Passing alternately from the north to the south of the Mediterranean, the Sephardi Jews often took to comparing the advantages and disadvantages of their respective diasporas in the land of Islam or in the countries of Christendom. Burned by his own experience under the Almohads, who forced all the Jews of Spain and North Africa to convert to Islam, Maimonides was the most critical with regard to Jewish existence south of the Mediterranean, going so far as to write in his Épître au Yémen (Epistle to Yemen) that Israel never had to deal with a more implacable enemy than Ishmael. Repeated by numerous exegetes of later generations as well as in reference texts of the first importance such as the Zohar, the position taken by the great Hispano-Egyptian philosopher is not, far from it, an unappealable condemnation of the Arab-Muslim civilization to which he belonged with all his soul. Nor is it a deliberate preference for “Edom,” the choice between the latter and “Ishmael” being moreover only a choice between bad and worse, as Abraham Saba would explain much later — one of the great spiritual leaders of the Megorashim (the expelled) of 1492, who narrowly escaped forced conversion before coming ashore in the Moroccan port of Arzila:1
“Suppose,” he would write, “that Jews from all the exiles gathered to recount to one another the evils each of them had suffered, some in the land of Ishmael, others in the land of Edom… Each interlocutor would have the impression of having lived through the worst in his own country, to the point of wishing to prefer his neighbor’s experience to his own. It is a fact that under Edom, subterfuges and rhetoric were used to convince the greatest possible number of Jews to abandon their religion of their own free will, whereas under Ishmael, where theological ‘discussions’ between Jews and Muslims were rare, violence was used to arrive at the same ends.”
This did not prevent the Spanish Jews from displaying the deepest attachment to Arab culture, long after they had left the Andalusian provinces under Muslim domination. Here, by way of illustration, is the case of Judah al-Harizi (1170–1235). Although he was born in Toledo, a century after the departure of the Muslims, this man of letters began his career by translating from Arabic into Hebrew certain masterworks of Muslim and Jewish writers, including Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. He produced a Hebrew version of the Maqāmāt of the Arab poet al-Hariri, on the model of which he wrote his great work titled Tahkemoni.
Arabic thus remained for a long time, in the eyes of the Jewish scholars of the Maghreb and the Mashreq, the language of all profane science: thus, in North Africa, Joseph Ibn Aqnin (1160–1226), who, under the Almohads, also had, like his master Maimonides, to “convert outwardly” to Islam in order to save his life, proposes a program of studies — largely inspired by the Muslim philosopher al-Farabi — in which, in addition to the learning of the Hebrew language, the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud, he advises the study of subjects generally taught in Arabic, namely philosophy, algebra, logic, optics, astronomy, music, physics, the natural sciences, and medicine.
In the same vein, it is well known that the attitude of the Sephardi Jews was always marked by a great warmth toward Turkey, “this broad and vast sea that God has opened with the staff of His mercy, as He opened the Red Sea in the time of the Exodus,” writes, in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese Jew Samuel Usque.2 This stands in sharp contrast with the traditional opinion of Ishmael and, at a century’s distance, echoes the dithyrambic remarks made on the eve of the expulsion from Spain by a rabbi of the Rhineland named Isaac Sarfati:3
“I, Isaac Sarfati, originally from France and born in Germany where I attended the schools, announce to you that Turkey is a country where one lacks for nothing. Each may live there in safety, in the shade of his fig tree and his vine. In the Christian countries, if you dress your children in blue and red, you expose their bodies to being turned red or blue by blows. You are obliged to cover yourselves in wretched rags. For you, the weekdays as well as the days of Sabbath and feast are all dark. Strangers alone enjoy your fortune. What satisfaction does the wealthy Jew have from his treasures? He keeps them only for his misfortune. One fine day, his enemies invent a calumny against him and take them away from him. (…). Israel! Why do you sleep? Arise and abandon this accursed country.”
