A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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