Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, 1860-1939

by Aron Rodrigue

The Alliance Israelite Universelle, an organization founded in Paris in 1860, established a vast network of schools in Sephardi and Eastern Jewish communities in Muslim lands stretching from Morocco in the west to Iran in the east. Teachers were recruited locally from among the best students at these schools, trained in Paris, and sent to teach in and direct other Alliance schools. In this book Aron Rodrigue examines the ideology and activities of the organization and discusses its place in modern Jewish history. His primary source is the correspondence between the teachers and the Alliance Central Committee in Paris. The book includes a generous selection of letters, along with reports, directives, and policy guidelines, thematically arranged and analyzed. The teachers not only discuss school matters but paint a distinctive picture of Jewish communities in Muslim lands, commenting on their social structures, customs, relationships with non-Jewish populations and authorities, and the changes caused by political, social, and economic developments. The image created within the representational framework of the letters is one that is often highly critical of the communities in which the teachers found themselves, reflecting the latter's identification with the values of French Jewry and the Alliance. Imbued with the liberal ideals of the age and guided by the Franco-Jewish ideology of emancipation, the Alliance sought to gain equal rights and full citizenship for Jews in every country, to defend Jews from persecution, and, through education, to modernize and westernize non-European Jewish communities. Its activities contributed greatly to the fundamental cultural, social, and political reorientation of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries toward the West in the modern period. The work of the Alliance was intimately associated with the process of westernization that marked so decisively the history of Jewish communities in the last century of their existence in Muslim land

317 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1993