Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860-1939 (review)

120 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 is "presumed to have been written in the third century by Rabbi Moshe de Leon» (p. 266)! On the whole this is a serious collection of essays by good scholars, and its predominantly academic orientation is flavored by some delectable reading. One of my favorites is Isaac Jack Uvy and Rosemary Uvy Zumwalt's delightful documentation and discussion of a specialty among some Sephardic women, conversation which consists in stringing proverbs end-to-end as a way of bringing traditional wisdom to bear on current situations. Another favorite is Issachar Ben-Ami's over-stuffed anthology of bizarre "Customs of Pregnancy and Childbirth among Sephardic and Oriental Jews." Nor is the volume entirely geared to the past. In terms of contemporary relevance Zvi Zohar discusses Rabbi Yitzhak Dayyan (Aleppo, 1923) as an interesting example of how Sephardic religious orthodoxy confronted some of the problems of modernism in a positive and flexible way. In sum, this serious and innovative volume does indeed offer new horizons on a growing field ofstudy and is to be recommended to scholars and general readers alike. T. A. Perry Modern and Classical Languages University of Connecticut Images of Sephardi and Eastern ]ewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, 1860-1939, by Aron Rodrigue. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. 308 pp. $40.00. Responding to the avalanche of ideas released by the French Revolution, virtually all the communities of the Ottoman Empire (which included the Balkans, Thrace, Anatolia, the Arab lands, and much of North Africa) began to undergo a renaissance. The Serbs, the Greeks, the Bulgarians, and the Armenians were led either by their respective Churches or their intelligentsias. Later Christian missions, Catholic and Protestant, established schools throughout Ottoman lands in an effort to proselytize and "save souls." This endeavor met with only very partial success, though the mission schools succeeded in educating a new generation ofmodernist Christian youths. The Muslims of the Ottoman Empire depended on their state to introduce reform so as to transform Muslim society and enable it to meet the challenge of the West, and the state carried out its task with Book Reviews 121 energy. Only the Jewish communities in these lands were left to fend for themselves until the founding of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860. This French institution, the subject of Aron Rodrigue's fascinating study, set out "to work throughout the world for the emancipation and the moral progress of the Jews." But before these non-Western Jews were worthy of emancipation, their communities had to be "regenerated," and individuals had to transform themselves into modern, enlightened citizens. The network ofAlliance schools was to be the agent of "regeneration" and "civilization." After all, the argument ran, emancipation and regeneration enabled French Jewry to enter "civilization"; why should not the same path be opened to "backward" Jewish communities of the east? Rodrigue rightly notes that there was a colonialist paradigm to the Alliance venture, "the larger dynamic of domination of the non-European with which the Alliance inevitably became associated." But he argues convincingly that this by itself does not explain adequately the ideology and self-representation of the organization, simply because eastern Jews were seen as an extension of the "seW' and not as the "other." This attitude became more evident when the Alliance was forced to rely on local recruits to staff the schools. Initially the organization had used French teachers to carry out its mission civilisatrice. But it found that it could not meet the growing demand without exploiting local talent. Therefore the best graduates of the Alliance schools in the east were brought to Paris and trained as teachers in the values cherished by the organization before being sent back to run the schools. Such was the success of the training that many teachers acquired a Western self-identification. It is the letters written by such teachers and administrators that Rodrigue uses to sketch the vibrant "images of Sephardi and eastern Jewries in transition." The reader is told not to expect the history of the Jews of the Muslim lands in modern times; he is offered descriptions ofJewish communities as perceived by...