French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey 1860-1925

250 Pages·1990·10.36 MB·English

by  Aron Rodrigue

The Modern Jewish Experience
Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, editors
FRENCH JEWS,
TURKISH JEWS
The Alliance Israelite Universelle and
the Politics of Jewish Schooling
in Turkey, 1860-1925
ARON RODRIGUE
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
© 1990 by Aron Rodrigue
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rodrigue, Aron.
French Jews, Turkish Jews : the Alliance israelite universelle and
the politics of Jewish schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 / Aron
Rodrigue.
p. cm.—(The Modern Jewish experience)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-253-35021-2
1. Jews—Education—Turkey. 2. Jews—Turkey—History.
3. Alliance israelite universelle. 4. Turkey—Ethnic relations.
I. Title. II. Series: Modern Jewish experience (Bloomington, Ind.)
LC747.T9R63 1990
370'.89924'0561—dc20 89-46327
CIP
1 2 3 4 5 94 93 92 91 90
To my parents \
and
to the memory of the Jewish communities of Thrace

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
INTRODUCTION \ xi
I. The Emergence of the “Jewish Eastern Question” 1
The Damascus Affair and the Ideology of Emancipation, 1
The Image of the Eastern Jew in the 1840s and 1850s, 8
The Foundation of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, 17
II. Turkish Jewry in the Age of the Tanzimat 25
The Ottoman State and the Jewish Community, 28
Traditional Mass Education among Turkish Jewry, 35
Educational Reform, Communal Crisis, and the Foundation of
New Schools, 38
III. The Politics of Schooling: The Alliance Israelite and
the Jewish Communities of Turkey 47
The Establishment of the Schools, 47
Teachers, Committees, Communities, 57
IV. Educating Turkish Jewry 71
The Teachers and the Moralizing Impulse, 71
Jewish Education, 80
The Alliance School as the Emporium of Languages, 85
The Alliance Network in the First Decade of the Twentieth
Century, 90
V. The Alliance Schools and Jewish Society in Turkey 100
Vocational Training, 100
The Social Impact of the Schools, 111
VI. The Alliance and the Emergence of Zionism in Turkey 121
The Alliance at the Summit: 1908, 121
The Emergence of Zionism in Istanbul, 126
The Coming of Age of Turkish Jewry, 131
The Response of the Alliance to Zionism, 137
VII. Between French Imperialism and Turkish Nationalism:
The End of the Alliance in Turkey 145
The Alliance and French Interests in the Levant, 145
From Empire to Republic: The Alliance Schools in the Age of
Turkish Nationalism, 157
*
vii
Vlll Contents
CONCLUSION 167
ABBREVIATIONS 173
NOTES 174
BIBLIOGRAPHY
210
INDEX 231
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
I am deeply grateful to Simon Schama and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi for their
support and encouragement. Their intellectual stimulus has had a major influ­
ence on my historical thinking in the fields of European and Jewish history. I
thank Patrice Higonnet who played a crucial role in deepening my apprecia­
tion of the fundamentals of modern French history. My thanks also go to
Omeljan Pritsak, who explored with me many aspects of Turkic and Ottoman
history and who was instrumental in heightening my awareness of the need for
the comparative perspective in all historical inquiry.
I am grateful to Esther Benbassa with whom I have been working closely in
the field of Turkish-Jewish history for having read and commented on various
drafts of this work. I have gained tremendously from our many discussions
over the years. Jean-Christophe Attias has shared with me the insights of the
medievalist and has often provided much-needed correctives to this unre­
constructed modernist. I have discussed many aspects of the activities of the
Alliance Israelite Universelle with Annie Benveniste, who opened up for me
the sociological perspective on this subject.
Lois Dubin, David Fishman, and Peter Mandler read and commented exten­
sively on earlier drafts, gave me the benefit of their learning in different areas,
and thus illuminated my own field of research. Benjamin Braude gave me
important advice during the revision process. Peter Baldwin, Riva Kas-
toryano, Daniel Sherman, and Christopher Waters all provided invaluable
friendship and intellectual companionship. I thank Georges Weill, Chief Ar­
chivist of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, for giving me permission to con­
sult the Alliance archives. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Yvonne Levyne,
the head librarian of the Alliance, for her tireless efforts to facilitate my
research. I would also like to thank the Archives of the Ministere des Affaires
Etrangeres, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Public Records Of­
fice in London, the Ben Zvi Institute Library, the Central Archives for the
History of the Jewish People, the Central Zionist Archives, and the National
and University Library in Jerusalem, the Widener Library at Harvard, and the
Indiana University Libraries at Bloomington, Indiana for allowing me to use
their holdings. At various stages of research and writing, Michel Abitbol,
Phyllis Albert, Jacob Barnai, Israel Bartal, Jay Berkovitz, Richard Cohen,
Paul Dumont, Michael Graetz, Joseph Hacker, Otto Dov Kulka, Simon
Schwarzfuchs, Michael Silber, Jacques Thobie, and Yaron Tsur gave advice,
comments, suggestions, and help, for all of which I am deeply thankful.
The final draft of the manuscript was finished at the Institute for Advanced
Study of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I thank the Institute for its
hospitality. Last, but not least, I am grateful to Indiana University, its Jewish
Studies Program, and its History Department for providing me with a chal­
lenging, stimulating, and always supportive environment.
IX
X
IN T R O D U C T IO N
If you believe that a great number of your coreligionists, overcome by twenty
centuries of misery, of insults and prohibitions, can find again their dignity as
men, win the dignity of citizens;
If you believe that one should moralize those who have been corrupted, and
not condemn them, enlighten those who have been blinded, and not abandon
them, raise those who have been exhausted, and not rest with pitying them . . .
If you believe in all these things, Jews of all the world, come hear our
appeal. . . .*
With such fiery words the newly created Alliance Israelite Universelle empha­
sized in its appeal of 1860 the need to embark upon the process of educating
and transforming the Jewish communities far removed from European civiliza­
tion. The aim of the organization was to fight persecution and to bring about
the emancipation of the Jews in those countries where it had not yet been
achieved. But, apart from the legal component, emancipation also had a
social dimension, and the Alliance saw the two as an indivisible whole. Social
emancipation was especially important in “certain regions of the Orient where
there [was] a whole work of regeneration to undertake.”2 The agent of “regen­
eration” was to be the modem school.
This kind of concern shown by elements within the Franco-Jewish elite for
the fortunes of the Jews of the East is firmly rooted in the history of European
Jewry in the modern period. The era of emancipation ushered in by the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, dissolving corporate communities
and gradually integrating the Jews into the “national” life of their respective
countries in the nineteenth century, brought about a hitherto unseen fragmen­
tation in the Jewish world. Until the eighteenth century, all Jews had shared a
common universe based upon the principles of rabbinical Judaism, of ha-
lakhah (Jewish law), and of communal autonomy. There were, of course, local
variations in liturgy, language, dress, and custom. However, the bedrock of
Jewish life, whether for the Ashkenazi or the Sephardi, was a well-defined and
regulated religious tradition. This universe was transformed irrevocably by
the rise of the modern state, by the European Enlightenment and its Jewish
version, the haskalah, by the development of industrial capitalism, and by
legal and political emancipation. The contours of modern Jewish history have
been shaped by the challenges posed by these developments.
The transformation of Jewish life proceeded unevenly, affecting Western
and Central Europe first, and then slowly spreading further East. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, leading sections of Western Jewry were,
from all points of view, quite different from their fellow Jews elsewhere. The
embourgeoisement of this elite, the result of its growing acculturation and
xi