of his children, which was a type familiar to him. Arié also probably wanted to keep his promise by marrying his fiancée. The sense of honor so valorized in that culture had to play a role in that decision. He preferred order. Is not the family “the cell of living order”?⁷⁵ After the birth of the Arié couple’s first child, Mile Ungar, offended and without hope, left the girls school in Sofia for another position.

In marriage, Gabriel Arié behaved like any Western bourgeois. Marriage was the decisive element in advancement and a serious matter;⁷⁶ Gabriel was well aware of this. In the first place, he took a wife from a wealthy milieu. And 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, who said what he thought, which did not fail to attract enemies very early. It was always with the community—institutions and their representatives—that he, as a man of the Alliance nonetheless, entered into conflict, as was the case in Sofia and Izmir. In fact, Arié remained a free agent before anything else.

Although he had character, he was also hypersensitive, in part because of his illness. He experienced the death of his father, his daughter, and his wife as tragedies, but he succeeded in overcoming them. A man of action, he knew he had to continue living in spite of everything. He remarried quickly to avoid the loneliness that pursues men of his age, and him more than others, since at that stage most of his children and the members of his extended family were dispersed. In his advanced age, he continued to look on women as nurses, angels of the house, whom it was difficult to do without. Death was disorder; remarriage, a remedy.

His pessimism—or, rather, a fatalism of the Eastern type—and his superstitious side broke with the apparent rigidity that seems to have marked his character. For him, the love of order, the remedy for his anxiety, was continually shadowed by the disorder that was at the very foundation of his trajectory and his being. Instead of continuing on his family’s path, he changed course and led a different life; his carefully planned career as a teacher was interrupted by his illness, generating disorder. And yet illness was already part of the family history. He opted for a conventional marriage but found himself involved in love affairs that went against that conjugal order. He sought financial security in a post as a teacher, but at the end of the road found himself once more in business, an area known for the unforeseen, for risk. In the beginning, he sought treatment in a sanatorium, a regimented environment, a disciplinary universe,⁸⁰ but he rapidly lost confidence in doctors and medication and definitively abandoned them. Gabriel Arié also chose the school, the regimented place par excellence, as his professional environment, but he abandoned it, not appreciating it overly much, since he chose not to send his children to school whenever he could manage it. He lived in that duality between order and disorder, and he provoked that disorder by revolt, by breaking with the established order at the very foundation of his social class of adoption.

Conservative in his ideas on education, politics (fear of Bolshevism), family, marriage, and many other points, by the life he led he also incarnated revolt. One of the most important revolts was illness. Through enclosures—institutions—in this case the Alliance, the school, the family, and the sanatorium, Gabriel Arié sought desperately the security he lacked. He went so far as to specialize in insurance, also setting up his children in a career that, as its name indicates, insures beings and goods. The sanatorium, with its rhythms and rituals, claims to be a reassuring universe, where the patient is taken in hand by the medical corps, but it is at the same time a place of anxiety.⁸¹ As soon as that security was guaranteed, he found it suffocating and attempted to break through these enclosures and go elsewhere, to breathe, as he did in the mountains associated with his treatment. He fled his family of origin to conquer new intellectual and social horizons, because it was suffocating him—like the coughing episodes that prevented him from breathing.

School, the sanatorium, illness, and even Judaism are major sites of rituals, which are reassuring because of their repetition. In his tuberculosis, there was also that duality of order and disorder, the first ensured by incessant observation of the development of his illness, typical of tuberculosis patients, the second by the break and, as a result, the upheaval at every level that it provoked his life. Although he created new barriers for himself, he liberated himself from others, but without knocking them down altogether, as in his relations with the Alliance, for example.

