Edirne: Its Jewish Community and Alliance Schools, 1867-1937 9781463225988

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Ederne

Analecta Isisiana: Ottoman and Turkish Studies

A co-publication with The Isis Press, Istanbul, the series consists of collections of thematic essays focused on specific themes of Ottoman and Turkish studies. These scholarly volumes address important issues throughout Turkish history, offering in a single volume the accumulated insights of a single author over a career of research on the subject.

Ederne

Its Jewish Community and Alliance Schools, 1867-1937

Eroi Haker

The Isis Press, Istanbul

gûr0Îa$ pre** 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2010 by The Isis Press, Istanbul Originally published in 2006 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of The Isis Press, Istanbul. 2010

ISBN 978-1-61719-145-9

Printed in the United States of America

Erol Haker (formerly Elio Adato) was born in Istanbul in 1930. The families of both his parents hail from Kirklareli. The Adatos of Kirklareli can be traced back five generations to the years of the turn of the 18th century. Erol Haker is a 1950 Exact Sciences graduate of Robert College (Istanbul). He holds a Graduate Diploma in Social Sciences from Stockholm University (1951), a B. Sc. Econ. from the London School of Economics, (1954) and a MBA from the Hebrew Unversity of Jerusalem (1964). He speaks Turkish, English, French, Spanish and Hebrew. Since 1956, Erol Haker has made Israel his home where he has spent most of his adult years. He has a forty-year career behind him as a Transport Economist and Planner and has spent about half of this time working in several developing countries, mostly for the World Bank, other international regional institutions, and bilateral aid giving agencies. Since his retirement in 1997, he spends much of his time researching his family history that of the Kirklareli community from which his parents hail, and other Thracian towns. He has published, two books: Once upon a time Jews lived in Kirklareli : The story of the Adato family, Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2003, and From Istanbul to Jerusalem, the Itinerary of a Young Turkish Jew, Istanbul: The Isis Press 2004. Erol Haker is married to Yael Aronson. They have three daughters and ten grandchildren.

to Yael, my wife

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 2: THE OTTOMAN REALM AND CITY BACKGROUNDS CHAPTER 3: THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF EDIRNE CHAPTER 4: SCHOOLING OPTIONS FOR JEWISH CHILDREN IN EDIRNE CHAPTER 5: THE TEACHING PROGRAM OF ALLIANCE SCHOOLS CHAPTER 6: SCHOOL MANAGEMENT CHAPTER 7: THE TEACHING STAFF CHAPTER 8: THE EARLY YEARS: 1867-1883 CHAPTER 9: THE BEST YEARS: 1884-1912 CHAPTER 10: THE ABSORPTION OF THE TALMUD TORAH SCHOOL CHAPTER 11: THE LAST PERIOD 1913-1937 CHAPTER 12: THE GIRLS SCHOOL , CHAPTER 13: SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT EVOLUTION 1883-1923 CHAPTER 14 : CONCLUSIONS

163 173

Annex 1 Incomes and What Money Could Buy 1870-1910 Annex 2 Samuel Loupo Annex 3 Reporting Requirements to "Paris" Annex 4 Alice Gueron Annex 5 Moise Mitrani Annex 6 Estimate of Turkish Jews immigrating to France Bibliography Illustrations

180 185 194 196 201 206 207 108

Abbreviations AIU Alliance Israélite Universelle AAIU Archives Alliance Israélite Universelle ENIO Ecole Normale Israelite Universelle ff French Franc RE Série de Registration d'Ecole OGL Ottoman Golden Lira NLI National and Hebrew University of Israel TTP Talmud Torah Public School

9 15 23 49 57 67 87 99 113 131 141 151

1 INTRODUCTION The Alliance Israélite Universelle (henceforward the Alliance) was founded in 1860 to pursue the following objectives: 1 a. To work everywhere for the emancipation of Jews. b. To help those who suffer as Jews. c. To encourage publications to achieve these results. Particularly during the last two decades of the 19th century, and the first decade of the 20 th the Alliance provided assistance to Jews who suffered as such. The Alliance provided this assistance in several ways that included the provision of considerable sums of money to provide financial support to Jews leaving the Russian Empire and Rumania to escape persecution to the point of even paying for their fares to enable them to immigrate to the United States. However, when measured against their resource requirements, both human and financial, the first objective was the number one long-term aim. The emphasis on the first stemmed from "the Alliance critique of traditional Jewish communities in the east [that] had three important features... it laid great stress on the need to reform the educational system to transform Jews to enlightened citizens... pointed to the need for Jews to be in productive trades... it criticized the rabbinate as backwards."2 To achieve this first objective, the Alliance planned a number of programs. It developed a vocational training program for young Jews to train them into skilled workers, and financed poverty alleviation programs, on the justified ground that poverty is a major cause of backwardness. With a similar objective in mind, the Alliance provided relief for disasters caused by wars and natural calamities such as large-scale conflagrations and floods. However, the most important instrument the Alliance developed to reach the long term objective of the emancipation of the "Jews of the East" was a schooling system for children of primary school age. This is a case study confined to an evaluation of the results the Alliance achieved in the primary schools it established in a particular community. The main reason for confining the evaluation this way and not to extend it to cover other programs Alliance financed to the same community is to avoid loosing 1 Leven 1, p. 69. ^Rodrigue 4, p. LIV.

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the focus on the Alliance's main thrust of its efforts to emancipate "the Jews of the East", which was to reform the primary school systems of the countries it operated in. Edirne was chosen as the Jewish community whose Alliance schools were to be studied.1 The choice was based on the following considerations: Edirne was the location where Alliance established one of its earliest schools. A boys' school started to operate there in 1867. The last Alliance school in Edirne, that was a mixed one, closed down in 1937. There is thus a record of seventy years of uninterrupted Alliance presence in the city, one of the longest for Alliance schools anywhere in the world. During most of these years, under Ottoman rule, the Jewish Community of Edirne and its schools operated in a politically, ethnically, and economically stable environment, with little interference on the part of the ruling authorities in community affairs. The Jewish Community of Edirne was one of the largest anywhere in the Ottoman Empire. An indicator of the importance of the city was the way it was perceived by the community of nations of the times. Eight among them kept consulates in it, comprising Russia, Austro-Hungary, France, England, Germany, the USA, Belgium and Greece. That the Alliance considered its Edirne schools as a major success story also played a role in the choice of the schools of which community evaluate 2 . This was done to guarantee that the community chosen whose schools were to be studied was not one where Alliance schools had underperformed (in the perception of the Alliance). The idea was to study the schools of a community showing the Alliance school system at its best. While not disputing that the Jewish public primary education system of Edirne was in need of reform at the time the Alliance came in, its Jewish community had a rich past both materially and culturally. At the time of the arrival of the Alliance past mid 19th century, the Jewish Community disposed of an impressive level of local government, sophisticated community institutions, public associations, and a developed welfare system. Again at the time of the arrival of the Alliance, Edirne boasted a limited but well visible circle of educated persons, and in particular a recently formed intelligentsia

1 Case studies on individual Alliance schools are hard to come by. During the course of this particular study, only five case studies could be identified compared to a peak of 183 schools the Alliance operated throughout the world in 1913. (Benbassa 1, Cohen 1, Dalwin, Haker 3, Rodrigue 3) There are no case studies on the Alliance schools of Edirne. The publications that comes the nearest to specifically covering Edirne schools is a book and an article by Professor Aron Rodrigue of Stanford University (Rodrigue 2, Rodrigue 4). In both of them, the space allocated to Edirne schools is perforce limited, as their subject matter is broader than the one of the present study. 2 Leven, 2, p. 65: "In Andrinople the success was fortunately very different..."

INTRODUCTION

11

that had started the work of waking up the Community from the deep intellectual slumber it had been in for two centuries. The evaluation attempts to provide answers to two principle questions. The first one is: how well the Alliance succeeded in applying the teaching program it designed to provide a primary education to the children of the community chosen for the case study? The second question is, how far the success the Alliance achieved served its first objective that can be transcribed into: "The regeneration of members of the backward Jewish communities of the East to make them deserving of enjoying the benefits of emancipation and full citizenship."1 Within the limits of a case study such as this one, the first question can be answered at two different levels: At the first level one can evaluate how well the Alliance succeeded in improving the primary education system of the particular community, and how large was the student population that benefited from this improvement. The second level of the evaluation could be directed towards finding out how well the Alliance did by comparison with the teaching program it had designed. Concerning the second question, of how far the success the Alliance achieved in its school program carried on into the regeneration process of the specific community, the Alliance schools were, of course, only one of the factors operating on the social, economic, and cultural life of the Jews of Edirne. Other factors include the influence of western powers in the Ottoman Empire, economic and industrial development, the trend towards secularization and the growth of nationalist movements. The Alliance schools of Edirne no doubt had a significant impact on the people they served. In Edirne, the Alliance was the first to introduce inside its Jewish community a primary schools that provided primary school education of a European standard of a mostly secular kind, the first to open a school for Jewish girls, and provide evening classes for adults with no previous education. 2 At the same time, the Alliance itself could not but be influenced by the environments that was surrounding it, comprising the Central Imperial Authority the socio economic structure of the township, and the Jewish Community of which it was a part. The present case study aims to identify how the developments in this environment component affected the strategic decisions the Alliance took, concerning the running of its schools and therefore the results it obtained from them. Between the three environments and the schools an interactive and mutual feedback process went on, that is worth identifying. At his point it is 1 2

Rodrigue 1, p. 17. Silberman, p. 204.

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sufficient to mention that in some significant respects, the two schools the Alliance opened in Edirne the first for boys in 1867 and the second for girls in 1870, were not the same schools that operated in 1922, the year of the formal demise of the Ottoman Empire, and even less so during the last fourteen years of their existence in the Turkish Republic established in 1923. To be able to understand these interactions it is necessary to describe the school environments, especially during the second half of the 19th century through 1912, which comprised the most productive years of the Alliance enterprise in Edirne. How representative is the experience the Alliance of Edirne schools of the totality of its 145 schools it operated in its peak year of 1909? The temptation to generalize is strong because all the communities in which it established schools, the Alliance lumped together, perhaps in a little cavalier fashion, as "the backward Jewish communities of the Orient". As it is well known the geographic spread of these communities was a very large one, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean of North Africa all the way to Iran in the East. A large degree of heterogeneity existed among them, in historic terms, their origins, cultural background, and among the ethnic cultural and religious identities of the nations in whose midst, they lived, the languages they spoke as their mother tongue and the political regimes whose subjects they were. Perhaps, the Edirne schools are relatively speaking more representative of those that were established within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire of 1877, in the Balkans and the provinces of Western Anatolia. What these communities had in common was their origin in Spain, the language they spoke, — a 15th century Castilian dialect laced with Hebrew and Turkish words and having lived in the multiethnic Balkans region for centuries, as subjects of the Ottoman Empire and under the benevolent rule it exercised towards them. However, even within the described degree of homogeneity there is quite some variety of background in the communities of the area, with the Bulgarian communities who in 1878, were the first to leave Ottoman rule with the establishment of the Kingdom of Bulgaria. They were followed by most of the Greek communities including the key one of Salonika that in 1912 became Greek, and a few that became Serbian. In all probability, the experience of Edirne is most relevant to those Jewish communities who stayed on with the Ottoman Empire until its demise in 1922 and later as citizens of the Turkish Republic established in 1923. The most important information source of the present study is the Alliance archives on Edirne at the Documentation Centre of the Alliance in Paris, (henceforward AAIU). An extra word on Alliance documents is needed

INTRODUCTION

13

to emphasize their richness and relative comprehensiveness, while at the same time highlighting the not unimportant gaps they contain. The files of AAIU comprise about 7,000 documents, as a rough number, on the Community of Edirne and its schools. The size of the documents range from half a page to 65 pages, the last mentioned one being a typed document from the pen of Alice Gueron, one of the directrices of the Girls School and her husband on the 1912/13 siege of Edirne. The bibliography contains a detailed statement of the specific Alliance folders that were looked into in the course of the present study. In the present text, more than five hundred of the documents they contain have been cited in the notes to this text. However, with the help of the existing documents, some not unimportant information gaps were identified. Data gaps vary to a considerable extent depending on the period of school history. In the period (1883-1912) data availability is at its maximum. Fortunately this happens to be the best years of the Alliance schools of Edirne, during which they functioned in a stable and generally friendly environment. Other information sources consulted are listed in the bibliography. Rifat Bali, an author of many books on the history of the Jewish Community of Turkey in the 20th century, Dr Eyal Ginio from the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Sinan Kuneralp the head of the Isis Press of Istanbul, Professor Aron Rodrigue, the Dean of the Faculty of History of Stanford University, and last but not least Yael Aronson my wife read earlier drafts and all made useful comments which I benefited from. I wish to express my gratitude to the Alliance Documentation Center of Paris and the Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of the Jewish Communities of the East in Jerusalem, in particular to Jean-Claude Kuperminc and Laurent Zimmern of the first, and Dov Hacohen and David Shukrun of the second, for the effective assistance they provided me in identifying and reaching the information sources I needed. Lastly, my word of thanks goes to the staff of the Isis Press that produced this book, with much exactitute and diligence and dedication.

2 THE OTTOMAN REALM AND CITY BACKGROUNDS

At the Central Imperial Authority Level: The Alliance arrived in Edirne at the mid point of a forty-year period between 1839 and 1877 in the history of the Ottoman Empire during which a major effort was in progress that aimed at reform in all fields. The process had started with the declaration of the Tanzimat (reformation), November 3, 1839, in the form of a Hatt-iHumayun (Royal Edict). What was special about the declaration was that for the first time in the long history of the Empire, the Ottoman Imperial Authority formally declared its intention to award rights to its subjects, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, in defense of their lives and property. 1 At times it looked as if the reformers were making significant headway with the peak being reached in 1876, when Abdulhamit II, the young Sultan agreed to the establishment of a democratically elected parliament for the first time in the history of the Empire, in whose election members of all its Millets participated. However, this parliament did not last for more than three months, and using the pretext of the Russian War, which had started in 1877, the Sultan abolished it, and imposed a form of rule that was no less retrograde than the one before the Tanzimat had been declared. Practically all the progress that was made during previous decades to liberalize the regime and the progress made in all fields of human activity came to a stop, with the exception of education in which progress continued though within certain bounds (See further in this Chapter). In 1908, a new ray of hope appeared as Abdulhamit II was dethroned, and a constitutional monarchy was declared that would rule the country by appointing a government that would enjoy the confidence of a freely elected parliament. Every male, who paid a minimum amount of tax to the Imperial Authority could vote in the elections no matter what his religious or ethnic identity was, and for the first time in the history of the Empire, full freedom of the press came into being. However, before these gains could be consolidated, it was the turn of the First Balkan War to break out in 1913, ending in disaster.

^Ortayh, Pp 11-16, pp 118,123.

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Following the end of the war, a Junta mostly consisting of army officers staged a coup d'état in 1913 and took over the ruling of the country, practically eliminating in the process the last vestiges of a constitutional monarchy and started building a new Muslim\Turkish uninational state, substituting the traditionally multi ethnic one. This new regime committed, excesses of oppression that exceeded those of its predecessors. The Junta brought the country into a much larger war one the side of the Central Alliance. As a result, it counted among its losers, and in the process brought to an end the life of the Empire that had lasted six hundred years. The Edirne City Background: Edirne is one of the few ancient cities of the World that have been continuously lived in for more than two millenniums. Evliya Çelebi, a well known Turkish traveler of the 17th century who in 1658 published a travel journal on his extensive journeys in the then vast territories under Ottoman rule, had the following to say on the importance of Edirne: "The largest towns [in the European provinces] of the Ottoman Realm, are in the following order: Istanbul, Edirne, Sofia, Belgrade, Budin (now Budapest), Saraybosna (Now Sarajevo), Selanik (now Salonika)..."1 Çelebi offered his reader a detailed description of Edirne, its mosques, centers of learning, its dervish lodges (tekkes), street system, public fountains (sebils), palaces, Kervansarays (in our times hotels or inns), institutions of religious learning (Medreses), market places, bridges, public baths, the produce of its immediate agricultural hinterland, and its industries.2 There is additional testimony on the importance of Edirne by a number of travelers to Edirne from European countries and in particular from two among them who visited the city during the late 16th and early 17th centuries (these were years when the Ottoman Empire was at its apogee) as follows: "From Philip du Fresne-Canay (1573): Edirne is the second city of the Ottoman Empire; it is large and a commercial center. Turks, Greeks and Jews inhabit it.3 From Simon the Pole (1608-1619): "The streets of Edirne are paved. For both beasts and humans it is possible to walk in its streets without getting wet. In the city there are guesthouses, large mosques built of stone, bathhouses, fountains and delicious waters. Caravans, in which even one

1 felebi, p. 123, the Turkish text runs as follows: "Memalik-i-Osmaniye de en biiytik §ehir su sira uzerindedir: Istanbul, Edirne, Sojya, Belgrat, Budin, Bosnasaray, Selanik..." 2 Celebi, pp. 108-124 ^Yurt Ansiklopedisi, p. 238.

THE O T T O M A N R E A L M A N D CITY B A C K G R O U N D S

17

thousand persons and their beasts of burden can be accommodated to rest, wash and eat well... There are several bridges in the city across wide rivers built of stone. The three rivers that cross the city bring to it blessing and abundance. Gardens and vineyards up to a walking distance of half a day surround the city." And yet, despite these impressive testimonies, the city had its seamy side as well. It is reported that at the end of the 17th 15000 persons, or about half of the city population, lived inside the city walls whose area totaled only 360,000 square meters. 1 This gives a population density of about 41,500 per square kilometer. Such a concentration of population cannot but indicate abject poverty and squalor that in our days would be perceived as an inhuman level. Despite the decline of the Ottoman Empire beginning with the 17th century, Edirne still continued to develop and prosper and its own decline started only at the end of the 19th century. At that point the city had grown in area several fold beyond its beginnings within the city walls.2 The population of Edirne Vilayet (province) at the turn of the 19th century counted about one million persons, comprising ten different ethnic or religious groups, with each one of them numbering at least 5000 persons, and other smaller ones. Together they constituted a true mosaic of ethnic groups. Beginning with 1858, the city of Edirne itself had a population of between about 70,000-100,000 depending on how its borders were defined. The two numerous ethnic groups among the city population were the Turkish and the Greeks and together represented a clear majority, although neither one of them enjoyed an absolute majority in the total city population. By the end of 1923, all the non-Muslim communities of the city, the Greeks, Armenians, and most of Bulgarians, had left it except the Jewish one. By 1927 the population of Edirne city was reduced to 37,000 including a Jewish minority of 6000. 3 As the Ottoman Empire expanded into Europe, the city became the location where all the transport arteries of the European provinces of the Empire in the Balkans, Hungary and further converged towards Istanbul, its capital and largest city. In this capacity Edirne retook its ancient role located on a major land transport corridor and prospered even more than it had done during mediaeval times. Edirne was a major location of silk, silk brocade, hosiery, leather, cotton yarn, and wool yarn industries. As far back as the beginning of the 19th century Edirne had become a major exporter of silk, in particular to England, ' Sari9aoglu, p. 16. ^ Eleniki Egsiklopedia, p. 641. •^Istanbul, Jewish Almanac 3, p. 154.

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and of wool, in particular to France. Located in the city was a factory that produced towels, carpets, others in which oil was extracted from cottonseed and sunflower, wax for polishing, and steam driven floor mills.1 Agricultural products grown in its area, like wine, cheese (kasseri in Greek, kasar in Turkish) were processed in Edirne on account of which it was famous. 2 The first signs on the decline of the economic importance of Edirne started to appear in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877/78. Until 1877, the Ottoman provinces of Europe, operated much like a free trade zone with a single currency based on a bimetallic gold-silver standard, and later only gold. Workers could move freely in quest for work in all the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Provincial administrations did not levy taxes on goods moving in and out of their territories. Upon establishing its independence in 1878, Bulgaria cut itself off economically from the Ottoman Empire, erected a customs barrier and enacted various other restrictive regulations. These steps led to economic dislocation and unemployment in the remaining European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, including of course Edirne.3 A second factor of no less importance causing the decline of Edirne, was the low customs duties, which European lenders imposed on the Ottoman Empire as a condition for rescheduling its debts to them, and loaning it new funds. A case in point was the decline in the local textile handicrafts and their reduced demand for cotton that hit the production of cotton as well.4 The major blow to the economy of Edirne came following the Balkan wars. With the new frontiers drawn between Greece, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, Edirne lost most of its economic hinterland that was transferred to Bulgarian and Greek sovereignty. Edirne then became an out of the way border town with poor economic prospects. Relations between the Ethnic Communities: It needs to be conceded that whether in the historic past or our present day, no multi ethnic society is free of friction between the various ethnic groups of which it is composed. Such friction had existed between the various millets constituting the Ottoman population and therefore in Edirne, and during its days of decline, could have assumed a sharper edge, in particular with the nationalist and irredentist movements ruling the day, like the Bulgarian one. However, even some such friction did exist, it did not get out of hand, and in fact there is a

'Yurt Ansiklopedisi p. 2378. ^ Eleniki Egsiklopedia, pp. 636-641. 3 AAIU, FRANCE-XVI-F, Bonfrado to Paris, Andrinople, 13 December 1883, Annual Report. 4 Issawi, pp. 2 3 3 , 2 5 4 , 2 7 9 , 313.

