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’