However, as one penetrates into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the choice between Edom and Ishmael would present itself under different auspices for the Mediterranean Jews; even if, as Isaac Caro, the author of the Shulhan ’Arukh, writes, the hatred of the Church “will not be extinguished before the coming of the Messiah,” the Sephardim — those of the West, notably — would mark their preference for Europe, which now appeared to them as more civilized and more welcoming than the Muslim countries:
“Our captivity under the Mohammedans,” writes Menasseh Ben Israel in 1656, “is by far heavier to bear and graver than under the Christians, for as our Elders have said, ‘it is better to live under Edom than under Ishmael, because (the Christians) are a people more civilized, more rational, and more orderly (than the Muslims) as our people has been able to ascertain from experience.’”4
It is a fact that in the same era the Muslim world seems plunged into a long period of decadence, linked to the rise in power of Christian Europe and to the deterioration of the balance of forces to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire, which would drag in its wake the decline of the communities of the Muslim East and West.
Present on all the seas, Europe established, from the middle of the eighteenth century, its trading posts off the coast of the Maghreb, in the Persian Gulf as at the gates of India. Its merchants flooded the great cities of North Africa and the Near East with their goods, from which they essentially drew raw materials — silk, cotton, wheat, hides, etc. Generators of temptations of every order, the first effects of this imbalance are of a military nature and manifest themselves in the successive defeats of the Ottoman armies before Russia and Austria, then in Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition in 1798, and the conquest of Algeria by France in 1830, which gravely endangered the independence of its Maghrebi neighbors. Unable to slow European expansion, the Muslim leaders would attempt to arrest the decline of their countries by modernizing their armies and their administrations. Partial reforms, no doubt, but which would end up touching broad sectors of the society of these countries, most of which would not be slow, moreover, to fall under the direct domination of Europe, which, at the same time as the advent of the industrial revolution, loudly proclaims its intention to “civilize” and to Westernize, in its own image, the countries of Africa and Asia that it is preparing to colonize.
Engaged over the very first decades of the nineteenth century, the Westernization of the Mediterranean Jews thus took place under European pressure, when, one after another, the countries belonging to the Ottoman and Maghrebi sphere were constrained to open themselves to French, British, Spanish, and Italian influence. Entering willingly or by force into an impressive process of destructuring and restructuring that would transform from top to bottom many crucial aspects of Jewish life, they would suffer the full brunt of the consequences of European expansionism, which, in most cases, would also be accompanied by a kind of Judeo-European cultural imperialism.
The first to notice this are the Jews of Algeria. They are firmly taken in hand by their coreligionists in France who, without asking their opinion, would make them pass through the same path that they themselves had traversed, from 1791 onward, on the way of emancipation and assimilation. Rapidly “consistorialized” (1845), then naturalized French (1870) and stripped of all their traditional communal structures, they would end up becoming “expatriates” inside the country where they had lived for centuries. Their accession to French nationality would be their “exodus from Egypt,” said of them Adolphe Crémieux, the principal architect of this naturalization:5
“Egypt is Algiers, Algiers for my unfortunate brothers, the land of servitude from which they have been freed for barely thirty years,” he exclaimed in 1860. “And since that time, look at the progress they have made… between them and the Arabs the intellectual distance is immense… They want to be French; they are worthy of it and they will soon be.”
The Algerian example would not be reproduced anywhere else, in all its scope, but in Tunisia and Morocco, as in the whole of the colonial countries, the irruption of Europe did indeed cut the Jews off from their Muslim neighbors, according to a mechanism minutely dismantled by Albert Memmi:6
The Jew partook as much of the Colonizer as of the Colonized. If he was undeniably a native, as one said at the time, by the unbearable misery of the poor, by the mother tongue… by sensibility and by manners, the taste for the same music and the same perfumes, by an almost identical cuisine, he tried on the contrary to identify himself with the French. In a great surge that carried him toward the West, which seemed to him the paragon of all civilization and all true culture, he blithely turned his back on the East, irrevocably chose the French language, dressed in the Italian manner, and adopted with delight even the mannerisms of the Europeans…
Considering “de-Arabization” as an obligatory complement to their modernization, the Mediterranean Jews would set about distancing themselves, culturally, socially, and politically, from their global societies, thus giving birth to a new type of emancipation, very different from the one known by European Judaism since the beginning of the nineteenth century: assimilation and integration north of the Mediterranean, alienation and “de-assimilation” in the south. Whereas in Europe, social modernization had long been facilitated by a slow preparation of minds, in the Muslim countries it resulted from an external will, that of conquering Europe, which, profiting from their political and military weakening, forced them to abandon old forms of collective life sanctioned by religion and tradition without giving them the time to elaborate new criteria of citizenship and social belonging founded on their own history and their own culture.
