A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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,