1882/83

THE OTTOMAN

REALM

AND

CITY

BACKGROUNDS

19

considerable amount of evidence on positive multi ethnic social intercourse and cooperation, as far as Edirne was concerned Trade relations brought the different religious and ethnic communities in frequent contact. Until 1912 at least, the various ethnic groups intermixed even as to their residences, with quarters exclusively lived in by a particular ethnic group being rare. 1 Alliance documents show quite a few instances of good community relations. A yearly occasion that brought together the senior representatives of the communities was the end-of-the-year school exams of the Alliance Schools. As it will be explained in further chapters, this was a yearly ritual devoid of any real education related content. Nevertheless, the senior members of the Armenian, Greek, and Bulgarian churches, of Ottoman Officialdom and Army were invited and they invariably came, except Bulgarian representatives, who rarely attended. The ethnic groups met on purely social occasions as well. Samuel Loupo who was one of the outstanding directors of the Alliance School for Boys mentioned in his correspondence with "Paris" two Annual "Cercle Israélite" balls, which Turkish, Greek, and Armenian notables attended. The balls were held n 1885, and 1893. They were organized for the profit of the city schools. Among Turkish participants were army officers, and officials, the senior staff of the economic entities of the city, and consular staff. "... There was dancing until six o'clock in the morning... "[!] 2 There is evidence that these balls were not mere instances. They continued to take place tens of years, as there is a reference to a similar one that was given in 1906. The ball was organized for the benefit of institutions of education in the city. In this year, the annual Cercle Israélite ball was held with Gentile invitees being mostly Turks and Armenians. It seems this tradition continued at least until 1912 when the Annual Ball was held on February 1912 under the auspices of the Vilayet Governor and the French consul.3 Another source of activity of a multi-ethnic content was theatrical performances. In 1887, a new theater called "Févaide' opened its doors to the public. Plays were preformed in Turkish, French, and in Ladino, some of which were translations of French classics. In 1887, six plays were preformed during the theater season. The plays were performed for full houses. Theatrical performances were also an occasion for multi ethnic mixing. 4 1 Eleniki Egsiklopedia, pp. 636-641. AAIU, TURQUIE IX-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, July 5,1885, February 4,1893. 3 La Boz de la Verdad, n. 193,16 January 1912. 4 AAIU, TURQUIE VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, March 13, 1887, , September 8, 1889, IXE, February 24, 1891, March 24, 1891, NLI, AIU, Monthly Report, N.3, March 1887, pp 43 Monthly Report, N.2, February 1885; p. 50. 2

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The Alliance itself was an important contributor in the development of a theater going tradition in Edirne, and in particular during the Purim holiday. Performances included French classics performed either in their original or in Ladino. 1 All the record of ethnic mixing so far described has a Jewish Community source. Were there records of other communities available, this list could most probably be expanded, as it is difficult to conceive that that no mutuality was involved. One of the earliest municipal councils established under the Tanzimat was in Edirne in the 1840's. "In Edirne the councils were active in generating local support for... state reforms [at Imperial Authority and Local Governments levels]... council members actively voted money for the construction of telegraph lines, public buildings, and schools... Infrastructure development led to inter communal cooperation. In Edirne 95% of all petitions coming out of the city council were signed by representatives of both its Muslim and non Muslim residents". 2 The Ottoman background to education: With education representing the main theme of this book, dwelling a little on the main events in the Ottoman Empire concerning education during the period the paper covers may be in order. The Hat-i-Humaytin (Royal Edict) that kicked-off the Tanzimat on November 3, 1839, did not mention education as one of the main fields in which a reform effort was required. However, soon after the declaration, reform edicts were published one after the other, and in addition, acts of reform came to pass in the field of education.3 In 1850 senior members of the Ministry of education prepared a blue print for the establishment of the Darulfunun (Istanbul University). In 1851 Enciimen-i-dani§ (The Commission to Further Education) was set up. In 1856 a further Royal edict was announced spelling out in detail the policy of the Imperial Authority on education reform. According to this policy all schools to be set up under the reform effort were to be open to all the children of Ottoman subjects, no matter what their religious allegiances were. During the same year Sultan Abdulaziz declared that providing an opportunity to study and to progress is a debt every Muslim owes to his children. In a regulation published in 1869 state run organizations were established in the principal provinces of the Empire to set up schools and to supervise them. Between 1847-1870, twelve new schools for boys were opened in Istanbul and in other provincial cities that while not neglecting religious 1 AAIU, RE-2, 15 January 1884, to Loupo, RE-3, 10 March 1884, 4 April 18, 9 April 1884 Rachel Behar, RE-25, 24 March 1887, to Loupo. 2 Ortayh, p. 165. 3 Tiirkiye Ansiklopedisi, pp. 4 6 4 , 4 6 9 , 4 7 9 , 4 7 0 , 4 7 2 , 4 8 0 , 481,494.

THE OTTOMAN REALM AND CITY B A C K G R O U N D S

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subjects mainly featured secular ones in their teaching programs. Four schools were opened for girl students, including one for the preparation of female teachers to teach them. The crowning achievement of this sub period ended with the promulgation of the first constitutional monarchy of 1876. Article 15 of the constitution stipulated that every Ottoman subject has the right to acquire either a state provided or a privately acquired education. According to Article 114, primary- education was to be made compulsory for the children of Ottoman subjects, and this provision would be anchored in specific legislation that was to be enacted. As mentioned earlier, with the abolition of the constitution by II Abdulhamit only three months after he ascended the throne, all further progress in reform came to a stop, in fact, all except one, namely education. Surprisingly enough, education reform continued during his rule, and even accelerated in execution terms, compared to the previous sub period in which the progress made was more declarative than actual. The last thing II Abdulhamit had in my mind was to develop the educational system of his Empire as a means to humanize and liberalize the thought processes of youth to become enlightened subjects. What concerned II Abdulhamit, was the use by foreign powers and neighboring countries of their educational facilities operating within the Ottoman Empire to wean away Ottoman youth from their Ottomanhood, and loyalties as such, as a means to dismember it. According to his perception, and justifiably so, these powers and countries were using the educational facilities they operated within the Ottoman Empire as a spearhead to achieve this aim.1 To counter this situation the Sultan applied two principal means. The first was to try control the operation of foreign schools under the declared aim of regulating the educational facilities of the country provided by all communities, religions, and foreign countries. In this he largely failed. "In keeping with the vision of the 1869 Educational Regulation, Article 129... stipulated for schools to be opened: (1) that that their teachers be in possession of certificates either from the Education Ministry or from the [provincial] administrations; (2) that... no lessons, contrary to custom, state policy and ideology will be taught in the schools... This regulation had been promulgated during the reign of Sultan Abdulaziz (r. 1861-76), ...[but] it was honored more in its breach than in its observance."2

1 2

Fortna, pp. 88-89. Fortna, pp. 91-92.

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The second means Sultan II Abdulhamit employed to counter the threat foreign schools represented in his perception, was to develop an Ottoman schooling system, which though largely borrowing elements of a western education model would still be one that would be imparting Ottoman culture and values to its students. He was careful not to endanger his repressive regime. The program of his schools would teach mostly mathematics, the physical sciences, biology, and statistics, while completely avoiding history, literature and philosophy courses as taught in the western world, and instead would teach the various aspects and disciplines of the Islamic religion.1 Having established his program he then went to work and during his 32 years reign established close to ten thousand schools across his Empire! 2 However, no matter what, the youth he educated in these new schools did not stop from plotting against him to overthrow his regime. This they achieved in 1908, the year in which the Second Constitutional Monarchy was declared. In this year major reforms were made in the Ottoman education system and all the subjects that were banned during the reign of Abdulhamit II were introduced to school curricula.

1 2

Fortna, pp. 108, Ttirk Ansiklopedisi, p. 473. Fortna, pp. 97-98.

3 THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF EDÌRNE CHAPTER 3: THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF EDIRNE Community history and population The first Jews, called "Romaniots" settled in Edirne immediately following its foundation by Hadrianus. They were refugees that came from Judea following the second abortive Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire led by Bar Kohbah that took place in AD 134.1 Beginning with the adoption of the Christian religion by the Roman Empire, the Jews of Edirne were subjected to severe persecution that continued across the whole length of Byzantine rule. With the conquest of Edirne by the Ottomans in 1362 a complete turnabout occurred in the attitude towards Jews by the new rulers of the city. In addition, having become the bustling capital of a burgeoning and rapidly growing empire, Edirne started attracting a steady trickle of European Jews to escape persecution, mainly from Hungary, France, Bavaria and Italy. 2 Also a growing number of Karaite Jews from Byzantium started moving into Edirne for similar reasons. 3 Immediately after conquering Byzantium in 1453, Sultan Mehmet II moved all Edirne Jews and Karaites to Istanbul because he wanted to build up the Jewish population of the city. Kanuni Sultan Suleyman did the opposite in 1526 by moving Jews from Budin to Edirne after he conquered Hungary. 4 In 1492 the Jews of Spain were expelled and Sultan Beyazit II opened the gates of the Empire to them; and they started coming in, in large numbers. Initially, the newcomers mostly settled in Salonika and in Istanbul, and from these two cities, they gradually spread into other cities and towns of the Empire, and the first among them was Edirne. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire came to a standstill in the 17th century and was followed by a process of decline throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Parallel to this general decline, another one occurred in the life of the Jewish community of Edirne as well, in ' Judaica, p. 566, Almanac Israelitit Salonika, Year 5683 (1923), p. 97 Benbassa & Rodrigue 1, pp. 4-5 3 Judaica, pp. 566, Almanac Israelitit Saloniko, Year 5683 (1923), p. 97 4 Benbassa & Rodrigue 1, p. 6. 2

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all its aspects. To some extent the decline was caused by conflagrations during the 18 th century that consumed large sections of the city, and recurring epidemics. In addition, the Kircali, who were a roaming band of outlaws that lived in the Rodop Mountains to the North of the city, raided Edirne a number of times in late 18th and early 19th centuries, to rob the city, and in particular, its non Muslim communities. However, the greatest blow to the Jewish Community of Edirne sustained in the history of this period was entirely self-inflicted, and occurred in the middle of the second half of the 17 th century. Shabtai Tsvi was the perpetrator of the blow. He was the last and most important false Messiah in Jewish history and a colorful one at that. 1 Initially the Ottoman Rulers observed his shenanigans and peripatetics with benign indifference mixed with mild amusement. However, by the first years of the 1660's Tsvi had succeeded in assembling around himself some 80,000 followers from among the Jews of the Spanish exile that had made the Ottoman Empire their home, and many more in European countries. Eventually, he started being referred to by his Jewish supporters as their "King" with heavy hints that he was destined to take over the rule of the Ottoman Empire! At some point, talk about the coming of the Messianic Kingdom in the immediate future alarmed the Ottoman authorities that decided that enough was enough, and on September 15 1666, they arrested Shabtai Tsvi in Edirne, and put him on trial for sedition. In the trial, Tsvi was given the choice of either facing execution or becoming a Muslim. He chose to become a Muslim, and as a result his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. However, he did not remain in jail for long as the ruling authorities treated him with exceptional leniency. He was awarded the title of "Kapiciba§i" (Chief Gate keeper of the [Sultans' palace]) with a handsome salary attached. This notwithstanding, the Shabtai Tsvi incident was a rather traumatic one for the Jewish psyche, and left it badly mauled.2 As part of its recuperation process from the Shabtai Tsvi trauma, the Edirne Community led by its Rabbinate, and followed by many others throughout the Ottoman Realm, decreed that in future there was to be no tinkering with Jewish religion no matter how obsolete some of its practices had become. Matters of education, thought process and the absorption of new knowledge went into deep freeze, as ossified practices in all aspects of life ruled the day. It was as if a dark age had descended on the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire and not the least in Edirne. 1 2

Haker 1, pp. 277-281 Benbassa & Rodrigue 1, pp. 58-59.

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The Community history from mid 19 th century to the eve of the Balkan Wars is the period of the greatest interest to the subject of this story. In this period, the Community seemed to have come back to life again, despite the fact that the vigilance exercised by the Rabbinate had not been relaxed. An intellectual awakening started to take place in the Jewish Community of Edirne. Newspapers and a number of periodicals, quarterlies, monthlies and others began to be published, containing research work and articles representing stands on issues of the day. According to a population census Ottoman authorities held, between 1506 and 1519, there were, in Edirne 231 Jewish households. 1 With each household representing an extended family of between ten or fifteen persons, the Jewish population of Edirne must have totaled between 2300-3500 persons during those years. A large part of this population was still of nonSpanish origin. However as the newly arrived Jewish population of the Spanish Exile continued to spread into the different provinces of the Ottoman Empire, including of course, into the Edirne Vilayet; by 1613, there were 553 Jewish households with a population of about 5000-7000. The new households were wholly made up of Jews of the Spanish Exile, by then a clear majority in the Community. The result was that the newcomers culturally swamped the non-Spanish exile members of the Community; these assimilated into the Hispanic culture and lost their former identities and languages. Beginning with 1613, the Community can by and large be identified as one of the Spanish Exile, which made its home in the Ottoman Empire. Jewish public life was organized around sub-communities, 13 in number each with its own synagogue. The first synagogue was the Poli Yashan, belonging to Romaniots Jews of Byzantine origin. There were two of European Ashkenazi Jew origin, namely Budun of Hungary set up by Jews whom Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent had expelled to Edirne from Budin, and the Ktigiik Alman or Ashkenazi belonging to Jews that immigrated from France and Germany over centuries. The remaining ten were the synagogues of communities of the Spanish exile, named after the town or region they hailed from, like Toledo, Cordova and Catalonia. 2 Between the years 1873 and 1912 the Alliance kept annual records on the Community population. According to this information, there were 12,000 Jews living in Edirne in 1873. Their numbers reached a peak of 20,000 in 1912 on the eve of the first Balkan War. In the Edirne Vilayet t h e r e were smaller Jewish communities in several of its small towns, £orlu (960), 1 2

Meshoulan, p. 367. AAIU, TURQUIE, IX-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, 6 May 1888,

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Silivri (1200), Kirklareli (1000), Tekirdag (3000), Gumiilcine (1200), Demotika (906), Dedeagaç (200), Uzunkôpru (253), Luleburgaz (350), Serez (2000) and in other still smaller communities. The data is for the year 1904.1 After the 1878 war, a two directional population movement could be observed in the Jewish Community of Edirne. On one hand each time a conflict arose between the Ottoman Empire and a neighboring state, Jewish refugees flocked into Ottoman territories. During the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877/78, in the small towns of the northern part of the Vilayet in present-day Bulgaria, their Bulgarian population subjected both their Turkish and Jewish communities to atrocities. Alliance Annual and Monthly reports of the years of 1877 and 1878 period are full of accounts describing these atrocities in their lurid detail. 2 The result was a stream of refugees that reached Edirne, 2000 Jews, from Kizanlik and Eski Zagora alone, and 10,000 Turks. 3 Most likely not many of them went back. In 1885, following the annexation of Eastern Rumelia by Bulgaria and the war that broke out between Serbia and Bulgaria during the same year, a second wave of Jewish refugees from Bulgaria hit Edirne, an additional 2000 in number. In the other direction, starting in the last decade of the 19 th century, an emigration movement could be observed out of the Jewish Community of Edirne and the smaller ones of the Edirne Vilayet like Kirklareli, Tekirdag, and Çorlu. 4 Between the years 1899-1912, about 8000 Ottoman Jews immigrated to the United States alone. 5 No numbers are available on emigration to other countries. There were two causes for this emigration, namely demographic and economic ones. On the demographic front there was a drastic fall in child mortality in the Jewish Community beginning with the turn of the century through improved hygienic and prophylactic practices, without an immediate compensation in terms of a similar decline in the birth rate, and this led to a population explosion. 6 The result was a wave of young Jews flooding labor markets in quest of work. These years were also a time when, in contrast with the population explosion, because of deteriorating economic conditions, in Edirne work opportunities were on the decline. Further more, although after the Second Balkan War Edirne returned to the Ottoman fold, the city did not go back to its former life. In fact it had now 1

AAIU, GRECE, II-E, Franco to "Paris", Demotika, September 21, 1904, Statistiques des Israélites de l'Empire Ottoman Actuel. 2 NLI, AIU, Monthly Reports N. 9, September 1877, pp. 132-139, N . l l , November 1877, pp. 209-239, N. 12, December 1877 pp. 230-239. 3 NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N.10, October 1877, p. 171. 4 La Boz de la Verdad, 2 September 1912, N.152. 5 Dumont, pp. 212-215. 6 Haker 1, p. 278.

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completely changed its character, economically speaking, as it is succinctly put in the Almanac of Salonika concerning the post Balkan Wars condition of the Edirne economy. "The economic situation in the Jewish community of Edirne is a lot less brilliant than it used to be before the Balkan War. As a result many became obligated to leave Edirne and look for their bread in other places." 1 Past 1913, immigration from Bulgaria into Edirne, and into other locations in the Ottoman Empire subsided as Bulgarian authorities substantially changed for the better their policies towards Bulgarian Jews. There was still some immigration into Edirne from Serbia 2 , and possibly from former Ottoman provinces which had now become part of Greece. However, beginning with 1913, Jewish emigration from Edirne accelerated. The emigration had a negative impact on the Community, in both qualitative and quantitative terms. The tax base of the Community was severely hurt just at a time when the financial needs of its institutions were rising, on account of welfare related expenses. On the eve of World War One, the Jewish Community had been reduced to about 10,000 persons. The emigration out of Edirne continued throughout the years of World War One, the Greek occupation, and through the first decade of the Turkish Republic. To economic worries others were added, like uncertainties about the future of the Ottoman State, which Jews had looked upon with much favor, and uncertainties about the political regime that was at the doorstep. Without emigration, and assuming a net birth rate of 2.5 % per annum between the years 1904-1920 and one of 1% per annum between 1920 and 1935, the Jewish population of Edirne would have reached 29,300 persons in 1935. By comparison, according to the results of the Second Population Census held in Turkey, in 1935 the town's Jewish population had declined to 6,000. 3 Some of the Edirne emigrants went only as far away as Istanbul to settle, but most went to the countries of the "New World", and among them USA. Of course, the spoken language in the USA was English, and the customs in the country were very different than those of the Jews of the Spanish exile. However, the USA was perceived by immigrants from all the 1

Almanac Israelii Saloniko 5683 (1923), p. 106. La Boz de la Verdad, N° 22, 12 March 1914. The demographic trend in the Jewish Community of Edirne was a reflection of a broader one for Turkey as a whole. In 1904 the Jewish population of all the communities living within the present borders of the Turkish Republic totaled 144,800, and would have reached 249,500 in 1935 without emigration. The Second 1935 National Population Census of 1935, showed the figure of 79,000 as the number of Jews that lived in Turkey in that year. The difference between the two, namely 170,500 is the number of Jews that emigrated from the territory of the Turkish Republic in the 31 years between 1904 and 1935, inclusive of their children born outside Turkey, less those among them that died outside Turkey during the same time period. 2

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world as a free country offering unrestricted economic opportunities to immigrants, and not only ex-Spanish Jews thought that, but practically all the nations of the World and in particular the European ones. The largest number of Jewish emigrants still preferred to emigrate to the countries of Latin America, and in particular Cuba, Venezuela and Panama that had less democratic regimes compared to the one that existed in the USA, and offered less work opportunities to new immigrants. But with Ladino as their mother tongue and the similarities in their culture they had fewer problems at integration into them. Jews of the Spanish Exile avoided immigrating to European countries in significant numbers, as these were countries that did not welcome immigration the languages spoken in them were foreign to their ears and so were their customs. France was the only European country that attracted significant numbers of ex-Spanish Jewish immigrants from Turkey and other Balkan countries (Annex 6).

Making a Living Until the middle of the 19th century, there is little information on how Jews made their living in Edirne. During these earlier times, "The migration process of the Sephardic Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsions from the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere created a Sephardi Diaspora that by its very nature established far-flung commercial networks along the Mediterranean. Sephardi Jews settling in Edirne benefited from this network not less than those living in larger communities such as Salonika and Istanbul. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Jewish Community of Edirne was part of a Jewish textile industry network that stretched all the way to Salonika where it was centered. By 1540, the Jewish communities of the Balkans including Edirne together manufactured over 60,000 rolls of cloth every year.1 Also "during the 16 th and 17 th centuries many foreign merchants mainly French ones lived in Edirne each with a large turnover mostly accounted for by the import of wool. Jewish craftsmen that produced woolen tissues bought the imported wool." 2 This kind of productive economic activity declined in the Jewish Community of Edirne as it did in other large communities of the Ottoman Empire, as they lost ground to competition from members of the Greek and Armenian communities. By the end of the 17th century Jewish economic activity was reduced to money lending and 1 2

Benbassa&Rodrigue 1, p. 39. Gerberp. 37.

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craftsmanship. The best estimate for the total breadwinners in Edirne at the turn of the 19th century is about 3500, mostly consisting of males. The Community income distribution curve must have been very skewed towards high-income groups. They included not more than tens of exceedingly rich persons, among them moneylenders who as a group were second only to those in Istanbul. 1 A middle to lower middle class existed, probably not exceeding a few hundreds, consisting of a few physicians, lawyers, teachers, a small number of better paid rabbis, pharmacists, salaried persons that worked in banks, the railways, insurance companies and others, a few medium sized store owners doing retail business like textiles stores and haberdashers. The next employment group consisted of skilled workers and craftsmen on whom detailed information is available for the year 1900 adding up to 657 employed persons. 2 In this information the group was classified into 40 categories. The largest categories among them were tailors, construction workers, ironmongers, sheep shearers, makers of pastry and jams, cheese, and shoemakers. One interesting feature of the community economy was the existence of an organized trade union of Jewish workers, although it functioned more like a guild. 3 The monthly earnings of this group were estimated as in the 1.00-6.40 Ottoman Gold Liras (henceforward OGL) range, and a weighted average of OGL 3.00 for a sample among them numbering 462. The remaining so-called "breadwinners" totaling about 2000, or slightly more than one half of the total, did not hold regular employment, and when they did, it was mostly ambulatory work, domestic work, and other unskilled occupations. Many among them were chronically unemployed. This group comprised bone-poor persons whose children went around barefooted most of the year, and at best had a single hot meal a day and often not even that. These persons had incomes of less than one OGL a month. 4 As an example on the living conditions of this group, one of the numerous rabbis of the city can be mentioned, who lived with his wife, their children, and the family of his married son, in a slum tenement of three by four meters, with a

1

Koksal, p. 181. AAIU, TURQUIE, X-E, Loupo to" Paris", Andrinople, 12 January 1900, Benbassa and Rodrigue 2. 2

3

AAIU, TURQUIE, IX-E, Loupo to "Paris", April 30, 1897, X-E, Andrinople, September 12 1901 4 AAIU, TURQUIE ... Halevi to Paris Rodosto (Today Tekirdag), 22 July 1907, Annual Report 1906/07. A porter in the port of the town made about two meteliks a day for a few hours of work which generated for him about half an OGL a month, and in a lucky month a little above that.

