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