Poorly accepted by a population violently shaken in its convictions and which saw in it the very sign of its cultural decline, the new political conjuncture hardly favored the integration of the Mediterranean Jews who, for a very long time, had ceased to share with their Muslim neighbors the same apprehensions toward the West nor the same obsessions toward European imperialism. Added to the sponsorship of European Jewish institutions of the caliber of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which intervened on their behalf at the slightest groan, this globally pro-European attitude would make the Mediterranean Jews still more suspect in the eyes of a part of Muslim opinion, which would tend to consider them as ungrateful collaborators of the colonial powers, aspiring to “trade the dhimma of Islam for that of the Christians.”
Their readiness to claim consular protection and European nationality, their infatuation with European culture and languages, or again — more specifically regarding the Jews of Morocco — their refusal to applaud the decision of the Palace, in the aftermath of the Madrid Conference of 1880, to grant them Moroccan citizenship, all these manifestations automatically excluded them from the new categories of “homeland” and “nation” that were beginning to take shape among certain Maghrebi and Eastern men of letters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Resolutely turning their back on the East, they would not regard European colonization with the same hostility as their Muslim fellow citizens, for whom it remained, above all, an attack on their national sovereignty and an affront to their religion. This divergence of interpretation of a historical event as capital as colonial domination would leave an indelible imprint on the collective memory of the two groups and would determine the attitude of each of them with regard to Western civilization.
One notable exception to this picture: the case of the Iraqi Jews, who displayed a real desire for symbiosis with the surrounding Arab society. The hardly constraining nature, on the one hand, of the British colonial regime and, on the other, the adoption by the leaders of the community of the Arabic language as the principal language of culture, whereas everywhere else in the East the Jews preferred the colonial languages to it — these two factors, without any doubt, determined the particular historical trajectory of Iraqi Judaism. Not without reason, its writers and leaders highlighted the ancient origin of the Jews of the country, whose origin goes back to the destruction of the First Temple, that is, before the sixth century before our era. Consequently, Iraq is the homeland of the Jews as much as that of the Arabs.
Elsewhere, Jews and Muslims would thus constitute two separate worlds, each living according to its own intellectual, social, and political rhythm. Two worlds little aware of the debates of conscience or of the intellectual agitation that mutually shook them from within, following their encounter with the West. Not understanding literary Arabic, the Mediterranean Jews — with the exception of the Iraqi Jews — thus lost the opportunity to follow the intense intellectual activity deployed by the Muslim reformists as well as its political implications: an activity which, between the two world wars, gave birth to the first versions of the various Maghrebi and Eastern national movements. Strongly imbued with Islamic images and symbols, there was no room, at that moment, for the participation of Jews in these movements which, in most cases, appeared as popular organizations for the defense of Islam rather than as genuine movements of national emancipation.
That said, as in any society in the process of modernization, contact with Europe was indeed followed by the collapse of religious practices in all the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean. Nowhere, however, did one encounter a fundamentalist or ultra-orthodox reaction of the haredi type as in the Ashkenazi world. Born in Central Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, the haredi phenomenon is hardly a remnant of old fossilized religious behaviors, but rather a “reappropriation of meaning” and a reinterpretation of traditional practices, in response to the assimilation and secularization that had invaded the European Jewish communities since the Emancipation. It did not reach the south of the Mediterranean, not so much because of the inaptitude of the Sephardim to adapt to it but simply by reason of the different circumstances of the modernization of Mediterranean Judaism, which produced another, more liberal type of reaction to Westernization.
Principal agents of the transmission of Jewish modernity in the East, neither the Anglo-Jewish Association nor the Alliance Israélite Universelle were anti-religious institutions. Called to become the “missionaries” of the West to the Sephardi communities, the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses of the Alliance (just like their colleagues in the other international Jewish organizations working south of the Mediterranean) were hardly revolutionaries, like the iconoclastic maskilim who had agitated the East European ghettos over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. Formed at the best schools of French israélitisme, they were, on the whole, respectful of Jewish tradition.