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single room, at once a bedroom, kitchen and washroom. 1 Additional examples of heart-rending descriptions of such persons appear in Alliance documents (Chapter 9). Just to assure their physical survival, these needed to be supplied with considerable doses of welfare assistance, and it was fortunate that the community rich were forthcoming in this respect. 2

Community Institutions and Associations The Rabbinate: The most appropriate way to start off this section is with the Rabbinate. Until about the middle of the 19 th century Sultans did not appoint in a formal sense a Chief Rabbi for the whole of the Jewish Community of the Ottoman Empire. In the case of the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul, the Sultan did see in him, informally, the representative of the Istanbul community and, in addition, the head of all the Jews that lived in the Ottoman Empire, but without according him specific, formal authority, responsibilities, and rights, though at times, and in informal fashion treated him as if he had some; however, the Sultan could alter or altogether withdraw this treatment at his pleasure. 3 In such a situation each community elected its own Chief Rabbi and so did the Edirne Community. In fact, between 1722 and 1902 there were two of them that officiated simultaneously with one representing seven of the thirteen sub-communities and the second the remaining six. 4 Just like in Istanbul, the provincial Governors informally recognized the Chief Rabbis of the province as the heads of their communities but not more than that. Their election by the Jewish community was only a formality as there were two ruling rabbinical dynasties, the first the Gueron, and the second the Behmoiras from whose rank the Chief Rabbis always came. With the contraction of the Community in numbers and influence, and the moving of Chief Rabbi Bejerano to Istanbul in 1915, no more Chief Rabbis were elected in Edirne. 5 Despite their lack of formal authority, during most of the Ottoman centuries, Chief Rabbis played a dominant role in shaping the affairs of their communities. This was because all community members observed religion and most believed in its written word. The theocentric quality of the Jewish religion is such, that no detail of living, even the minutest and most trivial, lacks a religious rule attached to it in the way it is to be lived. The Torah 1

Dumont, p. 211. Almanac Israelii Salonika 5683 (1923), pp. 98-99. 3 Hacker, pp. 225-262. 4 Leven 2, p. 66, AAIU, TURQUIE, IX-E, Loupo to Paris, Andrinople, 6 May 1888. 5 Benbassa 1, p. 226. 2

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contains no less than 613 doe's and don'ts injunctions each one of which can have several divisions and subdivisions. In a world of this kind a distinction between what is secular and what is religious has no meaning. Against any one committing transgressions, the Chief Rabbi had a powerful instrument at his disposal called herem. Literally translated it means boycott. Community members would ostracize a person who was subjected to such punishment. He would not be admitted to a synagogue. No one except possibly close members of his family would socialize with him, and worst of all he could not earn a living, as no one would buy his products and services, or employ him. Enforcing a herem was not difficult in a society where every one was religiously observant, and as such there was no need to make use of this sanction frequently. In such a society the threat of a herem was sufficient to cause strict religious observance to a Chief Rabbi's ruling. Eventually the Rabbinate lost its grip on the Community as secularization proceeded apace. The turning point occurred when the Rabbinate crossed the Rubicon of surrendering the primary school system to the cares of the Alliance (Chapter 10). Yet, despite this change in attitude, the Rabbinate continued to closely watch the goings on in the community and its institutions to make sure that no infringements of religious rules occurred under their roofs. However, this was a lost battle as religion gradually lost its grip on most aspects of living. The Alliance establishment of Edirne itself had no problems about making inventions in the Jewish religion without asking and receiving rabbinical concurrence. For example, the daily prayer the Alliance students of the Girls School were expected to say (in perfect French of course) when they woke up in the morning was: "My God, I thank you for guarding me during this night. Guard me throughout the day. Thank you Miss [I]". 1 A n y resemblance between the text of this prayer and the one traditionally said on the occasion is purely coincidental, especially the "Thank you Miss" part. Following the Tanzimat, in 1839, the Imperial Authority officially recognized non-Muslim communities of the Empire as individual Millets and granted them rights to govern themselves in local autonomy terms. 2 The Community established, for the first time in its history, a council (Meclis-iCismani) to run the affairs of the community. During the first years of the 20 t h century the Community Council of the Edirne Jewish Community was composed of 36 members. The males of the community above a certain age * Fortunee Afnat, D'Andrinople a Paris, Paix et Droit, April 1995, No. 10 pp 4. The original prayer inscribed in the Shulhan Aruh and daily said by practicing Jews in Hebrew is the following: "I stand before thee and thank thee Oh King Alive and, Existing for having restored to me my soul, and my breathing in compassion and my faith in thou". 2 Koksal, p. 177.

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that held regular employment, elected thirty-three of them. The remaining three were rabbis, including of course, the Chief Rabbi. An Executive Council of seven members elected by the Community Council ran its daily affairs. There were no political parties in the Community Council, but essentially only family groupings. In addition to his being a member of the Jewish Community Council, the Chief Rabbi was appointed in an ex-officio capacity to the Municipal Council of the city and was formally recognized as the head of the Jewish Community that lived in Edirne. In this capacity he had the authority to countersign all the decisions of the Municipal Council on subjects that were of common interest to the different Millets that made up the city population, for example infrastructure projects, their location and scope. 1 The Community central budget covered the expenses of the Rabbinate and the religious services it provided, such as marriages and funerals, a limited number of welfare expenses those of the Council itself and until 1891/92 it paid for the deficit of the Community supported Talmud Torah School (Henceforward, the TTP). To meet these obligations, by a special ferman issued in 1783, the Community was authorized to collect an indirect tax (the Gabelle) on kosher meat and some other products that became the most important revenue source in the Community budget. Information on Community revenues from taxes and how they were spent is spotty, and confined to 1885 and 1901. 2 However, limited as this information may be, it is sufficient for an evaluation of how important Alliance financial assistance was to the community to meet the expenses of future reform of the public education system. In 1885, the Community budget totaled ff 25,000, (about OGL 1170, or about US$ 179,000 of our times). The numbers for 1901 are, respectively, ff 35,000 (OGL 1605, and about US$ 250,000). Beginning with the school year 1892/93, the expenses of the three Community schools, the TTP and the two Alliance Schools, were financed under separate budgets. This became the single most important item the Community financed outside the central budget and it had reached a total of ff 9600 for the two boys schools, the one of the Alliance and the TTP out of a total of ff 42,000. Concerning Vocational Training, under a separate budget the Alliance participated in the financing of a vocational training program to an amount of ff 3960. The Community's participation is not known.

1 2

Koksal, from our meeting on 16 December 2004. AAIU, TURQUIE, VIII-E Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, August 9, 1885, X-E, June 5, 1901.

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For Community expenditures covering the bulk of the programs of different welfare organizations there is only a single one for which information is available, namely, the "Bikur Holim" that financed the medical expenses of the poor. Its annual expenditure in 1911 came to ff 16,500 two thirds of which was locally raised.1 In addition to the Gabelle tax, the Community Council was obligated to collect the Poll Tax (Harag), which members of non-Muslim millets were required to pay to the State. The Community Council nominated a commission that was in charge of establishing the amounts each person was required to pay. Concerning this tax burden, La Boz de la Verdad reported that the working male population of about 3500 was divided into three groups, the rich that as mentioned earlier probably did not exceed a few tens, the middle class probably around 500 or so, and the poor about 3000. The poor were exempt from the tax. 2 The newspaper reported that 1911 was a year of crisis when a large number of the obligated paid the Harag tax that was levied on them, though only under protest, while quite a few among them just refused to pay. The Community had limited means of enforcement of its own and was not happy about having to go to the State Authorities to report the delinquents. The tax rates paid by taxpayers in Edirne were higher than those Salonika taxpayers paid. The newspaper explained to its public why this was so was because the community of Salonika owned considerable amounts of revenue producing property whose income was used to pay for a proportion of the taxes owed to the State. The tax burden of the Salonika community was reported as OGL 1-10 for its middle class members and the highest tax recorded for members of the rich class was OGL 85. The article ended by exhorting the rich of Edirne to be a little more generous than they were to avoid trouble with the State Authorities. A poll tax that is graduated according to income sizes has the flavor of a progressive income tax, which hardly existed anywhere in the world at the time. Hypothetically assuming that in Edirne 30 persons were liable to pay an average of OGL 30, and 300 others one of OGL 4 per person, a total of OGL 2100 is arrived representing the annual Community tax payments to the State. The amount is equivalent to about ff 46,000, corresponding to about what its schools were costing the Community tax payer during 1910/11. The conclusion is that the Jewish Community of Edirne was not a lightly taxed community. The magnitude of these expenditures shows that without the assistance of the Alliance, there was no one around who could 1 2

La Boz de la Verdad, N° 183, 11 December, 1911. La Boz de la Verdad, N° 18, 7 December, 1911.

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fully meet the cost of education reform. This condition must have been an important consideration that led to the decision of the community and its Rabbinate to acquiesce to turning over of its public primary school system to the care of the Alliance (Chapter 10). During the second half of the 19 th century and the first decade of the 20 t h , many associations were established and flourished. In each such association three main activity types merged with varying emphasis in any one of them. They were welfare, social life, and intellectual or ideology related activity. El Circlo Israelite: It was founded in 1859. Its main objective was to encourage the formation of welfare institutions and the development of Community related projects. The Edirne Jewish elite patronized it. It had 150 members including high-ranking Jewish civil servants in the Ottoman Administration stationed in Edirne. The Association raised funds for the Community schools and other organizations. It provided financial assistance to locally recruited teachers, and to poor students, who applied as candidates to the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale (Henceforward ENIO), where the Alliance trained its teachers. 1 The association organized lectures, theater performances, and balls; it had a well-stocked library of about one thousand books in Hebrew, Ladino and French. 2 "£7 Circlo Israelite" fulfilled a coordinator's function on behalf of the Community on welfare related subjects and acted when requested by Community members as an instance of appeal on behalf of parties who had grievances against the Community Council and the Chief Rabbinate. La Boz de la Verdad reported a meeting chaired by a member of the institution that took place sometime during the last week of December 1911.The following statement appears in the newspaper. The delegates and associations appearing below assembled in the locale of the Circlo Israelite in order to examine the means required to make the cases of discontent that appear to exist in some parts of the population against the ruling Community Council and the Grand Rabbinate. This is to be done after hearing out the grievances of the delegates and the replies received from the Community Council on them... 3

It appears from the quotation that such meetings took place regularly. This is attested by the election of the new members of what sounded like an executive committee that managed the current business of the association. 1 AAIU, FRANCE, XVI-F, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, July 12, 1922, Annual Report 1921/22. The report confirms the assistance the association extended to needy students. 2 Almanac Saloniko, p. 103, (According to Benbassa 3, it was established in 1879). 3 La Boz de la Verdad, N.187,25 December, 1911 issue.

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The Bnei Brit club: It was established in 1911. It had a membership of about 40 notables. The club was active in giving relief to small businesses that suffered as a result of wars. It founded and patronized an orphanage, and as a channel for the transfer of donations to it.1 El Circlo de la Fraternidad Skolar also known as L'Association des Anciens Elèves d'Andrinople: The Circle of Scholarly Fraternity, also known as. The Association of the Students of Edirne) This association was established in 1902. The initial membership counted 110 persons. It consisted of graduates from Alliance schools. Its objective was to assist them in their post school intellectual development. It organized lectures and participated in welfare activities. This organization also had a well-stocked library.2 El Bnei Leon (The society of Young Lions): This association was supported by an organization called "Los Mansevos del Moviemento Nasyonal" (the National Movement of Youth). This was a club for young adults in the 20-25 year old group. Its main purpose was to spread the study of the Hebrew language and maintain ties with Zionist organizations such as the Keren Kayemet and Keren Haye sod? The Hevrat Dorshei Haskalah or Sociedad de la Progresistas (The Claimers of Education and the Progressive Society): "Avraham Danon established this society in 1879 whose aim was to spread the ideas of the Haskalah [Enlightment] ... By [1889] the society numbered about 200 members, had established a reading room and subscribed to Hebrew newspapers such as Hamagid as well, in Ladino. The society sponsored lectures on history, geography, science and literature, and the teaching the history of the Jewish people." 4 The Hevrat Hapoalim: (Workers' Corporation): Avraham Danon established this corporation in 1883. It was composed of artisans and craftsmen of all kind, typically tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, tinsmiths, carriage repairers, installers and repairers of stoves, painters, whitewashers, blacksmiths, makers of lockers and safes. The objective of this organization was to represent the interests of the Jewish artisans of Edirne in their relations with Municipal and Government authorities, and be of financial assistance to retired artisans. The corporation sponsored a training program, which was eventually taken up by the Alliance to finance it. A mutation of this entity was established in 1909 that sponsored activities associated with leisure: 1

Almanac Saloniko, p. 100, AAIU FRANCE XVI-F, Mitrani, Andrinople, July 6 1921 Annual Report for 1920/1921. 2 Almanac Saloniko, pp. 104-105, according to Benbassa 3, pp. 298-300, it was the successor of "Le Cercle de Bienfaisance" founded in 1890. ^Benbassa 4 4 Rodrigue 4

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"... with ad hoc lectures... theatrical performances... the setting up of libraries... these associations... continued the development a frame of reference on how to spend leisure in a secular and westernized context".1 Zionist Associations: The oldest Zionist association on record is the "Macabbi", established sometime between 1898, the year of the first Zionist Congress, and 1908 the year of the declaration of the Ottoman constitutional monarchy. Surprisingly enough it was the Alliance teacher at the Boys' School who taught physical exercise that headed the Association. The Association regularly met on Saturdays to hear lectures on Zionism.2 During the years of the occupation, following the end of World War One in 1918, Zionist associations surfaced to the open. Moise Mitrani reported in 1921 the existence of four in Edirne, and their names: Shivat Tsiyon (The return to Zion), Bnot Tsiyon (Daughters of Zion), Tseirey Tsiyon (The Youth of Zion), and Bnei Tsiyon (The sons of Zion). They organized conferences, literature reading evenings and balls. The Keren Kayemet supported them. 3 The most important among them was the Shivat Tsiyon. All the notables of the Community supported it; and it spread to the smaller communities of the Vilayet.4 Beginning with 1923 they had to go back underground, as the newly established Turkish Republic did not tolerate Zionist activity and gradually most of them closed down.

The Jewish Intelligentsia of Edirne "Most of the Spanish exiles that settled in the Ottoman Empire congregated in large numbers in relatively few centers, bringing together scholars who in the Iberian Peninsula would have been scattered in many localities. Istanbul, Salonika, Edirne, and later Izmir emerged as the sites of a rich intellectual and cultural life... this was a period, in which Ottoman culture flourished and reached its apogee. Under the liberal disposition the Ottoman State showed towards Jews, Edirne became a center of a blossoming Jewish intellectual life." 5 A few of the achievements and leading figures of

1 Benbassa 3 2¡m Verdad', issues 24 August, 7 September, 28 September, 26 October 1951. The author of the articles was Yomtov Alkabes

3 AAIU, FRANCE XVI-F, Mitrani, to "Paris", Andrinople, July 6 1921 Annual Report 1920/1921

4 Benbassa & Rodrigue 2, p. 226. Benbassa & Rodrigue 1, p. 49.

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Jewish cultural history during the 16th century and the first half of thel7 t h appear in the note. 1 "In the 16 th century Jewish immigrants, including many scholars trained in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian universities brought with them their libraries and introduced printing presses that turned out books in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew; and professionals who cast cannon, established banks, carried out international trade, served as royal physicians, and occasionally as ambassadors." 2 The first Hebrew press in the Ottoman Empire was established in Istanbul in 1493 and was followed by the presses in Salonika in 1510, in Edirne in 1554, and in Izmir in 1646. The Ottoman Levant emerged as a major center for Jewish publishing, printing a multitude of works composed by Jews outside the Ottoman Empire. As a point of reference in time, Gutenberg invented the first press in Germany in 1444. In Edirne, the printing press did not last long and managed to print only three books and eight pages of a fourth. By comparison, the one established in Istanbul, printed 780 books by 1863, the one in Salonika, printed about 1000 books, and the one in Izmir printed 170 books by the same year.3 "The Torah academies in Salonika, Edirne, Istanbul, Tsfat and Jerusalem provided the institutional setting in which sages could discuss and debate the wide range of issues deeply embedded in the various layers of rabbinical culture.. ." 4

Hekim Yakub, became the personal physician of Sultan Mehmet II, the Conqueror, when Edirne was still the capital of the Ottoman Empire. In addition to his professional function, he made available to the Ottoman court his extensive diplomatic network. With the conquest of Byzantium, he settled in it and became a member of the Sultans' court. Reuven Aftalion, one of the leading poets of Hispanic Jews lived in Edirne during the fifteenth century. Salamon Ibn Verga who lived in Edirne during the second half of the 15th century and the first quarter of the 1 6 , was a Rabbi, Dayan (judge), and historian, who became widely known for his history on the persecution of Jews in Christian countries. (Judaica, Volume 8, pp. 1203-04). Joseph Caro came to Edirne from Toledo as a young person and wrote there most of his book Beit Yoseph (The house of Joseph) in which he codified Jewish Rabbinical Law in all its intricacies and practice across centuries. He left Edirne to settle in Tsfat in the Galilee province where he published the first volume of the book. He wrote additional books on Jewish religion. The best-known book among his books Shulhan Aruh (The Set Table), which is a simplified summary version of Beit Yosef, was adopted by all the Jews of the world as the most authoritative statement on the practice of Jewish law and to this day remains so for Orthodox Jewish communities all over the world (Ibid, Volume 5, p. 194). Edirne was a center of Jewish music. A coral society, (maftirim) was founded in Edirne in the 17th century. The society succeeded in making the city become a center for hymn writers. The best known among them was Aron Isaac Hamon known as Yahudi Hamon, in Turkish musical circles. Hamon composed Turkish music after the style of the Dervish brotherhoods, though still retaining Iberian themes in his compositions, and this makes him unique (Ibid, Volume 7 DD 1250-51). Issawil,p. 68. Hacker 2, Benbassa & Rodrigue, p. 50. 4 Benbassa & Rodrigue 1, p. 51.

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From mid 17th through mid 19th century characterized earlier as a dark age, there are few documents on the religious, public and intellectual life of the Community. However, even during these centuries, Edirne was an important center of rabbinical law whose writ covered the Jewish communities of Edirne Vilayet and beyond. The documents containing the verdicts and rulings of the Edirne court did not survive. However, some of them that were often quoted in the rabbinical courts in other locations in the Ottoman Empire survived in their archives and publications.1 Nevertheless, no matter how many documents are missing, there is no doubt that during these centuries, the Jewish Community had fallen behind, on all conceivable fronts, in both absolute terms and by comparison with other ethnic groups. In mid 19th century an intelligentsia appeared on the scene, consisting of a small group of educated persons that aimed at extricating the Jewish religion and its associated way of life out of the rut it had got itself into. The Haskalah movement that was doing the same thing on a European scale was their inspiration source, but the one located in Edirne was more nationally oriented, as expressed in their support for the revival of Hebrew as a living language, for day-to-day use, and to express thinking not always associated with religion. "One of the earliest on record was Yehuda Nehama, [who] wrote in Hebrew and Ladino, producing biographies, poetry, and history. He corresponded with other maskilim in Europe, and... created a newspaper in Judeo Spanish El Lunar (1865/66) which aimed to educate people...."2. After him, the two leading lights among those who were active during the third quarter of the 19 th century were Joseph Halevi and Baruch Mitrani. A generation further Avraham Danon appeared. Joseph Halevy: a maskil (member of the Haskalah) who was a leading force behind the movement for a new school. Halevi was a Hungarian Jew who made Edirne his home for some years. He started his public life in Edirne in 1856. "Halevy became the director of the Talmud Torah of the Portuguese congregation of the town... He slowly began to introduce reforms at his school, teaching Hebrew Grammar systematically, and introducing the teaching of French. A group of reformers coalesced around him and managed to bring about the fusion of many meldarim [Traditional Jewish primary Schools] into one big Talmud Torah with Halevi as Director. 1 Haker 1, pp. 22, 277; for example two of the verdicts from the 1660-1680 1740-1780 periods have survived, the first in a 19th century Salonika publication and the second in a publication by Israeli scholars on Rabbinical law. 2 Benbassa&Rodrigue 1, p. 106.

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[The school] sowed the seeds of the Haskalah and the revival of Hebrew in Edirne...Opposition [in the Community] soon made itself manifest [to his attempts at reform], especially, to the teaching of French and to Halevi's Haskalah ideas. [The opposition] proved to be too strong to overcome and he had to leave Edirne. His experiment lasted five years.. ." 1 Joseph Halevy was one of the signatories of the Community petition to the Alliance to establish a boys' school in Edirne.2 Baruh Mitrani: "... This student of Halevi in Edirne, was passionately concerned with the revival of the Hebrew language as a living medium... combining religious messianic and moderate Haskalah ideas into an ideology which prefigured many of the elements of religious Zionism..." 3 . "Baruh Mitrani fought for modern methods of education, founded a school for this purpose in Edirne, Akedat Yitzhak (The Sacrifice of Yitzhak) and devoted many years of his life to teaching. He wrote books on education in Hebrew and a grammar of spoken Judeo Spanish, contributed to Hebrew periodicals such as Hamagid (1856-1913) and Havatselet (1863-1914) published in Istanbul... arguing for colonization in Palestine, and national rebirth. He also wrote poetry".4 Avraham Danon: A later figure, to which the title of "Giant" can be rightfully attributed, is Avraham Danon. "He was born in 1857 and belonged to an important rabbinical family of Edirne. Avraham Danon began his public life in 1878; a year after he had established the Hevrat Dorshei Haskalah referred to earlier... Avraham Danon translated the poems of Virgil, Hugo, and Saadi... and also Jewish Historian Reinach's Histoire des Juifs into Hebrew and published this version with extra additions by himself under the title of Toldot Bnei Avraham (A history of the Sons of Abraham, Pressburg 1897). He distinguished himself as an Orientalist. Many of his works on the folklore of the Jews of the Spanish exile were published in La Revue des Etudes Juives. Also, he published in Hebrew a history of the Jews of the Spanish exile. He was one of the most distinguished figures of Oriental Jewry, in his way of life and in his devotion to sciences."5 In 1891, "...After extensive personal contacts, with members of the Anglo-Jewish association which actively supported the work of the Alliance, and with Tsadok Kahn-Danon the Chief Rabbi of France [Danon] succeeded in ... persuading the Central Committee of the Alliance to open a small Seminary under his direction [to train rabbis]... Most of the instruction was 1 2 3 4 5

Rodrigue 2, p. 44-4-5. Rodrigue 2, p. 50. Rodrigue 2, p. 59. Benbassa & Rodrigue 1, p. 106. Rodrigue 4.

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in Hebrew. The students studied the Talmud, the Shulhan Aruch (The Religious Code of Conduct), biblical and post-biblical history, Hebrew grammar, and literature, religious philosophy such as the works of Sadia Gaon, and the modern biblical commentaries of Wessely and Mendelsohn. The seminary moved [from Edirne] to Istanbul in 1897, and closed down in 1915". 1 Between the years 1915-1925, Danon was the Hebrew Grammar teacher of ENIO.2 In a publication containing a bibliography on newspapers and periodicals in Hebrew and Ladino published in the Ottoman Empire, a newspaper and three periodicals published in Edirne are mentioned.3 Their contents are briefly presented below. Yosef Deat (The Knowledge of Joseph): 4 This is a remarkable periodical, which Avraham Danon published starting with 1888. A copy of a single one of its issues is available at the Ben Zvi Institute Library of Jerusalem. Two main types of articles appeared in the periodical. The first was articles on Ottoman history and they were written in Hebrew. The second covered the history of the Jewish Community of the Ottoman Empire. These were invariably in Ladino, written in Rashi script. A few of the articles were in Turkish using the Arabic alphabet as it was written during those years. Some characteristics are worth noting about both types of articles. Preceding each article there was an abstract of usually two to three short sentences describing in succinct form what the article was about. Unlike traditional Jewish scripts, all dates appearing in the article were reported in the Julian calendar while their Hebrew equivalent was given only occasionally. Abbreviations and exclamations with religious meaning were almost entirely missing in them. The articles contained orderly footnotes, including references in Latin and sometimes in Greek script. The outlook of the articles, though strongly Jewish and traditional, was essentially secular. The Hebrew used was rich in vocabulary, concise, and clear, almost identical to contemporary Hebrew used by Israeli scholars of our present day. At the time of their publication a battle was raging among theranks of the Alliance and the Jewish Community of Edirne, and in fact all over the world, as to whether Hebrew should be taught as a living language or a language of prayer only; and here was a periodical publishing articles

1 Rodrigue 4. Fiche du personnel Moscou, 100-1-46/25. Katan, Haitonut be ladino, arach ve hitkin Moshe Katan, Yerushalayim, Hotsaot Mahon Ben Zvi, ve Università Haivrit ve Beyt Hasefarim. Haleumi, tash"ha. (The Ladino Press, a Bibliography), prepared and edited by Moshe Katan, for the National Library and for the Hebrew University, a Ben Zvi Institute of Jerusalem, 1965, publication. 2

4

Yosef Deat o II Progresivo, Mihtav Et Ivri ve Sefaradi Letoldot Israel al Adamat Tur gema, Yotsei Leor Peamayim Behodesh Al Yedei Avraham Danon Letoelet Hevrat Tushia Beadrianopoli. (Knowledge of Joseph or the Progressive, A Hebrew and Sephardi Letter Published Twice a Month by Avraham Danon, to the Benefit of the Company of the Seekers of Understanding of the Hevrat Tushia Group of Edirne).