The link between Gabriel Arié and illness resembles that between himself and his family. It was a tie of attraction and repulsion. Influenced by the fashionable theories of heredity, or rather by the “mythologies of heredity” developed by doctors and novelists of the time,⁸² he did not dissociate illness from family: “The terror of ‘defects’ transmitted and of ‘damaged’ blood places the family into a link in a chain, a link whose fragility requires vigilance.”⁸³ Illness sometimes emerged as a mode of expression within the family. Arié himself alluded to the fact that his mother resorted to it to get attention and that she stopped doing so when her son or daughter-in-law became ill. As a result, illness became commonplace and no longer had the same meaning. This extended family, living within the same house, was suffocating, and manifested its discomfort in illness. Illness was also a distinctive sign of the family, whose members were affected by the century’s malady, tuberculosis. Gabriel Arié’s own son Sandro suffered from it and had to stay in Berck, France, for a long time. The son was at the seaside while the father was in the mountains. Diabetes was the second illness that affected the direct family: both his daughter Ida and his wife Rachel died of it. Arié especially associated defective lungs, the organ of breathing, with the family. It was to have the air he was lacking that he sought out heights, mountains, the symbolic place of healing. “The ill are people of the plains, who rise above their places and environments of origin, having to overcome anxiety, sometimes physical in nature, as a general rule.”⁸⁴ Gabriel Arié was destined to experience that anxiety inherent in his existence, which he tried to stifle in the enclosed worlds he chose for himself, but which in their turn suffocated him and from which he attempted to escape. He continually moved back and forth between these places and the outside, the symbol of deliverance. His illness, which in itself represents a break, linked Arié to the West, his universe of adoption, just as the family illnesses he bore within himself and the career he chose late in life linked him to his lineage and his cultural environment.

The practice of a career associated with the intellectual domain had only been a parenthesis. And yet his wish to exercise a career other than commerce, the traditional career path for Jews, particularly in the East, manifested a desire to leave his environment. In business, Gabriel Arié continued to write and to find a place for himself in the intellectual realm. Always regretting what he was leaving behind, he was one of those beings whose choices exile them from the universe for which they were destined, and who are condemned to live in the duality and tensions exile produces.

He attributed the causes of his illness not only to family heredity, which he experienced as fate, but also to external factors. These also stemmed from the environment he had wanted to reject: worries caused by the people of the Izmir community, who did not seem to appreciate him, and by the evil eye, a superstition anchored in the popular realm. Arié thus found himself once more prisoner to the same interpenetrating circles: family, community (the official family to which every Jew in traditional milieus belonged), and the cultural group in general, the Sephardim, the great ethnocultural family.

From the beginning of his illness in 1898, he undertook a tour of spas and mountain villages. He was seeking purification, which would come about through water and air. The conquest of a new physical universe also signified the conquest of the new identity he was seeking. Arié moved a great deal. He hid his anxiety in each change of location—escape, combined with hyperactivity. As a teacher, he changed countries and cities several times; he traveled a great deal within and outside the Balkans; then, with his illness, he once more took to the road in pursuit of recovery, in all senses of the word. Gabriel Arié’s itinerary allows us to reconstitute the path of tuberculosis, where Switzerland was the locale of choice. From one sanatorium to another, he tried to kill off his death anxiety, to regulate it, to enclose it in these enclosed places, in order to familiarize himself with it and thus get around it. Death at an early age was also hereditary in his family. Would he inherit nothing from that family but illness and death? They hung about him continually. They made their mark on his relations with the family.

Of course, Gabriel Arié was in the first stages of his illness, since sanatoria were open only to patients whom medicine considered curable. At one point, he thought about ending his life, but he continued to struggle to conquer obstacles, as he would throughout his life. During his stay in Switzerland, he looked within himself for the will to get well, putting an end to the regimentation of the sanatoria and the closed universe of illness and healing. There again, it was in activity that he found salvation. This was one way for him to reconnect with life and escape the exclusion that threatened anyone who transgressed. At no moment in his stay did he entirely set aside his profession or his family. He adapted to the new conditions and thus adapted his familiar universe to his new status. It is that adaptability that makes Gabriel Arié an interesting figure and a rich character. Like all those who took the path he did, adaptability was the condition sine qua non of success in the unknown.

