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