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in perfect, and close to modern Hebrew! That the authors of these articles and many of their readers must have spoken Hebrew fluently, and with whom any educated Israeli person of our time would feel entirely at home with, there is no doubt. The Ladino used in the articles written in the language is rich in vocabulary and clear in its style. Such Ladino is difficult to characterize as a "jargon". The journal was closed down by the State censorship in the days of Abdulhamit II.1 La Boz de la Verdad, Andrianople, (Kol Haemet): The paper was published in Ladino using the Rashi script. The headings over the various news items, articles and commentary, though mostly of secular content, were invariably in Hebrew written in Hebrew letters. This suggests that both the newspaper staff that wrote them and the readers who read them knew Hebrew to a satisfactory extent, and not just prayer Hebrew. Its publication started in 1910 and ended inl922. This was a newspaper that assumed the role of the spokesman of the "Haskalah" movement of Edirne after its three progenitors had lost out in their attempts at reform in various fields of the Community life (Chapter 8). The paper supported education reform but of a variety which gave more weight to the learning of Hebrew, including its spoken variety, and to the study of Turkish and was not in favor of completely abandoning Ladino as both a spoken language and one of learning. The paper had Zionist leanings; and at times was critical of the Alliance in the mentioned respects. La Boz de la Verdad did not hesitate to cross swords with the Alliance on the matter of bringing back to life Hebrew as a spoken language. The most noteworthy incident of crossing of swords took place in neighboring Kirklareli, that by coincidence or not, was also located near the Bulgarian border where a strong Zionist tradition existed.2 1

Rodrigue 4, ^ Haker 2, pp. 79-80. The happening took place in 1914. Being dissatisfied with how Hebrew was taught in its two Alliance schools, the Kirklareli Community looked for a Hebrew teacher who could teach spoken Hebrew "as spoken in Palestine"! It found such a teacher in the person of Eliezer Ben Yehuda who was a Bulgarian born Jew and trained as a teacher at the prestigious Teachers Seminar of Beit Hakerem of Jerusalem. The Community council of Kirklareli offered him a contract with a salary that was only a little lower than a full director's salary! It turned out that Ben Yehuda was a fervent Zionist as well, and not only taught spoken Hebrew, but gave sermons in the community synagogue in favor of Zionism. Hasson, the acting director of the Boys' School of Kirklareli wrote the following on this. Ben Yehuda. (AAIU, Kirklisse, 28.05.1914, Isaac Hasson, to Paris) "Exalted Zionist, fierce Hebraist who wanted to immediately convert all the masses to his Utopian fantasies of Jewish independence a Free Kingdom ; a new Messiah, he was announcing the good news of national Resurrection on condition that everyone spoke Hebrew... "The issue was picked up by La Boz de la Verdad who offered its strong support to Ben Yehuda and praised the great job he was doing. The following is an extract from issue of La Boz de la Verdad: "The Hebrew lessons in the Kirklareli school are prospering well. The progress they are making is palpable...and make the French "Bonjour" ashamed of itself. Among gentlemen, ladies old and young everywhere the language is reviving and there is nothing more to say. The soul is filled with happiness when even old ladies want to participate in the lessons. {La Boz de la Verdad, Anio 5, 16.05.1914 issue). One of the first acts of Conorte Canetti, the newly appointed director to the boys' school of Kirklareli was to fire Ben Yehuda. The Community Council strongly objected and fought it out, but eventually it had to yield to the will of the Alliance, and within a year, Ben Yehuda was out.

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Thus, with all the information reported extracted from this newspaper and quoted in this and subsequent chapters, one has to bear in mind the ideological coloring of the newspaper. However, the question needs to be asked as to whether the point of view that appeared in it was a mere call in the wilderness or whether it was voicing the ideology of an important part of public opinion even if not the majority. The question partly boils down to how large was the circulation of the paper? The newspaper was published twice a week. No data could be obtained on the paper's circulation. At the time the adult male population of the town was about 4000 and probably about a quarter of them could have afforded to buy the paper. Assuming that only half of them did so, it should not come as a surprise if its circulation amounted to at least a few hundred copies in Edirne, and in addition, some more in the small communities of the Vilayet. Supporting this estimate is the sales price of the newspaper before World War One, 10 paras (40 paras equal one kuru§). Taking the average daily earning of a carpenter of 15 kuru§ the sales price of the paper was not an unaffordable one and it could have permitted such a circulation size. As to the influence of the paper on the goings on in the town, the evidence that will be presented in subsequent chapters is that it did not amount to much and in fact its role appears to be one of "Her Majesty's Opposition". L'Echo d'Andrinople: This was a French paper that was published in Edirne, between the years of 1915-1922. Copies of this newspaper have not been preserved and there is no information on it comparable to the one for La Boz de la Verdad. 1

Karmi, Mihtav Iti Leumi, Oja Literaria Nasyonala (My Vineyard, A periodic National Letter, and a Literary National Page): This was a monthly periodical that started appearing in 1881. The author of the publication was Baruh Mitrani; it was written in Hebrew. In one of its issue "Bet", the author apologized to his readers that in all the previous issues the publication had confined itself to dealing with subjects concerning the Jewry of the Spanish Exile that had made Ottoman Empire their home. He declared that he wished to address "the Jewish Nation as a whole" including the Jewish

1 Ginau.

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communities of Western Europe as would befit the objectives of his periodical, this is why the publication was written exclusively in Hebrew, so he wrote.1

Relations with Other Communities and State Authorities Like everywhere else in the Empire, Jews were perceived by Christian communities as part of the Ottoman adversary from whom Greeks, Bulgarians and later Armenians were trying to win their independence; their Christian religion on "You killed Jesus" tack added fuel to this perception which at times caused much trouble to Jews in general, and more specifically, to those living in Edirne. Greeks: As mentioned earlier, the dominant community in the economic life of the city was the Greek one. Particularly in their case, relations between Jews and Greeks showed much ambivalence. Jews had close trade ties with Greeks. Members of the Greek community supplied the majority of the professional services in the city as physicians, various craftsmen, skilled workers, household help, retail food outlets and restaurants. A few Greeks sent their children to the Alliance schools even without the school having to solicit them. The reverse movement, namely Jews sending their children to Greek schools and in particular their girls, was several-fold larger (Chapter 4). The Alliance Girls' School could not do without Greek teachers and other staff, during its early years. In some of these years the directrice of the school was a Greek woman. In others, two Greek seamstresses managed the school and Greek was its Lingua Franca (Chapter 12). Members of the Jewish Community were in daily contact with Greeks, and seemed to get on well with them. An indication as to how close relations were is that among middle to upper class Jews there were many who could speak Greek as well as Turkish, and in the case of Jewish women even better. As mentioned in Chapter 2 Jewish Community establishment invited Greek grandees, on all major public and social events, and those invited inevitably attended. And yet: "It is especially with Greeks that the Jewish Communities had a bone to pick even if anti-Semitic prejudice was also frequent among Armenians and Bulgarians." Further more, as a general rule, when an incident occurred, Christians without regard to their particular ethnic or religvom affiliation they belonged to forgot their own quarrels, and formed a block 1

Katan, pp. 66-68.

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against Jews... 1,1 The correspondence of the Alliance from the 1870's onwards reported anti-Jewish upheavals practically every year. These upheavals were usually based on the blood libel. About two thirds of the seventeen cases of blood libels reported in the book Leven wrote on the history of the Alliance were committed by Greeks. 2 There is no record of any blood libel being committed in Edirne by Greeks. At the same time, sporadic breakouts of anti Semitic incidents did occur. 3 One such incident, involving a Greek nunnery to which parents sent their girls to study in large numbers, is told in Chapter 4. In nearby Kirklareli a tradition existed whereby, during Easter, Greek palikaria (young men) roamed in the streets where Jews lived and broke some windows, which the Jews of the town tolerated as long as the number of the windows they broke was not excessive! 4 There are no records in Edirne on relations between Bulgarians and Jews. It is as if one side was not aware of the existence of the other. According to Alliance records, mentioned in earlier section, during the 1877/88 war Bulgarians did not distinguish between Jew and Turk when it came to the atrocities they committed on civilians. There was, in Edirne, an Armenian community numbering in 1912 about 24000 persons in the Vilayet as a whole, but only 3500 persons in Edirne city proper. The only thing that is known about relations with them is that despite their small number they sent more of their children to the Alliance schools of the town than any other community did, and that they wanted to send even more of them, but were rebuffed by Alliance directors. Concerning relations with the Turkish Community, there is no better testimony than the one Narcisse Leven gave in Volume I on the History of the Alliance between 1860 and 1910. The whole of the volume of 545 pages is dedicated to the covering of manifestations of anti-Semitism in European countries and what the Alliance did to fight it. The amount of pages accorded to the Ottoman Empire, under the heading of Turkey, adds up to only 14 pages and all the references are for praise. 5 One of them followed by two more from other authors are quoted below: "Turkey: The situation of Jews and the spirit of justice reigning in the Ottoman Government... As soon as one gets in touch with the Jews of Turkey the first thing one notices is that they have nothing to complain about on account of either the Government or the Muslim population... In Turkey 1 2 3 4 5

Dumont, pp. 222-223. Leven 1, pp. 386-392. AAIU, TURQUIE, IX-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, May 5, 1890, June 5, 1891. Haker 1, p. 298. Leven 1, pp. 148-152, 386-392.

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the religious freedom that had been largely established for many centuries has been put into a severe test in the period we live in. In Europe the myth of ritual murder was exploited against the Ottoman Empire without noticing how it was extensively prevalent among Greeks. The firmness with which the Ottoman Government prevented from its degeneration into odious accusations leading to violence against Jews, succeeded in discouraging those who viciously spread the myth." 1 "There are but few countries... where Jews enjoy a more complete equality than in Turkey... In every respect Abdulhamit II proves to be a generous sovereign and protector to his Israelite subjects... The unflinching attachment of Jews to his person and to the Empire is the only way in which they can express their gratitude. Thus the Sultan as well as his officials know that Jews are among the most obedient faithful and devoted subjects of Turkey." 2 In one of his conversations with Theodore Herzl during their first meeting in 1897 Sultan Abdulhamit II reportedly said the following: "I was always a friend of the Jews. [In all cases] I stand on my Muslim and Jewish subjects. As to my other subjects, I don't have trust in them." 3 These statements are generally correct, but some Jews did join the main Turkish body that successfully plotted the overthrow of Abdulhamit II. Manifestations of the total identification of the Jewish Community of Edirne with their Ottoman Fatherland as its loyal subjects and those in the Balkans near bye are not rare. Three examples are mentioned below in chronological order. During the war of 1897 between Greece and the Ottoman Empire, the only one during the 19 th century in which the last came out as the winner when fighting alone, the Jewish Community of Edirne organized ceremonies to celebrate the Ottoman victory, and offered assistance in money and in kind to wounded soldiers that spent their time in the hospitals of Edirne to recuperate from their wounds.4 A major event took place in March 1909 when the followers of Abdulhamit II attempted to stage a countercoup to abolish the Second Constitutional Monarchy that was established only six months back. An army had to be put together in Salonika post-haste to be sent to Istanbul to suppress the counter coup. The number of young Jews who volunteered to join up was such, that a full battalion was formed with them. In Istanbul, they became the first battalion to be deployed against the rebels. The army 1 2 3 4

Leven 1, pp. 387-388. Dumont, p. 221. Tsiper, p. 120. AAIU, IX-E TURQUIE, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, May 13, 1897.

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command was uncertain about the complete loyalty of the remainder of the army who were Muslims, while they had no doubt about the loyalties of the Jewish Battalion.1 During the Balkan wars, when Edirne was under siege, the Community assisted in the war effort by operating the Girls' School of the Alliance as a workshop to produce bandages and nightgowns to hospitalized wounded soldiers of the Ottoman army. The school won an award for meritorious conduct from the Governor of Edirne. "The Jews of Edirne welcomed the return of Ottoman rule with delirious joy." 2 Thus, it is not to be wondered that Jews acquired the title of "en sadik millet" among the Ottoman establishment.3 Cordial relations existed between senior Ottoman officials, including army commanders, of General rank (Pasha). These were not infrequent visitors at the Alliance schools. 4 The visits were not supervision visits strictly speaking, as Ottoman authorities did not supervise or interfere in any way on how the Alliance ran its schools, but rather, they were visits to grant the schools honor and to receive honor from school managements. There were quite a few cases of Jewish pupils transferring from Alliance schools to a Turkish Rugtiye, during the years when the Alliance could not provide a Rugtiye level schooling. Concerning anti Semitism manifested by the Turkish people or by the Turkish community, generally speaking, compared to European countries and even among the Muslims countries of the Middle East and North Africa, the phenomenon was a rare and muted one. "Relations between Jews and Muslims were on the whole much more satisfactory... The documents examined covering a thirty-year period note only two or three cases of anti-Jewish riots. 5 There were additional manifestations of anti-Semitism among the Turkish people of Edirne below an actual rioting level, but still serious enough. According to an article appearing in the Boz de la Verdad, it is claimed that anti Semitism always existed beneath the surface, though it showed its head openly and the first time only after the new constitution was 1

Bali 2, pp. 53-82. AAIU, FRANCE XVI-F, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, August 19, 1913, Annual Report, 1912/1913. 3 Rodrigue 5. 4 AAIU, TURQUIE VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, November 5, 1888, IX-E, November 12, 1897. AAIU, TURQUIE VII-E, Gueron to "Paris", Andrinople, Received in Paris on December 18, 1911. Copy of a letter addressed to the Alliance of Paris on his inspection mission to Alliance school by Kasim Bey, Inspecteur Général pour les Vilayets de Edirne, Salonique and Kossovo. 5 Dumont, p. 222. 2

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declared in 1908, following which freedom of the press in the full sense of the term came into being. Anti-Semitism was suppressed during the times of Abdulhamit II as many other "ism"s was. The article bewailed the fact that the Community of Edirne was not fighting it back. 1 One such anti-Semitic manifestation with a Turkish origin on record occurred in neighboring Kirklareli whose echoes expanded as far away as the Jewish Press of Istanbul. The article that appeared in the Turkish newspaper was abusive and threatened action on account of an imagined slight the Kirklareli community had allegedly committed against a Turkish Literary Association. Ottoman authorities quickly took care of it before it got out of hand.2 All in all, one can conclude that there is no evidence from Edirne that contradicts the general view that the level of anti Semitism that existed in the Ottoman Empire was low even if it cannot be maintained that it did not exist at all.

1 2

La Boz de la Verdad, N° 183, 18 December, 1911. ElJudio, Issue N° 6, 14 Tishrei 5671 (1911).

4 SCHOOLING OPTIONS FOR JEWISH CHILDREN OF EDIRNE

Surprisingly, there is less information on the schools of the Jewish community before and after the Alliance arrived than there is on schools of the Christian and Muslim ones. Most of the information on the Jewish education sector is from the pens of Alliance directors, but in none of their reports was there a systematic and comprehensive attempt to survey the totality of the schools that operated in the city, whether Jewish or not Jewish, There were many Talmud Torah schools in Edirne. 1 The Chief Rabbinate managed the biggest one of all, which, one can call a publicly financed school. To distinguish it from the other small ones it will be referred to as the TTP. The TTP provided some sort of elementary education on a mass basis to school going boys up to the age of fifteen. In 1873, seven years after the opening of the first Alliance school, the TTP still counted about 800 students. 2 The number represented about 57% of the potential of the school going age of male children, of about 1400 in number. Most of students in the school came from poor families that could not afford to pay fees for educating their children What the Alliance school establishment thought about the TTP has been extensively written about and little can be added on the subject. Typical examples from the pens of two Alliance Directors are provided in the note. 3 1

Rodrigue to Haker, Stanford, February 27, 2004. NLI, AIU, Monthly Report, N° 3, July 1873; pp 5-6. 3 NLI, AIU, Monthly Report, N° 7, July 1874; pp 4-5, NLI, AIU, Monthly Report, N . l l , November 1883; pp. 160- 161. This institution occupies a two storey high vast house. 700 students taught by 16 Rabbis and two monitors frequent it... only four students study the Talmud and eight read Rashi; the rest have not studied beyond the Pentateuque. There is a total lack of discipline. Rules of hygiene are not observed well. The children are dirty and wear clothes that are too tight for them. In general they look pale and appear feverish. Most of the students come from poor families. Also: The students are confided into the hands of teachers, who more often than not are ignorant persons for which the rod is the most powerful means of persuasion. Crowded into narrow halls with low ceilings, sitting on couches, or standing, this multitude of children are clothed in tatters...and on their bodies conditions of extreme poverty are visible. They spend many hours repeating a text from the Bible in a monotonous tone of voice, and modulation that sounds like a complaint. After a stay of five to six years in the Talmud Torah, they know as much as they did when they first came in. The reading of the prayers constitutes the only [intellectual] food they are served to feed their intelligence and memory. 2

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There is a later report dated 1892 f r o m the pen of Samuel Danon, the first Alliance teacher who ever taught at the T T P .

1

He is not less critical of the

school than the ones his Alliance colleagues wrote, but his criticism is more balanced, and constructive. It took him a whole year of actual teaching at the T T P , before he put into pen what he thought about the school, whereas all the reports f r o m Alliance directors read as if they were written only following short and probably casual visits. What follows are some excerpts f r o m the Danon report: On many occasions, Alliance directors comment on the mediocrity of Talmud Torah teachers, and their lack of knowledge on teaching methodology. Nevertheless, as a measure of their dedication, the teachers who are all Rabbis come to the school every day except on Saturdays at six o'clock in the morning and leave at seven in the evening. Also to their credit, they are aware of their own limitations and their lack of tools to provide the children a modern primary school education. Generally, they are well disposed towards learning new methods in pedagogy, and with sufficient perseverance and energy one can succeed in making them change their teaching methods. As to the most practical and wisest method to handle the good old Rabbis, some among them in the 70-80 year age range, it is to send them to the Holy Land to spend there the last years of their lives. The remaining staff, is younger, healthy and active, in particular the most recent recruits of the school who are better educated, and they can be trained fast to learn modern teaching methods. The teaching of Hebrew at the TTP is a first order priority, and considerably higher than the one that is accorded to the teaching of Turkish and French. During the last years, the TTP has made notable progress, thanks to the use of better teaching methodology. Turkish is better taught at the TTP than it is at the Alliance school, though only relatively speaking, as the teaching of Turkish should be improved in both schools. The mediocrity of the teachers teaching Turkish is openly evident. T h e history of the T T P past 1892 and through 1905 is more suitably told in the context of the process of the f u s i o n that took place between the two schools, the T T P and the Alliance school f o r Boys. This is d o n e in Chapter 10. Other Talmud Torah schools existed in the Community; including the one Halevy ran that was mentioned in Chapter 3, with the most important one a m o n g them being the Mahzikei

Torah. This school existed a long way

back, but assumed particular importance after the Rabbinical Seminary Danon established under the auspices of the Alliance was moved to Istanbul and the

1 AAIU, FRANCE XVI-F, Salamon Danon to "Paris", Andrinople, received in Paris on October 4, 1892, Annual Report 1891/1982.

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absorption of the TTP by the Alliance. With the Alliance school being essentially a secular school, it was obvious that its students could not learn enough religion, Biblical History, and Hebrew to act as Rabbis. This school thus filled an important gap. The Dorshei Haskalah association mentioned in Chapter 3 managed the Mahzikei Torah} It continued to exist at least until 1934. With the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the banning of religious schools in the country, it led an underground existence.2 The remaining Talmud Torah schools were privately run schools financed by the fees they collected from their students. The most outstanding among them was the Tiferei Israel, in existence since at least 1873 with 150 students, and 200 students in 1886, about the same number as in the Alliance School for Boys during those years. 3 This school still existed in 1894. 4 Alliance directors found nothing to say about this school except mentioning that its students "were of better physical appearance", hinting perhaps that they came from better to do families, and learning standards in the school could have been higher too. There was a fourth Talmud Torah as mentioned earlier; it was called Akedat Yitzhak that had 200 students and was run by Baruch Mitrani's father. This school particularly emphasized the learning of Hebrew, but also, Turkish and Arithmetic were taught in it as well. 5 In 1886, there were additional smaller private schools with 400 students. 6 Twenty-five years later, Moise Mitrani, confirmed this number as applicable to the 1911/12 school year also. 7 There was a primary school at Karaagac, belonging to the Hilfsverein der Deutchen Juden that was established in 1901 by German Jews that broke away from the Alliance. It had the same agenda as the Alliance did, but as can be expected, the teaching language at this school was German. Prior to the arrival of the Alliance to Edirne, there was only a single girls' school in the Jewish Community. Nothing is known about this school except that it merged with the Alliance School for Girls upon its

1

La Boz de la Verdad, N° 2 5 5 , 1 8 September, 1912, N 32 April, 1914. Yaakov Philozof. He was a 1928 graduate of the school. He taught Hebrew at the Alliance school of Kirklareli until 1934 when the school closed down. Born in 1910 he lives in Israel since 1948 and retired in 1975 as the director of the post office of Yahud. 3 AAIU, FRANCE, XVI-F, Carmona to "Paris", Andrinople, October 10, 1886, Annual Report 1885/86. 2

4

II Tiempo (of Istanbul), Issue number 1, October 1, 5655 (AD 1894). NLI, AIU, Monthly Report, N.7, July 1874; p. 5. 6 AAIU, FRANCE, XVI-F, Carmona to "Paris", Andrinople, October 10, 1886, Annual Report 1885/86. 5

7

AAIU, FRANCE XVI-F, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, August 19, 1912, Annual Report 1911/1912.

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establishment in 1870. 1 It is doubtful as to whether this school could have had more than a few tens of students. In 1888, Ida Abramowitz, an Alliance School for Girls directrice, reported that a private Jewish school for girls existed in Edirne that counted about 100 students. 2 On the whole, and for all practical purposes, at the time of the arrival of the Alliance, the girls of the Jewish community did not receive a school education in significant numbers except those who went to missionary schools. As far as the education of girls went, the Jewish community lagged much behind all the Christian ones in the city, the Greek, Armenian, and Bulgarian. In Alliance documents there are no references to a Jewish school of learning higher than primary school of eight grades. There are a few references in non-Alliance sources. There is a reference to a Yeshiva (religious seminary) Avraham Danon studied in, in the middle of the 19th century. 3 Other than the primary schools, there were two institutions of higher learning for religious subjects (Yeshivot), Kahalat Yosef and Knesset Israel that survived, as late as 1926 4 Curiously enough, a "Jewish school of high learning on religious subjects is mentioned in a Greek source too, but not in Alliance documents. 5 Summing-up, the subject of schools in the Jewish Community, the diagnosis of Alliance Directors concerning the state of education within the Jewish community of Edirne was by and large correct. The run-of-the mill TTP graduate was at best a sub-literate person, and at worst not even that. With primary school being the foundation of subsequent stages of education, there is no doubt that the TTP could not offer its students a quality education to build on to continue their education, for example in a lycée or in an equivalent institution. It is not to be wondered that there was no Jewish Lycée in Edirne. Even when taking into account the other smaller Talmud Torah schools, which could have done a little better, the picture, still remains substantially the same. At the same time, the publishers of the local La Verdad daily, the quasi-academic quarterlies and other publications and their readers, the audiences that enjoyed theater performances put up in the city ranging from Turkish plays to Ladino translations of French classics, or rendered in their original French, as well as the many members of the associations in the town of intellectual content, must surely have received an education way above the standard one provided by the TTP and its variants.