It was also in illness that Gabriel Arié crystallized his individual sense of self, his profound being, whose tribulations he narrated in his autobiography and journal. These works are the testimony of a long internal journey, written by an engaging and courageous man seeking the irreconcilable—a fate reserved at a certain moment for those Jews who had gone in search of modernity and had witnessed the slow crumbling of a world that had been theirs for centuries. A proud man, he wanted to show himself in his best light; yet the weaknesses of a tortured being also show through. These weaknesses contribute to his strength. His was the order and disorder of a full life, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century and underwent the transformations and upheavals affecting the Sephardi world in the East up to the eve of World War II. Arié did not have the misfortune of experiencing the horrors of that war. Instead of an exemplary life—which is not truly life—the memory of which he would have liked to pass on to his children. Arié leaves us a life example, the memory of a man and of an age-old Sephardi culture that he saw slowly disintegrate and disappear.

1. For the latest overview of the history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, see Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans: The Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th Centuries (Oxford, 1995). See also Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1991); Walter Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity: A History of the Jews of Turkey (Lanham, 1992); Avigdor Levy, ed., The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 1994). For a general history of the Jews of Bulgaria, see Haim Keshales, History of the Jews of Bulgaria (in Hebrew), 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1969–73); and Vicki Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews: The History of a Dubious Symbiosis (New York, 1979).

2. The economic role of the Jews in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is analyzed by Halil Inalcik, “Jews in the Ottoman Economy and Finances,” in C. E. Bosworth, Charles Issawi, et al., eds., Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis: The Islamic World (Princeton, 1989), 531–50. For an analysis of the situation in the Balkans, see Traian Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960): 234–313. See also the discussion in Benbassa and Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans, 36–49.

3. See Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews, 64.

4. For an analysis of community structures and leadership, see the studies published in Aron Rodrigue, ed., Ottoman and Turkish Jewry: Community and Leadership (Bloomington, 1992).

5. For a study of the legal status of Jews in the land of Islam, see Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, 1984). See also the discussion in Aron Rodrigue, “ ‘Difference’ and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by Nancy Reynolds,” Stanford Humanities Review 5/1 (1995): 81–90.

6. See the manuscript in our possession tracing the history of the family between 1768 and 1914: [Nahim J. Arié and] Tchelebi Moshé Abraham Arié II, “Biography of the Arié Family” (in Judeo-Spanish), 4 vols., completed in 1914. This information is also contained in biographical notes provided by Gabriel Arié’s son Narcisse, which accompanied his father’s manuscript and are dated 8 November 1989.

7. For a presentation of the traditional educational system in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of Westernization, see A. Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington, 1990), 35–38.

8. For a general history of the Alliance, see André Chouraqui, Cent ans d’histoire: L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine (1860–1960) (Paris, 1965); and Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1939 (Seattle, 1993).

9. For an analysis of the ideology of emancipation and regeneration, see Jay Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century France (Detroit, 1989); Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 1–24; Rodrigue, Images.

10. See Rodrigue, Images, 15–21.

11. Ibid., 25–30.

12. On the activities of Nissim Béhar, see Shlomo Haramati, Three Who Preceded Ben Yehudah (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1978), 83–125.

13. See Rodrigue, Images, 34–67.

14. See Esther Benbassa and A. Rodrigue, “L’artisanat juif en Turquie à la fin du XIX^e siècle: L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et ses oeuvres d’apprentissage,” Turcica 17 (1985): 113–26.

15. Georges Weill, “Charles Netter ou les oranges de Jaffa,” Nouveaux Cahiers 21 (summer 1970): 2–36; Rodrigue, Images, 94–104.

16. See Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 110–11.

17. See Keshales, History, 2:195–210.

18. Ibid., 173.

19. On Zionism, see Esther Benbassa, “Zionism in the Ottoman Empire at the End of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Studies in Zionism 11/2 (fall 1990): 127–40; Esther Benbassa, “Associational Strategies in Ottoman Jewish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Levy, ed., Jews of the Ottoman Empire, 457–84. See also Benbassa and Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans, 116–54.

20. See Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews, 126–31; Benbassa and Rodrigue, The Jews of the Balkans, 163.

21. Biographical information compiled by his son and dated 8 November 1989.

22. Ibid.

23. See Tamir, Bulgaria and Her Jews, 116.

24. Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, Bulgarie XII.E. 153a.

