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  • Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915 by Jonathan Sciarcon
  • Selçuk Akşin Somel
Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915. By Jonathan Sciarcon. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017. xxx + 196 pp. Cloth $85.

This book provides a concentrated view on the emergence of modern Jewish female education in Iraq under Ottoman rule prior to World War I. The girls' schools were opened by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), a philanthropic body founded by French Jews in 1860 to promote education and welfare among Jewish communities in non-European regions. The teaching staff was usually sent from France. This study is unique in terms of using AIU's Iraq files to disclose the main facts concerning the foundation of the first Jewish girls' schools in the region, the difficulties encountered by the female directors sent by AIU's Paris center while stabilizing these institutions, and the impact of the AIU female schools on the social life of the Iraqi Jews.

Sciarcon's study consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 surveys the beginnings of the modern Jewish instruction in Ottoman Iraq, which initially focused on boys' education. Though the AIU founded the boys' school in Baghdad in 1864, [End Page 472] the resistance of conservative local rabbis prevented the opening of a female institution until 1895. It was J. Danon, the director of the boys' school, who established a girls' primary school, while his wife Rachel Danon became the first director of this institution.

The next chapter elaborates on Danon's struggle, both as a director and as a teacher, to settle the curriculum, to raise the teaching standards of the instructors, and to induce wealthy parents to send their daughters to this school as paying students. The girls' school turned into a prestigious educational institution of Baghdad. Meanwhile, the students, influenced by Danon as a role model of an independent and self-confident female instructor, came to resist the local patriarchal traditions such as child marriage and seclusion from the public life.

The third chapter discusses Oro Sémach's tenure as the second director of the school from 1899 to 1904. Under Sémach, the curriculum was enriched by including new courses, and new classes were introduced. In addition, she opened a school library and a Society for Reading, which supported charitable activities. Sémach also promoted vocational education for poorer girls. All these actions provided the entrance of at least some Jewish girls into public life.

The following section focuses on Marie Albala and Rebecca Bassan's activities as directors of the institution prior to its closure in 1915. The school received a building from the wealthy Kadoorie family in 1911, and the school's new name became Laura Kadoorie School for Girls. A preschool was opened, and vocational training became fully established. This school was closed down due to wartime government policies, to be reopened in 1917 under British occupation. The final chapter summarizes the foundation of AIU girls' schools in the Iraqi towns of Hilla (1911), Mosul (1912), and Basra (1913) and their activities until the demise of the Ottoman rule in the region.

Sciarcon's study is a significant contribution to Jewish women's history of Iraq not only in terms of educational aspects, but also with regards to the struggles of individual female directors to persuade local parents about the importance of female schooling within an adverse social environment. These directors also had to instruct mostly inexperienced instructors on the art of professional teaching. The harsh climate of Baghdad, combined with outbreaks of cholera, was not particularly helpful. Danon's elder son came to the brink of death; Sémach lost both her son and her sister.

Notwithstanding the contributions of this volume for gender and educational history of Iraqi Jews, some issues in this work strike an academic reader: possibly due to an exclusive focus on AIU correspondences, the language of the study came to reflect the modernistic and Orientalist viewpoint of the AIU school directresses (particularly pages 46, 82–84). In correlation with this...

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