1 2 3 4 5

NLI, AIU, Monthly Report, N.2, February 1877; p. 28. AAIU TURQUIE, IV-E. Abramowitz to Paris, Andrinople 15 M y 1888. Judaica, Volume 5, pp 1295. Istanbul Jewish Almanac 3, p. 156. Megali Egsiklopedia, Volume 1, p. 636.

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There is no record of where and how such education was provided. Most likely it came in the form of informal tutoring in the TTP to special small groups and extensive private tutoring. "More advanced education took place beyond the Talmud Torah and even beyond Yeshivot. It seems even in normal classes at the TTP, a teacher focused at times on small groups of students, not exceeding four in number, while the rest were on their own. This state of affairs existed in most traditional education environments where institutionalized educational frameworks did not exhaust all studying possibilities" 1 . Only well to do persons could afford to provide this kind of education to their children. In this respect the Edirne and TTP of Edirne was really the primary school of the poor. During the 19th century and earlier the poor of the world generally received a poor education, if any and the poor of Edirne were no different in this respect. A statement of Jewish education in Edirne cannot be complete without mentioning the considerable numbers of Jewish children studying in nonJewish schools that were mostly of a missionary type. There were many schools in the city run by Christian missionaries whose overriding objective was to win new converts to the Christian faith. Jews, whether poor or rich, had no qualms about sending their children to such schools. For the poor, a primary reason, for many of them doing so, was that not only the young boys would get material benefits out of the school, but their families as well. But once they went to such a school the door of conversion was open to the whole family. There was also a minority of well to do Jewish families including those of leading Community Council members who sent their children to missionary schools and paid them high tuition fees, believing that they would get a better education in them not available in Alliance schools.2 The evidence that is available on such a disposition stretches from 1892 to 1912, showing that it had a long history behind it. 3 The missionary schools mostly belonged to Catholic and Orthodox denominations. The teaching could be in French, Italian, German, or Greek. Concerning girls, as already mentioned, at the time of the arrival of the Alliance there were no schools for educating girls, and their number flocking into Christian schools was even larger than the one for boys. It seems 1 Rodrigue to Haker, Stanford, May 8, 2002. Also, my grandfather studied at the Kirklareli TTP between the years 1883-1888. Grandfather could read Hebrew texts fluently. He could read Ladino translations of French classics in Rashi script, which he did to his wife my grand mother. He could write fluently Ladino in the Rashi alphabet, and his arithmetic was as good as any one who had gone through an eight-year primary school education. His peers I had the occasion to meet in my young years, were not far behind him in any of these respects. 2 AAIU, RE-66, Paris to Loupo, 16 November 1892. 3 La Bozfifela Verdad, N° 255, 18 September 1912,

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members of the community were less reluctant to have their daughters study in missionary schools than their boys. As explained in Chapter 3, Jews were accepted as good members of Ottoman national life, and in fact were even protected by the authorities from anti-Semitic deeds generated by the Christian communities. The Jews of Edirne did not live in Ghettoes of the traditional European type. From a cultural view point, Edirne was a multiethnic society of a more advanced level than those of the uninationalist types that existed in most of the so called "civilized" European countries of the times. From the viewpoint of the Jewish community, the downside of living in a multiethnic society such as the one that existed in Edirne was their being exposed to proselytizing efforts. Jews could not do anything drastic against such attempts, as after all one can't enjoy the benefits of a denominationally open society, relatively speaking, while at the same time complain that one is being exposed to unwanted proselytizing efforts. The subject of Jews converting to Christianity was an embarrassing one to write about, but by 1891 at the latest, it became a major issue in the Jewish press of Istanbul. 1 In Edirne, in 1911 and 1912 a number of news items and articles appeared on the subject in the Boz de la Verdad.2 According to a news item, a record number of 15 Jews converted to Christianity during the week ending on August 31, 1911, and in addition a page long article was devoted to the subject.3 On the eve of the new year of 5671 (September 1911), a second, page long article appeared in the same newspaper, lamenting the phenomenon "Abandonan la lei de sus padres" (They abandon the law of their fathers), urging the Community to involve itself in a true spiritual reckoning to analyze its causes and think of what to do about them. 4 There is a further reference to conversions to Christianity being on the increase, not confined to Edirne, but in Cavalla and Salonika. 5 Given the built in anti-Semitic features of the Christian religion of the times, for Jewish youngsters studying at missionary schools, the ruling atmosphere was not an idyllic one. Paradoxically, they were more exposed to anti-Semitism than their peers studying in Jewish schools. A noteworthy incident in this respect occurred in a Greek convent that offered education to Jewish girls. During 1914 the parents of 97 of them, out 1 2 3 4 5

El Tiempo, issue N° 4, October 3,1891 La Boz de la Verdad, N° 159, August 28, 1911, N. 255, 18 September 1912. La Boz de la Verdad, N° 159, August 31,1911. La Boz de la Verdad, N° 157, August 21,1911. La Boz de la Verdad, N° 171, October 26,1911.

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of the 160 Jewish girls who studied at the school, removed the girls en bloc from the convent, and registered them at the Alliance School for Girls. This they did in protest against an anti-Semitic incident instigated by some nuns that exceeded a level, which the parents of the girls were willing to tolerate.1 However, following the parents' protest, the nun who headed the convent made extraordinary efforts and amends to win them back. The result was that in the space of a few months she succeeded in winning back 56 of the Jewish girls with the remaining 41 staying on at the Alliance school. An interesting aspect of the episode is the information gathered incidentally was that the Jewish girls studying at the convent paid full fees, suggesting that they came from relatively well to do families. On the subject of Jewish children in missionary schools, a three-page article appeared in an Istanbul daily Samuel Danon sent to "Paris" for its notice. 2 The article was written on the eve of the school year of 1891/1892. The main points the author of the article made were the following: (i) He was most unhappy about Jewish children studying at missionary schools; (ii) he maintained that there was a high risk that the Jewish identity of the pupils studying in them would be seriously eroded if not altogether done away with; (iii) he took to task Jewish parents, even the most religiously observant among them, who blithely send their children to these schools without realizing the contradiction between their act and their religious beliefs. This he wrote in the strongest terms and colorful language that is reproduced in the note;3 (iv) he maintained that the only school where a Jewish pupil can enjoy the benefits of a contemporary education without endangering his Jewish identity was an Alliance school; and (v) in an Alliance school a pupil could get as good an education as in a missionary school, if not a better one. 1

AAIU, TURQUIE VII-E, Gueron to "Paris", Andrinople, February 24, 1914, January 28, 1914, February 1, 1914, Mitrani to Paris Andrinople, February 1, 1914. 2 AAIU, TURQUIE, I-B, Salamon Danon to Paris, Andrinople, October 20, 1891. The reference to newspaper cutting is El Tiempo; issue N° 4, October 3, 1891 pp 43-46. "Jean" signed the article. In the letter, the Alliance acknowledged the receipt of the article and has the following to say: "We thank you for your having communicated to us the El Tiempo article on Congregationalist (Christian) schools. You describe in excellent fashion all the mediocre results the Congregationalists supply, and the scandalous snobbism of rich Jews who deliver their children to their worst enemies." -i El Tiempo, issue N° 4, October 3, 1891 p. 45: "It appears to us without exaggeration, that the ignorance demonstrated by parents who are very attached to their religion ... I know many among these dedicated Jews that for nothing in the world would light a fire on a Sabbath, would prefer to feel the cold [of a winter] to throwing a log into the stove. They don't eat cheese after meat, never miss a day in the month of Tevet on the siege of Jerusalem, get up late in the night for as many nights as required to ask forgiveness from God as the new year approaches. Thej nevertheless find it entirely natural to send their children to Christian schools [where their children] write in the Sabbath and in the process violate all the prescriptions of the Law. What is the marvelous secret they own that enables them to keep a conscience entirely at peace without having to explain away this abysmal contradiction?".

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What is unexpected in the mentioned article is the example its author gave as to how humanistic an Alliance education was, in addition to its being a Jewish one. The example was in a poem by Lamartine, which a girl pupil declaimed during the final examinations of the school year, held in the presence of the French Consul stationed in Istanbul, and other grandees, and the newspaper person who wrote the article also attended. The hero of the poem was a French Catholic priest! His humane approach to anything that had to do with the Jewish community was highlighted in the poem; no doubt this priest was implicitly presented as the role model of the poem to be emulated by any boy or girl who learned it. It seems the class teacher could not think up a different story, whether in the form of a poem or not, whose hero was Jewish or Turkish, who was no less endowed with saintly qualities. Such was the degree of identification of the author of the article with French culture including its Catholic component, and its assumed superiority to all alternatives including a Jewish one. As mentioned earlier, in Edirne too, members of the affluent and leading circles including members of the Community Council, though expecting Alliance teachers to observe their religion to the full, had no problems about sending their own children to missionary schools. 1 When Samuel Loupo, a long time Director of the boys' school complained to "Paris" about such persons and asked its help to desist them from doing so, "Paris" advised him that this was not its task and that it was up to him to talk them into abandoning the practice. On the other hand, at times the Alliance in Paris showed concern about the competition it was getting from missionary schools, and discreetly did what it could to stop the phenomenon. In one instance it accepted the advice of Angela Gueron, a Directrice of the Girls' School, not to let in pupil visitors from missionary schools to visit a sister who was studying at her school. But she was asked to play the whole thing delicately so that the Alliance would not be accused of fanaticism. A similar message went out to Mitrani. 2

1

AAIU, RE-66, "Paris" to Loupo 16 November 1892. AAIU RE-245, "Paris" to Guéron, September 24, 1913, RE-283, Paris to Mitrani, July 3, 1922. 2

5 THE TEACHING PROGRAM OF THE ALLIANCE SCHOOLS

The Alliance Manifesto published in 1860 was a ringing call-to-arms to all the Jews of the world to get together to assist their less fortunate brethren that were subjected to various forms of discrimination and often enough to outright persecution. The declaration did not contain any hint on how this was going to be done. 1 The more broad objectives the Alliance was to serve were formulated for the first time in its legal charter of incorporation established also in the same year. 2 The key word describing what the Alliance aimed at, as expressed in the declarations of its founders was "regeneration", which when achieved, would enable Jews wherever they lived to claim their rights of citizenship in the full and in the process enhance their integration into the economic, social and political fabric of the country they lived in. At the foundation of the Alliance, and as could be expected, the teaching language of the schools would be French and French culture would figure in it with some prominence. Nevertheless, the Alliance was not conceived in explicit terms as an organization whose main objective was to propagate French culture and expand French influence in the world on a wholesale basis. In fact, any one prepared to pay an annual subscription of six francs could become a member of the organization no matter what country he was a citizen of. The Alliance finessed the issue of the unavailability of a school program generally binding on all its schools, by giving its school directors considerable authority to establish their individual school programs, while generally expecting its directors to prepare them in the spirit of the Alliance Appel à tous les Israélites, AIU Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris 1860. "If you hate all the prejudices we suffer from, the generalized reproaches, the repeated lies, the calumnies that are fomented, the violation of justice that is tolerated, persecution that wins justification, and are excused. If you believe that the principles of '89 [The French Revolution of 1789], are still powerfully applicable to the whole world. If you believe that the corrupted should be moralized instead being condemned, enlighten those who are blind, make the down-trodden stand up and not being contented with complaining about their state; defend those who are facing calumnies and don't keep silent, succor those who are persecuted, and not shout about persecution..." 2 Chouraqui, pp. 312-417.

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Manifesto. This policy of flexibility was formally anchored in an Alliance directive to its schools all over the world; it also contained the reasons as to why such flexibility was a must. 1 The up side of this flexibility was that the Alliance allowed its directors the authority to make adjustments to local conditions and cultural attributes. The down side was that this seemingly unlimited flexibility resulted in a wide range of practice, in particular in the teaching of Hebrew and local language related subjects, and the teaching, use of Ladino as a language of teaching which the Alliance did not favor. 2 The direct difference thus concerned the language of teaching, but as each language taught stood for specific subjects, increased emphasis on a particular language automatically changed the amount of time allocated to the subjects taught in the particular language in question. The absence of a detailed teaching program lead to ambiguities on how some Jews all over the world, and the authorities of the Ottoman Empire perceived the Alliance. It may explain the warm welcome Ottoman authorities accorded to the Alliance at the time it started establishing its schools. Ottoman authorities saw in the establishment of Alliance schools as a means for the Jewish Community to join the ongoing general effort at reform within the Empire and make its members more fruitful subjects; with their traditionally benevolent attitude towards the Jews, they cheered at the establishment of the Alliance schools and, and were helpful as well. This perception of the Alliance by Ottoman Authorities is best illustrated in the following quotation. Not only was the Ottoman Government tolerant, it viewed with satisfaction the efforts of its Jewish subjects to get a better education and improve themselves. When thanking the Alliance for establishing schools in the Ottoman Realm, Nazim Pasha, one of the governors of Jerusalem, wrote the following in 12 March 1868. "It was a real duty of mine, to protect as much as it depended on me, an institution which was created with as noble an objective as the one of regenerating by education one of the most important components of the Ottoman nation. In addition to the sympathy that every enlightened man ought to feel towards such a grand and generous idea, it offers in my eyes an interest of a superior order, whose partial solution to the problem escapes no ones attention, namely the diffusion of education in Turkey.3

1 NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N . l l November 1880, p. 247. It is necessary to adapt this program that is to be applied in all [Alliance] schools (spread out in Europe, Asia and Africa), to local necessities." 2 Siiberman, pp. 73-74. 3 Leven l , p p . 151-152.

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The misunderstanding of the Alliance among Jewish circles in European countries was larger still. Unusual as this may appear, members of the Haskalah movement all over Europe, whom Graetz calls "Nationalists", including their supporters in Edirne, also greeted the establishment of the Alliance in the city with enthusiasm. "Despite the fact that there was no hint that the Alliance intended to support the rebirth of Jewish nationhood and the settlement of the land of Israel, with the Alliance declaring that its aim was to emancipate Jews, persons like Moshe Hess, David Gordon, and the Rabbis Alkali, Kalisher, Guttmacher, and Natunek, gave their blessing to the organization. They saw the establishment of the Alliance as an attempt to organize Jews on a world scale as a nation. They declared: "In France the foundation was laid to a World Jewish Alliance.. ."" 1 The very notion of the name, "l'Alliance Israélite Universelle" or its transliteration into Hebrew:, "Kol Yisrael Haverim", meaning," all Jews are Partners or Comrades » suggested nationhood to many persons. The "Nationalists" of the 1860's thought even to the point that the establishment of the Alliance was a sign that the process of "Athaltah de Geulah", or "The Redemption Process" that is to precede the arrival of the Messiah had started. In brief, the creation of the Alliance triggered a wave of anticipation among "Jewish Nationalists" all over the world involving different degrees of realism.2 One of the declared aims of the Alliance was to make Jews engage in what was then considered as productive occupations, to become craftsmen in various fields and agriculturalists. In this spirit, already in 1870 the Alliance had established its first agricultural school and located it in the Land of Israel. Was this not a sure sign that the Alliance supported the Zionist idea to settle Jews in Israel? Two main reasons can be offered to explain how this fundamental misunderstanding occurred. Firstly the Manifesto expressed two themes that could be at odds with each other. The first one was its appeal to Jews as a group of persons that can be identified by their religion affiliation, though at times, and by many Jews and Gentiles alike, as members of a nation of their own. The second reason was that the Manifesto contained a reference to the French Revolution of 1789 which could also be considered in both ways, namely in terms of an idea with universal implications on the equality of all human beings which the Alliance would serve, but at the same time, by many members of non French nations as a purely French phenomenon that ended up with Napoleon! 1 2

Graetz, pp. 281-284. Graetz, pp. 281-284.

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However, no matter what the extent of the misunderstanding was, by its very establishment as a universally Jewish organization, and a rallying center for Jews, the Alliance served to strengthen the belief of the "Nationalists" in the resettling of the Land of Israel by Jews. The Alliance started to issue circulars to its schools containing statements of its educational philosophy, instructions for the teaching of various subject areas, as well as the rules to be followed at the schools. They culminated with the Central Committee issuing in 1883 a directive establishing a school program that was to be observed in Alliance schools all over the world and of course in Edirne schools.1 It appears that the Alliance did not preserve these circulars including the teaching program of 1883 in their original form but it reprinted the most important ones in its periodicals and incorporated them in the Instructions Générales, which it published in 1903.2 This is a 133 page long document the Alliance issued to its school directors, consisting of two parts. The first part contained a detailed statement of the teaching program the Alliance expected its schools to follow, while giving reasons, to why the program was established the way it was and the spirit in which it was to be taught. In the second part, the Alliance explained how it expected its schools to be managed by its directors and provided a detailed reporting system to enable it to supervise the process. It showed grade numbers, detailed the list of the subjects to be taught and the numbers of class hours to be allocated to each subject by grade.3 Any deviation from the program required the Central Committee's approval.4 To evaluate the Alliance teaching program, a definition is needed of what a Primary school education is. It is defined as that level of education that is required to gain admittance to a Lycée in French terminology or high school in Anglo-Saxon terminology. On both accounts, the time required to complete such an education is eight years. In Turkey the same definition applies although the eight-year period is divided into two sub periods of schooling. The first five years was named "iptidai Mektep" in Ottoman terminology and "ilk Okul" in Turkish terminology. The second sub period of schooling of three years was called Ruçtiye and Orta Okul respectively. Like in French and Anglo-Saxon countries, their graduates were considered to

1 2 3 4

Rodrigue 1, p. 31. Silberman, p. 86. Instructions Générales, pp. 24-25, also Rodrigue 1, pp. 33-37, and Silberman, p. 84. Silberman, p. 110, Instructions Générales, pp. 48-49.

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qualify for admittance to an ïdadiye in Ottoman terminology and Lise in Turkish terminology. When referring to a primary education in an Ottoman or Turkish context the reference will be to eight years of study like its French and Anglo-Saxon equivalent. The first question that arises on the program is how far the Alliance intended to take its average graduate on his way to a French Lycée, AngloSaxon High School, an Ottoman idadiye or a Turkish Lise? With the Alliance being a French institution it would be most appropriate to compare the blue print to the level the French primary school stipulated for French children. Like in many countries of the world, in France, a primary education is anchored in law. For the period covered under the present study, a student who had completed a primary education was awarded, in France, the "Certificat d'Etudes Primairesunder a law enacted on March 28 th 1882 and its subsequent modifications on January 18th 1887 and February 24th 1923.2 As mentioned, in France it took at the time eight years of study in a primary school to acquire the certificate. At the time, the practice was a school year of 40 weeks and 35 hours of teaching time per week. Thus, to acquire his "Certificat d'Etudes Primaires the French student had to go through 11200 class-hours. According to the program appearing in the Instructions Générales, the standard Alliance school was to have four grades, with the "Premiere" being the top one, and the "Quatrième " the lowest. In addition and optionally, two pre-school grades of so-called "Infantile " level called the "Cinquième " and the "Sixième" were stipulated.3 The weekly maximum teaching hours stipulated ranged between a maximum of 56-59, depending on the grade between the first and the fourth, and as a minimum 35-38 hours. In the Instructions Générales it published in 1903 the Alliance defined the length of the school day as nine hours including all breaks.4 As Loupo, reported the matter in 1888, the school day of the Alliance Boys School of Edirne started at half past seven in the morning, and ended at half past five in the afternoon or a ten-hour school day. An hour was devoted to praying, half Shalom Brenner of Haifa Israel, who was the Vice President of the District Court of Jerusalem and is now retired was awarded the "Certificat d'Etudes Primaires" in 1950 by the Alliance School of Haifa where he spent eight years to acquire the certificate. 2 Communication of Olivier Tournaud, Institut Français , Tel Aviv. Since 1923 some additional changes were made in the law governing primary education. For example, a year was added to the length of time required to complete primary education, the educational standards primary school teachers were expected to meet were raised, and a much desired level of flexibility was introduced on how individual schools went about preparing their teaching programs. However, all these changes are not relevant to the period covered in the presents study. 3 Rodrigue 1, pp. 32-37, and Silverman, pp. 73-85. 4 Instructions Générales, pp. 25-26.

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an hour for breakfast, half an hour for cleanliness inspection, an hour for lunch, and other breaks. All in all six hours were left for teaching time in the duration of the school day, corresponding to 38 hours of class time per week. 1 This number of net class hours was confirmed in a testimony dating from 1913, that the teaching week in the Edirne school of Alliance consisted of 38 hours. 2 The teaching week practiced by the school fitted the minimum teaching hours stipulated in the Instruction Générales. On a 38 hour teaching week basis, the total teaching time an Alliance student would be exposed to added up to about 6100 net class hours compared to his peer in a French school who was exposed to 11,200. In actual fact the difference is larger when taking into account the hours he would spend studying Turkish, Hebrew and Religion. Under the best of circumstance therefore, assuming that his teachers were as good as those of a French school, he would get from his Alliance the equivalent of somewhat less than the first four years of a French primary school. However, as mentioned earlier, the program in the Instruction Générales did allow for a maximum number of teaching hours per week of 56-59 hours depending on the grade. This meant a teaching day of 10-11 hours, and when adding the four additional hours for the various breaks as practiced in the Alliance schools of Edirne, one arrives at a school day of 1415 hours, which is not realistic. The shortfall was eventually made up by doubling of the number of grades from the four stipulated in the Instructions Générais to eight, by Community request or school initiative thereby increasing the teaching hours for the whole length of the education process to 12,100. Again allowing for the hours allocated to Hebrew and Turkish, the schools the Alliance established in Edirne reached parity with a primary school in France of the time assuming that that there was no difference in the quality of the teaching. However, reaching this state of affairs took 29 years for the Boys School (1896/97), and was reached in 1901/02 in the Girls School. In the 1903 program, the number of class hours taught in French represented 27 of the 38 weekly hours of the Teaching Program. These hours can be divided into two kinds. The first had to do with the hours devoted to such subjects as arithmetic, science and others, whose language effect is neutral as far as their impact in cultural identification terms. After all it does not matter which language the student is taught arithmetic, whether he feels more French than Turkish, or vise versa, at least not directly. However, the 1

AAIU, TURQUIE VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, 5 November 1888. AAIU, TURQUIE VII-E, Angela Gueron, to "Paris", Andrinople, December 31, 1913, six days @ 5 morning hours, plus four days @ 2 afternoon hours. 2

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very fact that he was taught these subjects in French, indirectly impacted on the identification issue, as French was used in exercising young minds, and in all matters of thinking, the students learned to think and count in French. The second group of subjects consisted of those for which the identification issue did arise directly. They were history, geography, in which France was awarded an important part, and above all, the French language itself, and its literature. These last subjects were devoted three times the one allocated to their Turkish counterpart. Thus, if the Alliance Program was successfully applied, its typical product would be a young Jew who spoke French as the best language he knew, was better versed in French literature, history and culture than any other one, and who had learned to think in French. Turkish was allocated five hours a week in the 1903 program. How much a young boy, who did not speak Turkish at home, and with his peers in the street, could learn Turkish in five hours a week could not amount to much. This is particularly so when he had to learn what was to him a brand new language in the old Arabic script that to him was a brand new alphabet too, when he had to focus his main attention on the learning of French, also a foreign language as far as he was concerned, but still the main language of his schooling. The Jewish subjects to be taught at the school consisted of Hebrew, religion, biblical, and post biblical history. Six hours of teaching were allocated to the teaching of these subjects, which is one hour more than those allocated to Turkish. One has to bear in mind that prior to the arrival of the Alliance, Community children studied Hebrew and related subjects a lot more hours, this being said without considering at this stage whether Hebrew was being learned well or not. The hours devoted to the teaching of the subjects of this part of the Program agreed with Alliance ideology that being Jewish was a purely religious matter and anything else that had to do with Jewish culture, language, and ethnicity, not to mention national identity, was to be ignored. In such a perspective the number of hours allocated to the subject of Jewish religion was perhaps sufficient. A discussion of languages cannot be complete without reference to how the Alliance viewed Ladino. "The educational activities of the Alliance are best understood in a continuum that spans the attack upon all popular local cultures begun during the French Revolution... The aim was to annihilate local jargons and universalize the use of the French language." 1 As far as the Alliance was concerned, Ladino was a form of jargon comparable to Breton, and the sooner it was eliminated, the better it was for every one. * Rodrigue 2, p. 76.