Giving as instruction to its schoolmasters to introduce change more “by demonstration” of a personal kind than “by affirmation,” the Alliance took care indeed “not to give offense to the rabbis and the parents” by wanting too quickly to rid the minds of the children “of the chimeras that haunt them.”7 Thus, in a general manner, its directors would set about obtaining the prior cooperation of the rabbis of each community before the opening of any new school. This is what was done, for example, by Salomon Benoliel, who came to Fez in 1882 to obtain the blessing of the chief rabbi of the city, Abner Ha-Serfati, reputed to be an enlightened man:
“The advantages of an Alliance school,” he explained to his superiors in Paris, “would cause a beneficial revolution in the midst of this people lost in the shadows of ignorance. It would be the awakening of minds, it would be a radiant and flowering spring succeeding this dark and endless winter, which would finally bring about a true renaissance from which all the Moroccan Israelites, in general, and those of Fez in particular, would profit. Emancipation would be one of its first consequences. The knowledge of a European language would decide and embolden the Jews to travel, eager to know Europe; their relations with the rest of the world would take a great leap; their commerce would reach serious proportions.”8
Pragmatic, the teaching that the Alliance provides to its pupils — girls or boys — has by no means the ambition of producing, at the end of the course, disembodied intellectuals making a clean sweep of their culture and their past, but quite simply modest little functionaries, commercial employees, farmers, and workers, knowing how to read and write, handling the four operations of arithmetic, the rule of three, and currency exchange operations; in short “a generation of men fit for all the functions of society, useful citizens, doing honor to the religion they profess” and bearers of hope to communities strongly shaken by contact with Europe:
“It goes without saying,” explains on this subject one of its best disciples, Moïse Nahon, “that theory is entirely set aside; the aim to be pursued is to develop the sense of logic, the filiation of arguments, the need for the why, without ever forgetting that we have before us future workers, the commercial employees, the merchants of tomorrow, requiring only a very utilitarian arithmetic, the best possible adapted to practical exigencies.”
Because they perceived it as such, the Sephardi Jews — and their rabbis foremost — accepted, without grumbling and without being constrained, the modern teaching dispensed by the Alliance (and the other European school institutions) which, be it said in passing, had the greatest difficulty imposing itself in the Ashkenazi milieu in Palestine. Carried by an old fund of religious tolerance conveyed by the Sephardi tradition, the Mediterranean rabbis did not lock themselves up, like their ultra-orthodox colleagues of Hungary and Poland, within the “four cubits of the halakha” by proclaiming urbi et orbi that “all innovation is forbidden by the Torah.” On the contrary, they generally adapted their religious positions to the spirit of the times, thus making life easier for communities that were, moreover, transformed from top to bottom by the effects of European colonization.
This open-mindedness allowed Mediterranean Judaism in particular to avoid the debates that tore apart the European communities in the face of modernity. This was made possible by the fact that in the Muslim countries, the socio-economic and political changes brought by the encounter with Europe hardly attenuated the traditional ethno-religious cleavages. On the contrary, they were rather reinforced by them, the identity of the individual and of the group continuing to be defined according to rigorously confessional principles independently of the level of religious observance of one or another. A criterion of identitarian cleavage as much as an instrument of power, never would the ethno-religious factor be as determining in the public life of the countries of the Maghreb and the Levant as in the colonial era: pushed to its extremes, it would give birth to an ostracism of rare virulence between Europeans (Christians) and natives (Muslims), between Jews and Europeans, and between Arabs and Jews.
Without too much fear, then, for the identity of their communities, the Sephardi rabbis were thus able to approach, in all freedom, concrete problems concerning for example the use of electricity and that of the railway on the Sabbath, the use of the telegraph for the dispatch of acts of divorce (get) traditionally requiring a direct and unmediated contact between the spouses, or again the taking into account of the progress of medicine and the adoption of new rules of hygiene in the practice of circumcision.