25. Gabriel Arié, Histoire juive depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1923), 1.

26. Ibid., 2.

27. Ibid., 65.

28. Ibid., 236.

29. Ibid., 262.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., 278.

32. Ibid., 279.

33. Ibid., 337.

34. Gabriel Arié, Histoire juive depuis les origines jusqu’à nos jours, 2d ed. (Paris, 1926), 3.

35. Ibid., 348.

36. Ibid., 349.

37. Ibid., 366.

38. Ibid.

39. Archives de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, Suisse A, response by Bigart to a letter from Arié dated 15 January 1909.

40. Philippe Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France (Paris, 1971), 10.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid., 70.

43. Pierre Guillaume, “Tuberculose et montagne: Naissance d’un mythe,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 30 (April–June 1991): 36–37.

44. Béatrice Didier, Le journal intime (Paris, 1976), 18.

45. Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 210.

46. Ibid., 216.

47. Ibid., 210.

48. See n. 6 above.

49. Mme Mathilde Arié of Israel, wife of Félix, nephew of G. Arié, sent us three genealogical trees: the first goes from 1780, the date the ancestor of the line, Abraham Arié, arrived in Samakov, until 1890, and was no doubt compiled by the father of G. Arié; the second was compiled by G. Arié himself; and the third is a later, supplementary copy. Different members of the family, who are dispersed in various countries and who sometimes do not know one another, possess copies of these trees.

50. Didier, Le journal intime, 63.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 47.

53. Ibid., 79.

54. Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 217.

55. Didier, Le journal intime, 79.

56. Ibid., 64.

57. Ibid., 56–57.

58. Michelle Perrot, “Drames et conflits familiaux,” in Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds., Histoire de la vie privée (Paris, 1987), 4:264; Adeline Daumard, Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France depuis 1815 (Paris, 1991), 153.

59. Anne Martin-Fugier, “Les rites de la vie privée bourgeoise,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., Vie privée, 4:195.

60. Didier, Le journal intime, 21.

61. Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 181–82.

62. Ibid., 59.

63. Alain Corbin, “Coulisses: Le secret de l’individu,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., Vie privée, 4:419.

64. S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Patterns of Modernity (London, 1987), 1:5; Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris, 1988), 61.

65. For Westernization in Sephardi regions, see Esther Benbassa, “La modernisation en terre sépharde,” in Shmuel Trigano, ed., La société juive à travers l’histoire (Paris, 1992), 1:565–605.

66. For photographs, see various private collections and also Esther Yuhas, ed., The Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire (in Hebrew) (Jerusalem, 1989).

67. Esther Benbassa, “Education for Jewish Girls in the East: A Portrait of the Galata School in Istanbul, 1872–1912,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 9 (1993): 163–73.

68. Daumard, Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie, 152.

69. Didier, Le journal intime, 91.

70. Martin-Fugier, “Vie privée,” 195; Didier, Le journal intime, 18.

71. Michelle Perrot, “Figures et rôles,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., Vie privée, 172.

72. Daumard, Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie, 152.

73. Martin-Fugier, “Vie privée,” 228–32.

74. Michelle Perrot, “La famille triomphante,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., Vie privée, 4:94.

75. Perrot, introduction to “La famille triomphante,” 91.

76. Ibid., 136.

77. See on this subject Esther Benbassa, “Haim Nahum Efendi, dernier grand rabbin de l’Empire ottoman (1908–1920): Son rôle politique et diplomatique,” 2 vols. (thèse de doctorat d’état, Université de Paris III, 1987); Esther Benbassa, Haim Nahum: A Sephardic Chief Rabbi (Tuscaloosa, 1995).

78. Michelle Perrot, “Manières d’habiter,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., Vie privée, 4:307 and 309.

79. Perrot, “Figures et rôles,” 154.

80. Pierre Guillaume, Du désespoir au saint: Les tuberculeux aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris, 1986), 233.

81. Ibid., 261.

82. Perrot, “Fonctions de la famille,” in Ariès and Duby, eds., Vie privée, 4:115.

83. Ibid.

84. Guillaume, “Tuberculose et montagne,” 37.