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Ladino was a language spoken by all the Jews of the Spanish exile that lived in the Ottoman Empire. The communities, in which it was spoken as a Lingua Franca, stretched from Serbia and southern Romania in the north and west, Greece in the south and Anatolia in the east. Important minorities among Jews of the Arab Middle East and North Africa, the majority of which spoke Arabic, also spoke the language as their mother tongue. Thus its use among the Jews of a widely dispersed area, as Yiddish was in Eastern Europe, was extensively prevalent. The comparison with Breton that was a language spoken by a compact group of persons located in the westernmost peninsula of France was not appropriate. It is also remarkable to note that the Alliance condemned the language at a time when "an explosion in Judeo-Spanish literary and journalistic activity [was taking place]." 1 The consequences of the "explosion" were well felt in Edirne as well, as most of the references to literary activity of Chapter 3 were from the second half of the 19 th century. Again, this is not a suitable place to get involved with a detailed and comprehensive defense of Ladino except to mention that the Alliance was to pay a price for its stand on the matter in terms of the limited results from its school and the extra operational expenses it created for itself in Edirne. In most schools of the world, a young pupil begins to learn how to read and write in a single language that is almost always his mother tongue, and he is almost often introduced to a second one after three to five years in a primary school, though typically, the introduction of a new language does not involve the learning of a new alphabet. Typically, a pupil from an AngloSaxon country would start learning French or Spanish as a second language, a French pupil would start learning English and so would a Turkish student who would learn today a second language like French or English. If the Alliance Teaching Program was applied to the letter, the average pupil would have had to start Grade One, simultaneously learning three separate languages, namely French, Hebrew, and Turkish each with its own different alphabet, with the first one being written from left to write and the other two from right to left. All the three languages were to him foreign languages. Anywhere in the world then and now, whether he came from a rich or poor family, an educated or uneducated one, such an experience can only be mind boggling for a seven year old boy or girl even if a very bright one. The teaching method the Alliance adopted was called the "concentric circles" method. 'The principle of concentric education adopted in the Alliance schools was identical to the system recommended in the Règlement Général,

1

Rodrigue 2, p. 85.

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which applied it in all the French primary school in 1868." 1 The Alliance adopted this method for its schools in 1882.2 According to this method, the teaching started off with a list of subjects, taught first in the simplest form and as the students were promoted to a next grade, the subject structure was preserved while more detail, depth and complexity was added. The same was done as the students were promoted further to upper grades. In a new school year, the teacher was expected to make sure that in the previous one the students had learned adequately what was taught to them, before breaking new ground in a given subject. Therefore, the first thing the teacher did in the new grade, at the beginning of the new school year, was to quickly recap what was taught in the previous one. This method to some extent did away with the need to have formal end of year examinations whose results became a basis to promote an individual student to a higher grade. The disadvantage of the method lied in making it difficult to keep a tab on how well the class was doing. If a teacher found out that his new students in his grade were deficient in what they were supposed to have learned in the previous year, he would be obliged to spend a considerable proportion of the year in recapping what they had learned, leaving less time for what new material they were expected to learn in the new grade. The result of the use of this method was a lot of informality being introduced into the learning process. Even more, it became very difficult to tell how well a particular student had done in a way other than his teacher's word on his performance. Loupo wrote on a number of occasions about the limitations of the method. He found that progress from year to year was much more limited than expected. The students returned to the school with a low stock of knowledge at the beginning of the year that assumedly was learned in the previous one. At times, a teacher spent most of the year repeating the material with little time left to teach something new. 3

1 Rodrigue 2, p. 76. ^ Silberman, p. 77. 3 AAIU, TURQUIE, VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, August 5, 1885, 9 May 1887.

6 SCHOOL MANAGEMENT

Centralization and Decentralization The two practical constraints that limited the degree of centralization the Alliance Central Management located in Paris on how a particular school was managed were the level of communication technology that was available, and the second the size of the supervising staff at the center. Over the length of the 70-year history of the Alliance School of Edirne, travel between Paris and Edirne was by railway, and during most of these years it took about six days. It took about ten days for a letter from Paris to Edirne to be delivered to its destination, and vise versa. This meant that getting a reply to a letter a director wrote to central management took about three weeks when the letter was promptly answered, but could take longer if not promptly answered. The fastest means of communication was telegraph, but it was rarely resorted to, because among other reasons, it was exorbitantly expensive, at least until the twenties of the 20 th century. In 1914, a hundredword cable sent from Edirne to Paris cost ff 155.6, about OGL 7, the equivalent of about US$ 1100 of our times!1 The sending of cables from the field to the Alliance Central Management located in Paris was frowned upon. Cables are rare in the Alliance files of Edirne, until the 1920's. Concerning the supervision staff at the center, according to all reports it did not exceed five or six persons whose task was to supervise about 150 schools spread out from Morocco in the west located along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, to Iran in the east and in the middle, the full size of the Ottoman Empire. Under constraints such as these, one would expect the Central Management to grant its directors a substantial degree of freedom to handle all micro matters related to the running of the schools as they thought appropriate. And indeed, on certain subjects the Central Management did so, but on those it thought were important it engaged in micro management to a considerable extent.

1

AAIU, RE-250, "Paris" to Gueron, May 21, 1914

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The Central Management gave an almost totally free hand to the school director to manage the staff that taught Hebrew, Turkish, sewing and needlework in the girls' school; and other subjects not included in the teaching program that were taught in certain years, such as German, accounting, house management in the girls' school, and a course called "économie" in the boys' school (henceforward Group B Staff). The central management did not show much interest in the substance of these subjects that were taught except Hebrew. However, the interest it showed was confined to teaching methodology, but not to the point of bringing the director to order to do something about the deficiency in the way it was taught (Chapter 7). Lastly, the Central Management left the managing of monitors to teach the French part of the teaching program in lower classes to its Paris trained teachers. On the subject of welfare and relief programs, with the most important being the hot lunch program for poor students, the Central Management again left their handlings in the hands of the Director. The group of teachers the Central Management, directly managed, was the one whose members were trained at ENIO. These taught the French component of the teaching program, mostly in the upper grades. To express their elevated status they were called Deputy Directors. Included in this group was the Director himself who mostly rose from their ranks. This group of Alliance personnel will be referred to as Group A staff. At best, the management style the Central Management practiced on this staff can be called paternalistic, and patronizing. At the worst it could be called plain oppressive. All communications between the Edirne schools and the Central Management were channeled through the Alliance Secretariat located in Paris. The Secretariat provided an answer to a director's letter, or comment on it, if it were within its authority to do so. If it were not, the Secretariat would inform the director that he would refer the matter to the Central Committee and would later supply the director its decision on the matter. It thus would appear that the Central Committee was the highest instance in the running of Alliance matters and its word was the last word on any subject that would come up. However, meeting agendas and meeting minute documents for the years 1886-1909 found in Alliance files told a different story. 1 Their study revealed that the Central Committee largely dealt in matters concerning Jews

1 MOSCOU 100-2-2, Ordre du Jour, 1886-1890, MOSCOU 100-3-5, Ordre du Jour, 18971900, MOSCOU Procès Verbaux du Comité Central, 1898-1904, France XIIA 1) 1898-1904, MOSCOU 100-3-6, Procès Verbaux du Comité Central, 1904-1909.

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persecuted in East Europe, particularly Russia, and in North Africa particularly in Morocco, and the help the Alliance provided to alleviate their plight, in particular financial help. Next to this subject came matters related to school management involving the approval of subjects that seemingly appeared in eclectic and random fashion in the agendas for its meetings, and they were mostly budget related. Subjects requiring financial approval ranged from ff 120 as an allocation to a domestic working in a school, to ff 25,000 allocated for the construction of a school building in Casablanca, for instance. Both the subjects got two or three lines of space in meeting minutes. In neither one of the cases is there a reference to some overall budgetary framework or any staff papers on whose basis these allocations that were brought to the attention of the committee for approval. Another example: a type of resolution which occurs, not infrequently is: "We will approve the sending of a teacher to school 'x', provided that the community agrees to pay a specified part of his salary." A Central Committee meeting at the end of every year approved the salary increases, bonuses and other compensation that were granted to staff, resulting from the annual salary review of Directors and Deputy Directors of the Alliance Schools all over the world. 1 At the end of every year an overall Alliance budget was approved for the totality of its schools. The detail shown in the minutes of meetings is confined to a single figure for each one of school types, namely, the ENIO that trained male teachers, a similar one for the Ecole Préparatoire de Filies for female teachers, Lycées, and lastly, under a single expenditure line, the large bulk of primary schools, vocational training programs and agricultural schools all over the world all taken together. In the minutes of the meeting referred to, there was no mention of any document circulated among committee members containing details underlying the financial estimates to be approved, or the fact that some presentation had been made concerning them in the meeting. For example, when lumped together in this fashion, for the year of 1906, the school budget that was approved added up to about ff 1.3 million or US$ 9.2 million of our times, with this amount representing about one half of the total budget for Alliance schools taken together, which the Alliance itself would provide. The seeking of approval from the committee for the planned budget of a particular school in a particular year was a rare event in all the meetings. It thus seems that the Central Committee was approving an overall budget, 1 MOSCOU 100-3-6, Procès Verbaux du Comité Central, 1904-1909, meeting held on 21 December 1904. A similar one was held at the end of every calendar year.

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while leaving some unmentioned authority full freedom to determine specific budgets for specific schools in a given year. What is striking is the conspicuous absence of any discussions or resolutions on overall strategy matters concerning how schools were to be run, and on issues of comprehensive substance either at overall or an individual school level. According to Aron Rodrigue, the supreme authority in the Alliance behind the Central Committee was Jacques Bigart, the all-powerful Alliance General Secretary. "In Paris, most of the day to day work on the schools was done by Bigart. He had a few trusted senior school directors with whom he consulted, such as Gabriel Arie. The Central Committee was a mostly honorific instance in the overall system of the Alliance." 1 The study of the files so far mentioned fully supports this view. 2 Jacques Bigart was appointed as the Secretary of the Alliance in 1881 and kept the position until 1934 when he died at his desk while working. His period of tenure covered most of the years of the history of the Edirne schools. I will therefore refer to the Alliance Central Committee and Secretariat combined (in effect a stand-in for Bigart on both accounts) as "Paris", who communicated with the field on an exclusive basis in the name of the Alliance.

Salaries According to the Instructions Générales, the salary of a "Group A " staff member who had just been appointed to his first position to teach the French component of the school program in a particular school was set at an annual minimum of ff 1200, and a maximum of ff 1400. The information provided on the salary records of Alliance in the personnel files of Group A staff consists of (i) the year in which they began their teaching career in the Alliance system, (ii) the year in which they left employment at the Alliance, either by resigning or in retirement, and their rank whether a Deputy Director or director, at retirement and (iii) their salary record during the years they worked for the Alliance until the time they left. 3 According to a sample of 57 Group A staff members, out of a total of about 150 who taught in Edirne schools at one time or another that were trained at ENIO, or in an equivalent French or European institution, most of 1

Rodrigue to Haker, August 5,2004. Jacques Bigart was born in Alsace in 1855, was a graduate of the Rabbinical Seminary of Paris, and was appointed as Alliance secretary in 1881. He kept his post for 52 years and died in 1934 when at work at his desk. He was 79 years old at the time of his death. (Antebi, pp. 2235). 3 AAIU, Moscou, Fiches du Personnel, 100-1. 2

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them were awarded at entrance with the ff 1200 minimum, a few between ff 1200-1400 and very exceptionally above the maximum. For the four cases in which the staff was recruited directly as Directors in their first assignment, starting salaries ranged between ff 1500-2000 annually. The starting salaries the Alliance awarded did not change during the school's history from 1867 to 1912. Until 1912, Paris did not make adjustment to salaries reflecting changes in the cost of living. The minimum starting salary of ff 1200 represented a monthly income of ff 100 (OGL 4.5). Of the 57 staff member sample, 12 came to Edirne as Directors or Directrices with previous directorship experience in one of the smaller Alliance schools, and an additional 22 who were promoted to a directorship in other Alliance schools after having served a tour of duty in Edirne as deputy directors. This kind of a record shows that "Paris" assigned to Edirne topdrawer staff, which it thought, had directorship potential. The monthly salaries of the sample shows that they peaked at between OGL 11.4-18.9 at the end of an Alliance career that ended not later than 1912. If a teacher continued to work for the Alliance after 1912, information on the salary increases past 1912 were not taken into account in the present study, although they are available in Moscow files. The reason for this is that past 1912, and in particular during World War One, price inflation occurred at a pace that makes comparisons of salaries over time practically not meaningful. Annex 1 provides data representing a rough indication on how the salaries the Alliance paid to its Group A staff, compared to the incomes of those of other gainfully employed persons in the Community, and secondly, what the salary he was paid could buy, representing his standard of living in an absolute sense. According to this data, the starting salary of ff 1200 a year or ff 100 per month, three years after the opening of the first Alliance school in Edirne, around 1870, put the graduate of the ENIO at between 15-20% of the top income category of the Jewish Community of Edirne already, when he was only about twenty years old, and in all probability unmarried. His salary was about the same as an average skilled worker in the same year, with the difference that the last was at least ten years older, a married person and had a family to support. There is no doubt that as far as the Edirne record of the Alliance went, in the years before 1912, the year the Balkan Wars started, the Alliance was a generous employer salary wise to teachers belonging to Group A, possibly because it wanted to instill in this staff the notion of their being an elite, and was prepared to offer them salaries that served the purpose well.

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After 1870, consumer prices fell continuously until 1904, and so did monetary earnings of skilled workers while Alliance salaries were not revised downwards. The result was that in 1897, for example, the minimum Alliance salary of ff 100 a month had become about 50% higher than the annual earnings of a skilled worker in Edirne during the same year. Particularly high were the salaries of directors. Loupo, who was the director that provided to Paris information on practically all school related subjects and more under the sun, on himself and his surroundings, wrote to "Paris" that his monthly personal expenses for the year 1886, consisted of food OGL 4, rent 1.7, clothing 1.8, miscellaneous 3.2 adding up to OGL 10.7. By 1903, at the time he left Edirne, he was making OGL 18.9 a month, or saving nearly half his income. 1 There were only very few community members in the city who could make more than this kind of money. What is particularly striking in salaries paid to Alliance teachers is that they were determined in accordance with the "equal pay for equal work" principal, without paying attention to the gender of the teacher. With the struggle for fully applying the principle still not being over, it is refreshing to find a major organization in the world, that a full 130 years before our time, practiced the principle of equal pay for equal work, seemingly without provoking protests in its management board of the type: "Why are we paying our female teachers as much as our male ones?" It is also worth noting that once the Alliance gave female teachers equal opportunity in the work field, they took up the challenge and held their own in all the positions they were placed in, from the top at directorship level to the bottom. Concerning salaries of teachers belonging to Group B, all of whom were locally recruited, there is very little information. Most likely, it was the Community Council and the School Director that together determined them. "Paris" showed little interest in the subject. There are only two pieces of information on the salaries of teachers who were Rabbis. According to the first, in 1892, a 34-year old Rabbi received an annual salary of ff 552, and a second one who was 38 years old received one of ff 690. 2 The second piece of information comes from the Boz de la Verdad on a Rabbi teaching at the Girls' School who complained to Alice Gueron, the school directrice, about his low salary which totaled three Napoleons monthly, the equivalent of ff 60 a month, with which, in his words, he had problems making ends meet. 3 He most probably was a family man with a number of children.

1

AAIU, TURQUIE-X, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople... March 1886. AAIU, TURQUIE-X, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, 31 March 1893, Rapport Semestriel. 3 La Boz de la Verdad, n.194, January 19, 1912.

2

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Whether the salary paid to Rabbis could justifiably be called a low one is not certain, because practically all Rabbis employed by Alliance Schools were part time employees. In a year when the Boys School had six grades, 36 hours of Hebrew teaching was required. Two Rabbis taught in those years, and hence, each one of them could be employed only on a half time basis. As a halftime job the pay was comparable to the one a Group A teacher received. On the pay of Turkish teachers, there is even less information, confined to two teachers who taught in 1892 with the first getting ff 790 yearly and the second ff 775. These salaries were a little better than those Rabbis were paid, but again, considering that Turkish teachers were employed on even less than a half time basis, they could be considered satisfactory salaries. Concerning the salaries of other teachers the sewing teachers of the girls' school were paid between ff 600-700, when they were employed on a half time basis, as most were, and so was the house management teacher who taught less than half time. As to other teachers that taught subjects outside the official school program prepared in Paris, like the German teacher, no salaiy information is available. One last subgroup among Group B teachers was the monitor subgroup that taught the French part of the teaching program in one of the lower classes. There is a large variation in the salaries monitors were paid. Unlike other Group B teachers, they were employed on a full time basis. The top annual salary on record for monitors of both sexes, was ff 300, OGL 13.5, or about OGL 1, monthly 1 but monthly salaries of about 40-80 kuru§ ( O G L 1=100 kuru§) are also reported, or a little more than pocket money.

Personnel Management and Other Employment Conditions For teachers belonging to "Group A", personnel management was highly centralized. Appointments were the prerogative of "Paris". As part of the centralistic way the Alliance managed the affairs of its Edirne schools, "Paris" moved Deputy Directors from one school to another without consulting the Directors involved, and at times even in mid school year. 2 Generous an employer the Alliance was salarywise, it was tight fisted on the subject of fringe benefits, such as regular leave, sick leave, and the working expenses items of its staff it was prepared to reimburse. Fringe benefits as we know them in our time hardly existed. The Alliance operated a

1 AAIU, RE-21, "Paris" to Loupo, 11 August 1886, AAIU, TURQUIE VII-E, Gueron to "Paris" Andrinople, February 13, 1913. 2 AAIU, RE-15, "Paris" to Elie Carmona, 18 August, 1885.

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retirement fund with the participation of the staff. However, the pensions it awarded, did not amount to much. Moise Mitrani, one of the leading lights of the Alliance school that worked for the organization for 52 years, was awarded a monthly pension of ff 600 monthly upon his retirement corresponding to 38% of his last salary! 1 Mrs. Demitriadis, a one-time directrice of the girls' school was awarded, after 32 years of service, a monthly pension of ff 5, by the Community Council, corresponding to about 10% of her annual salary and an additional single French franc from "Paris"! 2 The amounts she received (about 22 Ottoman kuru§) would have put her well below the poverty line if this were her only source of income, or if she did not have a husband to support her. Directors enjoyed a housing allowance of up to ff 400 annually that represented no more than a 10% addition to their salaries. The amount was less than what was needed to rent a house that was commensurate with their social status in the community. Occasionally, staff members were awarded bonuses for exceptional deeds the Alliance approved of. 3 Staff expenses incurred in authorized traveling comprised only two categories. The first was work related, and in this case only directors were asked to travel for such a purpose. The second was appointment related, and associated with moving from one school to another. When traveling by rail, staff was expected to travel second class in Balkan countries, and presumably further east. Any one traveling further west of Budapest was authorized to travel in third class only, and this included staff of Director rank! Journeying to Vienna from Edirne on Alliance business, Loupo had traveled on the segment between Budapest-Vienna on a Saturday, as was clear from his expense account, he had submitted to "Paris". The Alliance sought an explanation. Loupo lamely wrote to Paris that he was obliged to travel on a Saturday because the train he would have traveled on either a Friday or a Sunday, lacked a third class car. 4 "Paris" was very strict with its directors, on their personal working expenses it was prepared to reimburse. In a case involving Alice Gueron, "Paris" had no problem deducting from her salary the sum of ff 156.6 for a cable referred to earlier in the chapter, the equivalent of her salary for about two weeks. In the process "Paris" did not take into consideration that she held Directrice rank, the subject of the cable was strictly school business, and this was a "first offence". "Paris" was equally strict in holding its directors 1 2 3 4

AAIU, AAIU, AAIU, AAIU,

Moscou, Fiches du Personnel 100-158/14. TURQUIE IV-E, Algranti (later Gueron) to "Paris", Andrinople, December 23, 1910. RE-242, "Paris" to Gueron, 9, May 1913. TURQUIE VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, August 22, 1886.

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responsible for the financial delinquencies of their staff. For example, it took Mitrani to task for having overpaid a Deputy Director who had resigned from the school. It warned Mitrani that if he did not recuperate the overpaid amount from the delinquent it would deduct it from his own salary!1 The Alliance informally operated a medical insurance scheme in paternalistic fashion, as can be expected, without spelling out its rules. For every application from a staff member for financial assistance to meet medical expenses, it considered itself sole judge on what it was prepared to pay for, on a case-by-case basis. This policy that involved "Playing Doctor" from Paris towards "Group A" teachers at the two Alliance schools of Edirne was probably the most oppressive aspect of the Alliance personnel management. Here are some examples: Mitrani asked permission for traveling to Paris to treat a stomach ailment. Paris answered "It is no good going to Paris for treating a stomach ailment..." A long exchange of letters followed this first letter. His case went all the way up to the Central Committee (as explained earlier a euphemism for Jacques Bigart) that decided to grant him the leave, but only on August 29, 1913 four full months after he made the original request and only a few days before the start of the new school year! 2 Rachel Levi was diagnosed as suffering from anemia and wanted to get sick leave in a sea resort during the summer vacation. She got the following reply from "Paris". "Last year you had a very long vacation in Paris. Physicians do not recommend taking sea baths for anemic persons. We believe that good fresh air, walks in the countryside and an appropriate diet is all what you need and all these are available in Edirne. We recommend that you take two hours leave every day rather than one extra day of leave per week [you asked for]." 3 This type of management had its upside part as well, though in fewer instances, and here are some examples: "We are in reception of your letter of 10 March. We are worried about the condition of your health and accord you three months of leave to get better. Mme Cohen will replace you. M. Loupo will be in charge of the administration of the school." 4 The letter Ida Abramowitz had written to Paris had expressed her condition of health but she had not asked for leave specifically and directly. "Paris" must have had an additional information source on her condition.