Thus, for Rabbi Aharon Ben-Shimon, who fulfilled the functions of chief rabbi of Cairo between 1891 and 1921, the abandonment of traditional dress had nothing illicit about it, no more than the adoption of the division of time as it is practiced in the West. As a consequence of which, he was led to proclaim obsolete certain old ritual practices that no longer suit the wearing of European trousers, such as for example the custom — still in force among the Ashkenazim — constraining bereaved families and their visitors to sit on the ground during the seven days of mourning.
His predecessor Eliyahu Hazan had displayed the same spirit of tolerance when he permitted his coreligionists to shave; he limited himself only to forbidding the cantors and other “beardless” officials of the cult from ascending to the pulpit during the solemn services of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. At the same moment, in Iraq, the chief rabbi ’Abdallah Somekh (1813–1889) of Baghdad authorized his flock living in Bombay to travel by train on Saturdays on condition that they not leave the perimeter of the city, while the Sephardi rabbis of Jerusalem, unlike their ultra-orthodox neighbors of Meah Shearim, were not far from applauding the emergence of political Zionism.9
Without however minimizing the scope of all this halakhic work, one cannot help noticing, nonetheless, that the shock of modernity hardly produced among the Jews of the Arab countries the same intellectual effects as among their Muslim neighbors. Without mentioning the fact that they hardly contributed — contrary to the Arab Christians — to the intellectual and political renewal of their countries, they developed for their own account no current of thought, of religious or secular essence, approaching closely or remotely the movements of ideas issuing from the Arab Nahda (Renaissance) of the second half of the nineteenth century. Consequently, one would search in vain among the Jewish men of letters for thinkers of the stature of the Tunisian statesman Khéreddine or of the Egyptian Shaykhs Tahtawi and ’Abduh, who, each in his own way, attempted to respond by their political action and their religious writings to the challenges of the West.
This lack of Sephardi creativity seems to hold to two or three essential reasons: contrary to their Muslim neighbors, whose encounter with the West was brutal and demanded of them radical and innovative responses, the Jews were able to call upon an arsenal of ready-made ideas generated by the experience of their Ashkenazi coreligionists who had approached modernity earlier than they. This was all the easier for them in that it was precisely Jewish “masters” formed in Europe who made Western civilization accessible to them. In the same order of ideas, the presence in most of the great cities of the south of the Mediterranean — Tangier, Tunis, Alexandria, Cairo, etc. — of Jewish “colonies” of European origin favored their direct access to Western modernity. Finally, thanks to the open-mindedness and the pragmatism of their rabbis, they spared themselves the two great responses of European Judaism to modernity — total assimilation or orthodox fundamentalism. Responses that undermined Ashkenazi Judaism from within and paved the way for the appearance of Zionism, a secular ideology of messianic essence which had also, and for the same reasons, the greatest difficulty implanting itself in the Sephardi milieu. One would have to await the creation of the State of Israel, the massive immigration of the Eastern Jews into this country, and their confrontation with Israeli modernity to witness the emergence, under the features of the SHAS party of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, of a Sephardi fundamentalism of the same fashioning as the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodox movement of East European origin.
Notes
H.H. Ben Sasson, “The generation of the Spanish Exiles on its Fate” (Hebrew), Zion XXVI (1961), pp. 47–48.↩︎
Consolations aux tribulations d’Israël, cited by Bernard Lewis, Juifs en terre d’Islam (1986), p. 160.↩︎
Cited by Heinrich Graetz, Histoire des Juifs, Paris (1894), Vol. IV, pp. 371–2.↩︎
L. Wolf, Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell, London (1906), p. 113.↩︎
Cited by Claude Martin, Les Israélites algériens et la France (1936), pp. 115–116.↩︎
Albert Memmi, L’homme dominé (1968), pp. 58–59.↩︎
Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris), France XIV F 25, 18.10.1898.↩︎
Ibid., Algérie II B1, 27 August 1911.↩︎
On this whole question, see Zvi Zohar, The Luminous Face of the East — Studies in the Legal and Religious Thought of Sephardic Rabbis in the Middle East (Hebrew), Tel Aviv, Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meouhad (2001).↩︎