1

AAIU, RE-275, "Paris" to Mitrani, June, 1920. -AAIU, RE-241, "Paris" to Mitrani, April 4, 1913, RE-243, August 19, 1913, RE-244, August 19,1913, August 29,1913.

2

3 4

AAIU, RE-5, "Paris" to Rachel Levi, 30 June 1884. AAIU, RE-49, "Paris", to Abramowitz, April 11, 1890.

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An even more generous act concerned Rosa Levy, who was granted a special bonus to cover her medical expenses whose sick leave was extended several times over a period of two years, and when she finally got well enough to resume her work, she was given a salary raise from ff 1300 to ff 1400.1 There was an additional case of a female Deputy Director who asked for an appointment in the Djedeida Agricultural School in Tunis, immediately upon completing her studies in Paris at "Pension Bischoffsheim". "Paris" obliged, but it seems that soon after her arrival to Djedeida, she had a nervous breakdown, and had to be replaced. "Paris" asked Loupo to arrange for one of her relatives in Edirne to travel to Djedeida with "Paris" paying his fare in addition to paying hers, to accompany her back to Edirne that was her hometown. 2 Until she recovered, she continued to draw half her salary for more than six months, and was reinstated at her work when she did. 3 On balance, had "Paris" employed the services of a physician in Edirne, even on a part time basis, and act on his advise on individual cases, instead of second guessing the state of the health of its staff from Paris, and what needs to be done about it, it would have saved a lot of correspondence, and heart ache on the part of the staff. A Deputy Director or Director could not leave Edirne during holidays without the explicit permission of "Paris", even when he was prepared to do this at his own expense. There is a case of "Paris" refusing to permit a Deputy Directrice at the Girls' school to travel to Paris for the summer to visit her mother on the grounds that it had already approved such a visit to Paris in the previous year. In its view, there was no need to repeat the visit again, and "recommended" her to spend her vacation in Edirne!4 When Moise Mitrani applied for leave following the death of his father "Paris" enquired: "What is the exact date of the death of your father?" 5 "Paris" reprimanded Rachel Behar, a Girls' School Directrice, for traveling to Istanbul to spend Passover there, presumably with her family, without asking for its permission. 6 Elie Carmona, a Deputy Director, was refused permission to spend his summer vacation in Salonika on the grounds that he had already

1

AAIU, 1887. 2 AAIU, 3 AAIU, 4 AAIU, 5 AAIU, 6 AAIU,

RE-16, "Paris" to Rosa Levy October 8, 1885, RE-21, 29, August, 1886, RE-26, 3 June RE-93, "Paris" to Loupo, 29 February 1896. RE-92, "Paris" to Sara Ungar, 8 April 1896, 22 May 1896. RE-252, "Paris" to Mitrani, July 15, 1914. RE-242, "Paris" to Mitrani, April 13, 1913. RE-4, "Paris" to Rachel Behar, 22 April 1884.

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spent his vacation there the previous summer and in the eyes of "Paris" there was no "need" to repeat the experience so frequently!1 Only very exceptionally would "Paris" participate in reimbursing travel expenses during summer leave, like for example when Sara Ungar, a most valued directrice of the Girls' School, was regularly granted a travel allowance of ff 200 for traveling to Bonn, her city of birth, for her summer vacation.2 Getting married required written permission from "Paris". According to Edirne files, there is a case of a young Deputy Director at the school, fresh from ENIO, who asked permission to get married. "Paris" refused his request in preemptory fashion on the grounds that in its view, with the salary he was earning, he could not afford to support a wife! 3 Nevertheless, this person was making the minimum salary of OGL 4.5 (ff 100) a month at the start of his first assignment in the Edirne School for Boys. Of course, once he had to support a wife and presumably one or two children a few years after the marriage, his standard of living would have declined, but still he could live at a reasonable, even if modest, level of comfort, and he could look forward to receiving from "Paris" salary increases. Eventually, after eight months "Paris" did relent to the marriage. The case of David Levy and Dina Halevi was probably one of the more celebrated ones in the annals of the Edirne Schools on the subject of the need to get permission to marry. The happening started off with the following communication from "Paris" to David Levy: "We heard from M. Levy (another teacher named Levy) stationed in Tunis that you got engaged to Miss Halevy and that the wedding is to take place shortly. The question we raise is "are you not too young to get married and do you have the means to maintain a family?" Your decision to get married will affect your future career. We had in mind to appoint you and Miss Halevy to the directorships of the two Beirut schools [if you give up your marriage]. Is Miss Halevy prepared to leave Andrinople for Beirut? In any case what you do or you don't, we make no commitments [!]." 4

What is really unexpected in the letter is the reference to their not earning enough money to get married with their monthly salaries, which when combined, came to at least OGL 9, an income which put them well in

1

AAIU, RE-27, "Paris" to Carmona, 22 July 1887. AAIU, RE-66, "Paris" to Ungar, 4 November 1892, 'The Central Committee who desires to give a new expression of the sympathy and high esteem it holds you with accords you with îî 200 as a contribution to your travel expenses ". 3 AAIU, RE-93, "Paris" to Loupo, 5 June 1896. 4 AAIU, RE-5, "Paris" to David Levy, 11 July 1884. 2

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the top 10% category in the Jewish community of Edirne. As to their age, he was 21, and she 23 years old. 1 A furious correspondence followed, between the two and "Paris", with "Paris" trying on them all possible means in the book to prevent their m a r r i a g e . 2 It reappointed each one of them to positions that were geographically separated by large distances. Both refused the appointments. "Paris" then switched to stick and carrot tactics including the delivery of an ultimatum to Miss Halevy that if she does not agree to be promoted to the position of directrice at the Beirut Girls' School it will fire her! These did not work either. In the end, after four months of correspondence, "Paris" relented to their marriage and promoted both of them to become the directors of the two schools at Tatar Bazardjik, in Bulgaria, located only about 150 kms to the north east of Edirne! "Paris" showed an interest in the personal lives of its staff much like anxious parents would show concerning the wayward acts of their children, which in their parents' view could lead to trouble. In 1897, a letter went out to Samuel Loupo asking him to investigate the gambling habits of his staff. "Paris" wanted detailed answers to questions, like who was gambling with whom, who was loosing money, who was winning, and what kind of sums were involved. Loupo dutifully investigated the matter and wrote a detailed report on the subject. 3 With persistent reports on the profligacy of Elie Carmona, and in particular, his ever accumulating gambling debts, "Paris" wrote to him, saying that in the future it will pay his salary to his wife! 4 She was the directrice of the Girls' School. Even the great Loupo himself, was not immune from close scrutiny into his actions. When Paris heard from Loupo that he had managed to wheedle out a ff 675 donation from the Anglo-Jewish Association to purchase a piano for the Boys' School, instead of congratulating him on his achievement, it promptly fired a broadside at him in the form of three questions: (i) Do you know how to play the piano? (ii) If you do, in what years did you learn how to play? And (iii) what steps did you take to make sure that you will not be cheated in the act of the purchase, and that the piano you purchased will be really delivered to you and not another one of inferior

1

AAIU, Fiches du Personnel, Moscou, 100-1-56 /04, 56/07. AAIU, RE-6, "Paris" to David Levy, 11 August, 1884, 19 September 1884, - to Loupo, 1 September 1884, 9 November 1884, - to Halevy, 1 September 1884, 24 September 1884. 3 AAIU, TURQUIE V-E, Loupo to Paris, Andrinople, December 22, 1897. 4 AAIU, RE-15, "Paris" to Eli Carmona, 18 August, 1885. 2

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quality? 1 "Paris" did not ask Loupo the first and obvious question to ask, namely, to what use he will put the piano at the school. Concerning Group B staff none of these policies and restrictions applied. They enjoyed no fringe benefits and as far as "Paris" was concerned, outside their school hours they could be on their own and do as they pleased.

Ideological

Vigilance

This is a two-track subject. The first involved the French connection, namely how well the school was spreading the good word on French civilization and culture. The second track is how well was the school staff acting as good Jews in their religious observation. On the first track, "Paris" did not have to worry about "Group A" staff, maintaining their ideological purity re Alliance objectives. Past ten years after the establishment of its schools in Edirne, and until 1912, (Chapter 11) all school directors and their Deputy directors teaching French subjects, were graduates of ENIO. ENIO had been set up to prepare teachers to teach Alliance values, with the best ones among them eventually becoming Directors. The record of Edirne schools showed that the Directors and their Deputy directors were zealous, and no-holds-barred converts to the cause of spreading the good word on French civilization. At times, they were "more Catholic than the Pope". There is no instance in the correspondence between "Paris" and the Edirne schools where an ideology matter appeared in the form of the mildest reprimand, except on one occasion involving Loupo, but this was the other way around. He was giving a course on French history to an evening class of vocational trainees. Loupo wrote a letter to Paris stating that with the budget he was allowed, he could not teach a full course on 2000 years of French history beginning with Ancient Gaul, and asked for additional funds to be able to do so. Back came the answer from Paris stating that there is no need for the young Jewish boys of Edirne undergoing vocational training to study the full history of France, and if he doesn't have the budget to do so he should confine the course to contemporary French history (the 19th century).2 Loupo being the person he was, who did not take "no" for an answer easily, (Annex 2) wrote a second letter telling "Paris" that he had tried to follow the advise "Paris" gave him, but the funds were still insufficient to teach even 19th century French history. Back came the answer from Paris "a general history of the 19th century would be quite sufficient, and cut down 1 2

AAIU, RE-50, Paris, to "Loupo", June 3, 1890. AAIU, RE-48, Paris" to Loupo Paris, March 12, 1890.

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detail until the budget you have covers the course you are giving." 1 In between the lines, what "Paris" was saying to Loupo was: "We do not have the slightest doubt about your ideological purity, but please don't be more of a royalist than the King"! Concerning the second track of Alliance on religious observation, the story was a different one. "Paris" tried hard to have its staff observe the rules of the Jewish religion and kept a vigilant watch to ensure that the staff was not breaking them. In this respects "Paris" saw eye to eye with both the Community Council and the Grand Rabbinate In a circular dated 16, May 16, 1894 bearing his signature, Jacques Bigart appealed for stricter vigilance in the observation of the Jewish religion. The circular included a warning and is quoted below:2 On many occasions, the Central Committee had to remind the teachers of our circulars 52, 139, 140, 141 [we had sent to them], concerning the religious conduct of Alliance staff. It frequently happens that teachers believe they can ignore our instructions, live the lives of true free thinkers, and neglect religious practices that are dear to the hearts of Jewish Community members in whose midst they live... Such disorders cannot be tolerated any more. In entering into the service of the Alliance the teacher knows the obligations he undertook.... We cannot keep in our service those who do not conform to these obligations.

These circulars notwithstanding, infringements continued. On one occasion when a report reached "Paris" that teachers of the Girls' School were eating in restaurants that were serving non-kosher food, it asked the Directrice to investigate the matter. The Directrice wrote back to Paris that she did that, and found that such a "sacrilegious" act was never committed3. The Chief Rabbi complained to "Paris" about what it considered to be excessive mixing of the two sexes among the teaching staff. A copy of the letter was sent to the Director of the Boys' School, M. Mitrani. It read: "The Rabbinate wants the female teachers in the Boys' School to be replaced by male teachers: The people are not happy over eight female teachers mixing with 22 male ones. The female teachers teach children up to the age of 15. Some of the male teachers are not Jews [heaven forbid!]. The Alliance should correct the situation."4 At some point, the non-observation of Jewish religion by Alliance teachers assumed proportions to the point of becoming a public matter and 1

AAIU, RE-49. "Paris", to Loupo, April 8, 1890. AAIU, RE-77, "Paris", to Loupo, 16 May 1894. 3 AAIU, TURQUIE VII-E, "Gueron" to Paris, Andrinople, November 26, 1911. 4 AAIU, RE-236, Paris, September 8, 1912, Grand Rabin de la Communauté d'Andrinople to Paris cc: Mitrani. 2

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reached the Jewish Press of Edirne. As a result "Paris" formulated a seventh circular to be circulated among the staff of the school that said the following: "The Central Committee of Paris expresses dissatisfaction at the laxity shown by the teachers of its Edirne schools in observing religious practices. Though not wanting to interfere with the private lives of its instructors, it calls them to a strict observation of the Sabbath, [other] holidays, and Jewish religious practices generally." 1 Eventually, "Paris" went easier on religious observation. It is noteworthy that the day Bigart died in 1934 at his desk was a Saturday. 2 Working on Saturdays is a serious offense not only for the orthodox but for the conservative and reform denominations as well. Actually, what made matters worse was that a few moments before the actual hour of his death he was to start a work cession with the Director of the Basra School of the Alliance, and it was to persons like him that Bigart used to throw his "observe your religion" circulars. In what year this ideological change occurred in Bigart is not known. It could have been a gradual process. Concerning group B teachers, "Paris" was not concerned about their attitude towards Alliance ideology. There was no need to worry about Rabbis not observing their religion to the letter. Concerning Turkish teachers, who were Muslims there was nothing to worry about and as to other teachers, it did not seem to matter on how religiously observant they were.

Operational

Management

At times, on matters of school management of the current or daily type, the interventions from "Paris" looked reasonable and warranted. A typical example in this respect is a two and a half page letter going out to Angela Gueron in which she was taken to task over day-to-day management issues, like her practicing a teaching week of 32 hours instead of the 38 "Paris" prescribed, her accepting for vocational training students above the accepted maximum age of 12, and her Deputy Directrices teaching at different school hours of the day than those "Paris" had requested. In a second letter the following is written: "We have heard that your students have leave on Friday afternoons, Saturdays and Sundays. This is half a day more of weekend-leave than we allow. They should be at school during Sunday afternoon". 3

1

La Bozfifela Verdad 14 August 1911, Issue 154. Antebi,p. 33. 3 AAIU, RE-246, "Paris" to "Gueron", Undated November 26, 1913 RE-238, October 1912 2

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Mitrani was not spared from this kind of letter either. He was taken to task about a Deputy Director whose full teaching hours prescribed in Alliance regulations, Mitrani seemingly was unable to use, and allowed the Deputy Director to teach fewer hours than the 38 he was committed to teach in a week. The letter concluded with the expectation that the extra teaching hours he owed to the Alliance should be used for teaching French.1 There were only a few instances in which "Paris" responded to appeals, from Directors and Deputy Directors on the subject of teaching methodology and management. To give a few examples, D. Levy wrote about some changes he wanted to introduce in the teaching methodology and got a positive reaction on his proposals. Sara Ungar proposed changes in how she went about collecting fees from the parents of her students, and her proposals were favorably received in "Paris". 2 On one particular case it applauded Gueron's idea of having students correct each others' notebooks as a means to sharpen their learning processes. There were others.3 At other times the limits of getting in micro detail were well exceeded. As an example, "Paris" was not prepared to let Loupo decide on the type of lock the school door should be equipped with, and refused the funds to buy the lock Loupo wanted to buy! 4 Due to its having its hands full with micro management, chunks of the operational management process slipped through its fingers without their being controlled from "Paris" even in the broadest terms. A noticeable example in this respect was in leaving Loupo entirely free to decide on how much he could travel out of Edirne to keep an eye on behalf of "Paris" on what was going on in the small communities of Edirne Vilayet, their schooling needs and their schools. "Paris" did not draw up terms of reference to Loupo for such work. The result was that Loupo spent quite a bit of his working time outside Edirne, visiting the schools of the small communities of the Vilayet, sometimes even those in Bulgarian communities as far away as the Danube River, and writing voluminous reports on them (Annex 2). "Paris" did not react to his traveling even beyond the boundaries of the Edirne Vilayet, did not acknowledge the reception of his copious and interesting reports that brimmed with information on the Jewish communities of the Balkans, but did not

1

AAIU, RE-247, "Paris" to Mitrani December 17,1913. AAIU RE-48, "Paris", to David Levi February 14, 1890 RE-242,"Paris" to Gueron May 22, 1913, RE-245, October 10, 1913, RE-248, February 4, 1914, RE-48, to David Levi, 14 February, 1890, RE-125, to Ungar, May 11, 1900. 3 AAIU, RE-12, "Paris" to Loupo, 4 March 1885, RE-19, ", 10 March, 1886, RE-57, "Paris" to David Levi 30 June 1891. 4 AAIU-RE 95, "Paris" to Loupo, 24 September 1896. 2

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reprimand him for doing so either. It goes without saying that Loupo's traveling could only be done at the expense of the time he could allocate to running his own school. By contrast Mitrani, his successor spent little time out of Edirne and only on the rare occasions Paris specifically asked him to do so. 1 The general impression is that decentralization in the school operational management occurred by default rather than by design. It is just that "Paris" had its hands so full in micro managing the various aspects of school activity, that it lacked sufficient capacity to provide a full coverage in the detail it intended to control. There was so much "Paris" could micromanage, given the large numbers of schools it operated and its very limited central staff.

Budgeting, Accounting, Control, and Reporting This is an area that is difficult to assess due to lack of data as explained further down in this section. As far as Edirne Schools went, it appears that the budget was planned in two parts. "Paris" planned the first, and itemized the expenditures it would finance out of its own funds, consisting mostly of the salaries and fringe benefits of Group A staff, and their expenses. The second part of the school budget was prepared locally, presumably by the Community Council and School Director. It comprised the salaries of all the locally recruited school staff except monitors, and all other school expenses. Who kept the accounts on the modest amounts financing other foreign donors contributed to the running expenses of the school is unknown. Salaries accounted for about 60-70% of total current school expenditures; about 20% were accounted for by welfare support programs to poor students (food and clothing), and the remainder, represented various other expenditure items. The Alliance financed roughly one half of the total running costs of the two schools taken together. "Paris" prepared its part of the school budget without consulting its director. As mentioned in a previous section concerning the correspondence between the field and "Paris", individual school budgets were rarely submitted to Central Committee for approval. In the 23 years between 1886-1909, on which information is available the budget of the Edirne schools never came up in Central Committee meetings for approval.

1 AAIU-RE 281, "Paris", to Mitrani, December 21, 1921. This is the only letter that could be found in RE files containing a specific request from "Paris" to undertake a mission to the schools of a neighboring community.

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Once "Paris" approved that part of the budget, which the Alliance would pay for, its execution involved considerable micro management. About two thirds of the letters "Paris" sent to Edirne over the whole length of the study period were on budgetary matters. They mostly consisted of payment orders. "Paris" approved all expense statements from its individual Group A staff members posted at the schools anywhere in the world. There is no evidence to suggest that the Director reviewed any of them before their being mailed to Paris by individual claimants, or "Paris" requesting from a Director an opinion on them before it approved them. Individual payment orders could be as small as ff 40 (about US$ 280 of our times). 1 On matters of salary, "Paris" acted likewise. In such a set up, the role of the Director consisted of acting as a bank teller of our times. He gave out the cash, kept the accounts of how much he had paid out, and to whom in a particular month, as per the payment instructions he received from "Paris". Some pieces of expenditure accounting found their way, for some reason into the letters from Edirne to "Paris" and these contain some indication as to the kind of accounting detail "Paris" expected from its Edirne schools. As an example of the micro management detail "Paris" expected its Edirne School Directors to itemize postage expenditures by each letter sent to Paris or anywhere else. 2 About 150 letters went out of the Boys' School every year at the end of which a list had to be drawn up showing the stamp cost of sending each one of them. Taking into account the Girls' School correspondence, the number would double to 300. Also, school furniture and fixtures purchased locally had to be itemized piece by piece, each with its cost. The comprehensive financial reporting "Paris" expected from its Edirne Directors appeared in a circular sent to them in 1892. The circular was incorporated into the Instructions Genérales of 1903 (Annex 3). It contained a detailed format for such reports and expected delivery dates. 3 This information the directors dutifully forwarded to "Paris" as requested, in their bimonthly or quarterly reports. This reporting covered only the Alliance part of the school budget. As far as the second part of the budget, which the Community Council prepared and handled "Paris" was interested in receiving only limited information on subjects reported in Annex 3. In letters going out of Edirne, there are many references to bimonthly and quarterly reports being sent to "Paris" from Edirne as attachments to letters. In addition twenty-three letters were found in the files containing 1 2 3

AAIU, RE-236, "Paris", to Mitrani, August 22, 1912. AAIU, TURQUIE-X, Mitrani "Paris", Andrinople 7 July 1911. AAIU RE 64, "Paris" to Loupo, 5 August 1892.

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letters sent from "Paris" to Edirne during 22 years that were surveyed in this study confirming the reception of such reports. But not a single one among them was found in Alliance files. 1 The reason may be that they were lost during the occupation in World War Two, but more likely they were trashed wholesale even before the war, as none of the attachments mentioned in outgoing letters no matter what subject they were on can be found among the files that exist in our day. At the end of the school year the two parts of the annual expenditure budget for every school, the first the Alliance part and the second prepared under the Community Council were put together in Paris and published in the Alliance Annual Report covering all the schools. This is the only instance where the total running costs of particular schools appear, unless such presentations also appeared in quarterly or bimonthly reports mentioned earlier which were lost. In addition to current school expenditures reporting there were rehabilitation and construction works, which the Alliance financed, and "Paris" expected its Edirne Director of the Boys' School to act as a supervisor for cost control; the financial reporting form for this purpose was also a very detailed one.2 Until the spacious school building for the Boys' School of contemporary standards opened its gates to students in 1906, the condition of the school buildings were poor and they required frequent large-scale maintenance and rehabilitation works. "Paris" did not expect its director to take the task of financially supervising such works lightly. Most of the reprimands, which "Paris" issued to Loupo, expressed dissatisfaction on how he was performing this task and in particular on the subject of cost overruns. 3 Supervising such works took a considerable amount of the working hours of the director of the Boys' School, which of course was time off from the management of the teaching. This state of affairs continued while the rehabilitation work was done. Overall "Paris" expected to receive annually 20 reports from the Director alone. In addition "Paris" expected a report from each deputy director at least once every two months. The number of Deputy Directors employed in 1 AAIU, RE-23, "Paris" to Loupo, 23 December 1886, RE-20, 17 June 1886, RE-27 22 August, 1887, RE-34, June 21, 1888, RE- 54, 14 January 1891, RE 64, 5 August 1892, RE-65, September 30, 1892, RE-68, 17 January, 1893, RE-77, 24 August 1894, RE-82, 11 January 1895, RE-84, 10 May 1895, RE-91, 21 January 1895, RE-92, 14 April 1896, RE-92, 12 May 1896, RE-95, 18 October 1896; RE-62, to Ungar 10 May 1892, RE-63, 14 April 1893, RE-69 12 July 1892, RE-70, 12 May 1893, RE-76, March 27, 1894, RE-86, 17 July 1895, RE-89, 12 May 1896, RE-94,17 November 1896; RE-20, to Carmona, 17 July 1886. 2 AAIU, RE-51, "Paris", to Loupo, August 10, 1890 . 3 AAIU-RE 47, "Paris" to Loupo, January 24, 1890, RE-51, August 3, 1890, RE-52, February 22,1900.

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the two schools peaked in 1912 to 11. The number of total reports expected annually from the Director and Deputy Directors taken together came to 20x2+11x6=106, as a minimum. In addition, and as also mentioned financial reports on construction and rehabilitation works had to be reported upon and also an unspecified number of special reports. An estimate of how many of these reports were actually written appears in Annex 3.

7 THE TEACHING STAFF

Group A teachers As mentioned in Chapter 7, Group A teachers consisted of those who taught the French component of the teaching program, and qualified as Deputy Directors. To assure itself an adequate supply of them, the Alliance established ENIO in as early as 1867.1 Gradually, this school became the most important source for qualified teachers who could teach in French. 2 About 85-90 % of the students that were admitted to the ENIO were graduates from the schools that the Alliance had established in the Jewish communities of the east, in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and Iran. A large majority of these students came from the Jewish communities of Spanish-Exile origin that had settled in those parts of the Ottoman Empire that became present day Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria There was a residual number of between 10-15% of ENIO students that came from European countries, in particular France, Spain (from Tetuan), some from Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in one case from England. It took three years to complete the ENIO. In 1885, a fourth year was added to graduate.3 Before authorized to act as teachers, ENIO graduates were expected to pass the French National Examination for the Brevet Elémentaire (Primary School Certificate), which was the diploma all French elementary school teachers had to obtain before they were qualified to teach.

^ Rodrigue 1, p. 43. The personnel files of the "Moscou" series do not mention specifically whether a particular teacher is a graduate of ENIO. The files show a large variety of diplomas the two principal ones of who are "Supérieure " and "Elémentaire". In a sample of 120 teachers comprising all teachers whose family names were either Levy or Cohen it was found that 55 of them hold a diploma called "Supérieure and 34 "Elémentaire". The remaining 31 have different names attached, "De Capacité", "Diplôme Rabin", "Un Certificat", "Deux Certificats", and "Agronome". Of the remaing 31, in one case the person is mentioned to have "Aucun certificat", and for seven the education space is left blank. Following further consultation with Ecole files it was found that "Supérieure" and "Elémentaire" are stand-ins for an ENIO diploma, though what standards each one refers to is unrecorded. Whether the difference could arise from a diploma issued by ENIO and the second for Girls of a somewhat lower standard was checked. It was found that proportionally no fewer "Supérieure" were awarded to female teachers as well and in particular to those of the Bischopsheim Institute. 3 Rodrigue 2, p. 73. 2

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Compared to the needs of the total Alliance system all over the world, the output of ENIO was limited. Until 1885, 18 years past its establishment, there were still only 21 students studying at ENIO in four grades. 1 Until 1900, the number of ENIO graduates did not exceed ten annually, and Edirne was the only one, even if an important one, of the 109 schools that were operating to teach 29,000 students. In 1913 the output of ENIO had reached 28 graduates, but the number of schools the Alliance had gone up to 183 with about 43,700 students.2 Under these conditions, the length of time the Alliance succeeded in keeping the teachers it had trained, and in addition, how long it could afford to keep the teachers of a particular school in before it was compelled to rotate them, was a moot point. There usually is a minimum amount of time it is desirable to keep a teacher in the school of his assignment before rotating him into another school. The results obtained from the sample of 57 Group A teachers, referred to earlier in the Chapter, on the average length of a career in the Alliance, and numbers of years of service in either one of the two Edirne schools is shown in Table 1 below. TABLE 1 Group A staff Total Career and Edirne Tour of Duty Lengths Boys and Girls School combined In Years Average Edirne

Alliance Staff Numbers Staff with 20 or more tenure years 22 Staff with less than 20 years Full Information not available

Total Sample

Tenure

Staff Tour of duty Numbers

Length

30.6

22

6.8

13.1

35

4.1

18.1

57

4.4

Length

31 4

57

The average of 18.1 years for a tenure length for the Alliance staff that did a tour of duty in Edirne school is not much to write home about. Assuming an average age of about twenty at graduation from ENIO, the average graduate left the Alliance when he was 38 years old, when a good half 1 2

NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N.2 February 1885, p. 27. Rodrigue 1, p. 21.

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of his working years was still ahead of him. However, when distinguishing between staff according to the longevity in working for the Alliance, two groups appear with striking differences between them. Most members of the first group, representing about 40% of the sample, averaged 30.6 years of employment by the Alliance. This staff was usually promoted to the rank of Director within a few years past their starting posts, as Deputy Directors, and stayed with the Alliance until they were about 51 years old with most of their working years behind them. For the second group, representing about 60% of the sample, the average tenure length was 13.1 years only. This means that the average member of this group was 33 years old when he left the Alliance, with most of his working years still ahead of him. Thus the amortization of the training expenses of this staff had to be spread over a small number of years. For example, if the average of 13.1 years was doubled, then the overall cost of training could have been significantly reduced, or alternatively for the same training cost outlay, a lot more teachers could have been trained. That the Alliance could not keep the teachers it trained in its payroll was not due to the salaries it paid them. As was described earlier in the Chapter, the teachers were paid competitive and even generous salaries. The paternalistic and heavy-handed personnel policies of the Alliance described in the previous chapter could have been a significant reason. The Alliance was never short of students who wanted to study at ENIO, and in the process spend four years in Paris at no charge to themselves. However, according to Edirne files, once they graduated from ENIO and appointed to a school as Deputy Directors, the Alliance had difficulties in keeping them at their posts for long. The average tour of duty in an Edirne school was 4.4 years, 6.8 years for the first subgroup and 4.1 for the second subgroup of "Group A" staff appearing in Table 1. If one deducts from the first group three directors with exceptionally long tours of duty at one of the Edirne schools, namely Moise Mitrani for 32 years, Samuel Loupo and Sara Ungar for 20 years each, the average tour of duty lengths of the two subgroups become nearly the same, at about four years. This is a rather short span for a teacher to adjust to a new location, community and school environment, so that the time he was really effective as a teacher could not be more than a couple of years and for a director even less. The reason for this low average and high rotation rate had to do with the chronic staff shortage and is further discussed below. Once an ENIO graduate teaching in an Edirne school decided to leave it for another workplace, he had plenty of alternatives to choose from. A young person with a diploma equivalent to a primary school of eight years with a

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good command of French, enhanced by four years of study at ENIO in Paris, enjoyed a competitive status in the employment market of Edirne, and in many instances, out of town as well, for example in Istanbul and in the immigration absorbing countries of the Western Hemisphere. In the employment market for Government and other public organizations, there was no discrimination against Jews in the Ottoman State. Ottoman institutions welcomed staff with a good knowledge of French. The result was that the Alliance schools of Edirne were chronically short of qualified teachers, and at times desperately so. In the years between 1905-1912, of the 21 Deputy Directors that taught in the Edirne School for Boys ten of them, and among them some of the best left it for outside employment. Moise Mitrani, the author of the Annual Report quoted from, wrote about the deteriorating motivation of his teachers and their increasingly being drawn to careers other than teaching, in banks, insurance companies, and commercial houses, and last, but not least, in Turkish schools who more than welcomed Alliance students as French teachers. He concluded: "It is the best teachers that are leaving us".1 The worst and most brutal form of leaving the Edirne School for a Deputy Director was by plain absconding, never to return. It was only when such deserters were traced and threatened with lawsuits that the Alliance was able to recover the cost of training them. There are at least six of these on record in the boys' school alone. 2 The majority left the Alliance in a more responsible form with written resignations. AAIU Edirne files contain tens of appeals from school directors, some in pretty desperate terms, asking "Paris" to urgently provide them teachers.This is why tours of duty in a given school were relatively short as teachers teaching French were constantly moved around between schools. The moving of a Deputy Director from one school to another in mid term to remedy a worse situation than an existing bad one was not uncommon. Even the Deputy Directors of a greatly valued Directrice like Sara Ungar were not immune to such movements in mid term. 3

1

AAIU, FRANCE, XVI-F, Mitrani to "Paris", Annual Report 1911/12. AAIU, TURQUIE XI-E, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, October 26, 1904, a Deputy Directrice called Gueron (not the Directrice Gueron) left her post, without seeking permission and explained only later when she was traced down that she had left for health reasons. (XI-E, Mitrani to Paris, Andrinople, December 12, 1904), XII-E, 2 February, 1907, Caleb an ENIO graduate left his post without giving notice, XII-E, January 22, 1912, grandson of Chief Rabbi Semach, resigned shortly after arriving from Paris and taking up his post as a Deputy Director and promptly left Edirne. XII-E, March 3, 1912, Semach was found in Istanbul and threatened with litigation following which he agreed to return his training expenses at ENIO at the rate of ff 25 a month. (AAIU, RE 275, Paris to Mitrani, June, 1920: the case of Deputy Director Joseph). 3 AAIU, RE-75, "Paris" to Ungar 5 February, 1894. 2

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With the above kind of background, it is not to be wondered that once their stay in Paris ended and they were appointed as beginner-teachers, quite a few among them took unusual liberties vis-à-vis the Alliance re their employment by the institution. There were cases of Deputy Directors in the Girls' School who went on unauthorized leave for periods longer than a month, only to be reprimanded, and no more. 1 In another case a Deputy Director regularly took off from the Boys' School for a few hours a day without authorization, to lend a helping hand in teaching at the Girls' School whose directrice was his wife. All "Paris" could think of writing to him was, "could you not do this on a Friday Afternoon?" 2 There is a second case of a Deputy Directrice leaving the Alliance Girls school of Izmir, and turning up in Edirne unannounced, asking the Edirne Directrice for an appointment in the Edirne school, declaring that for personal reasons she could no longer remain in Izmir, and had to come to Edirne. There is no record of any explanations she gave for her behavior! 3 A most severe case of a Deputy Director delinquent behavior, which in our times would have led to criminal proceedings, and the degree of magnanimity "Paris" showed him, is described in the note. 4 A particularly undisciplined and wantonly behavior on the part of a Deputy Directrice at the Girls' School, over a prolonged period of time, against which "Paris" did not take sufficiently energetic action is described in the note. 5 Such occurrences took place even in Edirne that was a choice location to be appointed to as an Alliance teacher.

1 AAIU, TURQUIE V-E, "Paris" to Rachel Behar to Paris, Andrinople, August 6, 1884, and Rosa Levi a teacher absented herself from the school without permission for a month and a half to look after a sick sister. XI-E, Roza Mitrani to Paris, Andrinople, April 25, 1920. 2 AAIU, RE-20, "Paris" to Carmona 17 July, 1886. 3 AAIU, TURQUIE, IV-E, ECOLES, Suzanne Benbassat to "Paris", 25 April, 1920. 4 AAIU, IX-E, TURQUIE, Loupo to Paris, July 24, 1892, RE, "Paris" to Loupo, 29 July 1892, 10 August 1892. A Deputy Director who boarded at the home of a colleague who was a married person (his name is in the file). One night when the last was out of town he entered into his wife's bedchamber, and assaulted her. She started screaming to the point of waking up her neighbors. These came in and saved her from what was in store for her. The woman was pregnant and as a result of the commotion and the trauma she sustained, she aborted, lost a lot of blood and got very sick. The husband, wanted to sue his DD lodger, but in addition applied for a divorce presumably on the grounds that his wife was now a "dishonored" person and as such had become untouchable as far as he was concerned. Loupo was satisfied if the offending DD was moved out of Edirne. "Paris" concurred and within a little over a month transferred the offender to a school in one of the Bulgarian communities. Thus "Paris" still kept him in its payroll to continue his work on providing education to the Jewish Communities of the East!! 5 AAIU, TURQUIE, VII-E, AAIU, Pardo to "Paris", Andrinople, February 13, 1914, March 11, 1914,- Gueron to "Paris", Andrinople, February 23, 1914, March 29, 1914 May 9 1914 May 10, 1914, May 13, 1914, May 19, 1914, RE-245, "Paris" to Gueron, May 22, 1914, RE251, May 14, 1914, May 21, 1914. Pardo developed a habit of regularly cutting her first class in the morning, and some times more than that requested that she be transferred to Istanbul to look after her sick mother. Pardo further claimed that she was suffering from an ailment whose treatment required her traveling to Istanbul. Paris granted her request for leave of one month; she came back to Edirne after two weeks of overstaying only after "Paris" threatened her to put her in the "Available for Appointment" List if she further delayed her return. Her behavior did not improve upon her return, and she developed a new habit of taking her students to see movies during class hours. It is only at this point that "Paris lost patience with her and suspended her from school for two months without a salary. On the eve of the First Balkan War, Pardo resigned from the Alliance and left Edirne.

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Of course in theory, the Alliance could have alleviated the shortage of qualified teachers in its Edirne schools, and probably in others as well, by expanding ENIO. However, this ran into a budgetary problem. "Paris" was reluctant to add Deputy Directors to its Edirne schools without getting the community to finance part of the expense involved. There is no record in community files that the community recognized the dearth of trained teachers and pressed "Paris" to supply more of them to its schools. Had it done so, the first question the Alliance would have put to the Community Council would have been "How much of the cost are you prepared to finance?" As the community did not want to hear such a question it thought twice before making this kind of a request and the school director was the only one left to make them for additional teachers, and when he did that "Paris" would reply to him "Will you please find out how much the Community is prepared to pay for the additional teacher you ask for?" and that was the end of the matter. There was on record a proposal appearing in La Boz de la Verdad, to establish a school similar to ENIO in Istanbul, for training teachers who would be taught to teach Hebrew and Ladino, using modern teaching methods. The newspaper strongly believed that such a school would be much more cost effective than its ENIO counterpart, and provide an additional supply of trained teachers to the one the ENIO was providing.1 There is no records of a reaction to the article either in the Community or in "Paris". Until 1905 the Boys School never had more than five ENIO trained staff, including its director. By 1912 their numbers had gone up to nine, but with the absorption of the TTP, student numbers had quadrupled and hence the shortage of trained teachers had become more acute. In conclusion, an important dichotomy becomes apparent between the very disciplined life "Paris" wished to impose on the personal lives of its teachers in matters such as marriage, where the teachers could spend their summer vacation and religious observation, and its inability at the same time to impose discipline on their performance at school. One may wonder if the restrictions in personal lives were softened, how this could have slowed down teacher turnover, and with more teachers around, then to what extent "Paris" would be more successful in imposing school discipline on teachers. All Group B staff had certain characteristics in common, no matter what they taught. They were all employed on a part time basis except the monitors. They did not enjoy the fringe benefits described earlier in Chapter 7,

1

La Boz de la Verdad, N° 175, 09.11.1911.

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the Alliance offered to "Group A" teachers, limited as they were. Personnel files were not kept on them, and because of this, the length of their employment by the Alliance cannot be established although, in all likelihood, their turnover was higher except possibly, in the case of Rabbis teaching Hebrew and related subjects. In the correspondence between Edirne and Paris, the teachers of this group were generally not referred to by their names but only as collectives like "our Rabbis", or "our Turkish teachers". Edirne Directors rarely supplied to "Paris" performance evaluations on them individually, as required by the "Instructions Générales, " but "Paris" never asked its directors why they were not doing this. Perhaps as a consolation prize, the kind of close supervision of their lives "Paris" maintained on "Group A" teachers did not apply to them. Until the Alliance took over the TTP, Hebrew teachers came from traditional background, and there was not a shortage of them. However, there is conflicting evidence on their quality. As mentioned in Chapter 3, According to practically all documents on the TTP from an Alliance source, Rabbis teaching at the TTP were considered to be too poorly qualified as teachers to teach Hebrew. The only exception is the testimony of Salamon Danon. His was a more balanced view (Chapter 4). In a letter to "Paris" Loupo wrote that at the TTP, Hebrew was better taught than at the Alliance school, and because of this reason students transferring from the TTP to the Alliance school were allocated to grades higher than the one they normally would be put in as far Hebrew classes were concerned. 1 On the other hand, Mitrani reported that in his twenty years of teaching experience at various Alliance schools in other towns, he did not come across an Alliance school where Hebrew and religious instruction were taught as well as it was in Edirne schools. 2 It is possible that both appreciations are correct. What Mitrani had in mind was that Hebrew was better taught at the Alliance School of Edirne than in other Alliance schools he had personal experience of; but he did not give an opinion on whether it was taught better or worse in Edirne schools than at the TTP. On the other hand Loupo was more concerned with the Hebrew being taught at the Alliance school by comparison with the TTP. The Alliance made considerable effort to improve the teaching of Hebrew and sent to its schools, in Edirne, detailed circulars on how Hebrew ought to be taught. It was the view of "Paris" that "if Hebrew is not sufficiently well taught, it was because it is taught without method and 1 2

AAIU, TURQUIE, VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, 5 June 1887: AAIU, TURQUIE XI-E, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, May 5, 1904, Rapport Moral.

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without an underlying teaching program..." 1 . The Alliance paid less attention to another necessary condition for the improvement of the teaching of Hebrew, namely, to improve the quality of the teachers teaching it, by offering them full time positions, job security, fringe benefits and generally treat them as equals to Group A teachers. Also, it did not ask its Directors to organize training courses for the Rabbis where they would learn modern teaching methods. Past the fusion between the Alliance School and the TTP in 1906, a shortage of Hebrew teachers developed by the beginning of the second decade of the 20 th century. The reason was that the older Rabbis among them had retired, and the younger ones were eased out rather than being taught modern methods of teaching. The Alliance had difficulties in recruiting Hebrew teachers who were not Rabbis. After the end of World War One, the problem of insufficient Hebrew teachers got worse, in both qualitative and quantitative terms. This happened because a change had occurred in the kind of Hebrew that was taught in Alliance schools. After the War, the Alliance had agreed to the teaching of Hebrew as a living language. 2 An obvious source of such teachers was the teachers' seminaries that existed in the then Mandated Territory of Palestine. There were two reasons why a teacher from this source was not liked by the Alliance. The first was that he expected to be paid a competitive salary comparable to the one an Alliance Group A teacher was getting and not getting those Rabbis were paid as part time work. The second reason had to do with their ideological outlook. Mitrani in particular who was School Director in post World War One years, had a lot of difficulties to find qualified Hebrew teachers and had, on an occasion, the following to write on the subject: I was answered that in Palestine one can find teachers who are capable of intelligently teaching Hebrew, but at the same time, these own a special capability to disturb Community spirits with their fantasy ideas.

What Mitrani had in mind was that coming from where they did, they were probably Zionists. A year hence, when Mitrani, for lack of a realistic alternative, finally surrendered to the idea of recruiting a teacher with such background, he received a letter from "Paris" disapproving his candidate "for reasons we gave you in our meeting" 3 . In fact, the supply of Hebrew teachers

1 2 3

NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N.12, December 1902, pp. 212-217. AAIU, TURQUIE XCIV, Conorte Canetti to "Paris", Kirklisse 26 January 1920. AAIU, RE-28I, "Paris" to Mitrani, December 30, 1921.

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had diminished to the point that Zionists or not, they had become very expensive to hire and Mitrani was complaining on that point too! 1 In many publications on the Alliance, the subject of how Turkish was taught has been discussed extensively. The general consensus among researchers of Alliance history was that poorly qualified teachers taught Turkish and did so poorly. Two examples of what Edirne directors thought about their Turkish teachers appear in the note. 2 The problem of Turkish teachers was widespread and persistent. A major complaint of the school directors on Turkish teachers was their absenting themselves frequently from class time. This is hardly a fair complaint, because the Alliance employed them on a part time basis. They must have been constantly on the look out for additional work, had to juggle their time quite a bit to manage between more than one employer. Of course, as soon as they found a full time job, they would forget about the part time job they had at an Alliance School. The most adverse consequence of an unsatisfactory level of Turkish teaching came up for Alliance graduates who wanted to continue their studies beyond a primary school education. These had two choices, namely, either to continue their studies in a missionary school, and normally one to be paid for, or to go into an "idadiye" whose language of instruction was, of course, Turkish. According to an article appearing in La Boz de la Verdad, those that wanted to continue their studies in an idadiye had to agree to starting three to four years lower than the grade they would be entitled to enter, because they did not know Turkish sufficiently well. 3

1

AAIU, FRANCE XVI-F, Mitrani, to "Paris", Andrinople, July 6, 1921. Annual Report 1920/21. 2 AAIU, FRANCE, XVI-F, Mitrani, to "Paris", received in Paris, on August 30. 1904, Annual Report 1903/04 "At the beginning of the year we had four Turkish teachers, one of whom was provided by the Government and the other three the school recruited. Tevfik, our first teacher is an honest person. However, he is frequently absent for one reason or another. It is true that following my diplomatically and repeatedly stated observations and my chiding him for his attendance record he has become more regular. Remzi, our second Turkish teacher is also the Director of a private school. He too is very irregular. AAIU, FRANCE XVI-F, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, September 21, 1909, Annual Report 1908/1909: "Turkish teachers add indolence and irregular attendance to their incapacity as teachers. We tried between ten to fifteen teachers in our school during the school year... Only two of them bore witness to professional aptitude and teaching skills ... One of the two who is of Captain rank in the army just left us as his regiment was transferred to another location." 3 La Boz de la Verdad, N°° 183, 16 January 1912.

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A way out of the problem, which better-to-do persons who wanted to have their children continue their education in an "Idadiye" resorted to was arranging private lessons for them to learn Turkish. But those who could afford to do this were strictly limited in number. Counting together the number of Deputy Directors that taught in the Boys' School and the number of teaching hours "Paris expected its Directors to teach (24 out of his 38-hour-workweek), 1 there were generally up to 150 students per teacher teaching French subjects or in other words three to four classes. A Deputy Director could of course teach only one class at a time, and therefore a substitute had to be found for teaching the lower classes. The solution was the employment of young monitors. Monitors who taught the French part of the program in the lower classes were recruited from the students of the top grade who came from poor families. The run-of-the-mill monitor was about sixteen to seventeen years old that had studied up to eight years in the boys' school, but often less than that, before he was given the responsibility to teach in one of the lower classes. Monitors lacked sufficient authority due to their lack of training in teaching, and their young age. Assuming a family background where not a single word was uttered in French, it is doubtful whether a monitor had learned enough of the language at the school, in particular during the first decades of its existence, when it had only four grades, to enable him to act as a teacher, even for teaching in the lowest grades. Because of the low salaries the monitors were paid, they did not stay long with the Alliance School and left as soon as something better turned up. There are numerous complaints in Alliance files on the poor performance of monitors. Loupo made outright pleas to drastically reduce the numbers of monitors and to bring into the school more Deputy Directors. 2 Mitrani had the following to say about monitors. "Monitors; they are the weakest part of our staff". 3 One director went as far as writing that his monitors could not speak French with a proper accent. 4 The truth in the assertion should come as a surprise to no one. It is interesting to note how the Alliance Schools located in Bulgaria solved the problem of insufficient ENIO trained teachers. Instead of employing monitors they simply went ahead and hired Bulgarian teachers who taught in 1

Silberman, p. 192. AAIU, TURQUIE, VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, 31 March 1886, 16 May 1886. 3 AAIU, FRANCE, XVI-F, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, August 30, 1904, Annual Report 1903/04. 4 AAIU, TURQUIE XI-E, Mitrani to "Paris", Andrinople, January 9, 1904, to Paris. 2

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Bulgarian, apparently because the communities were prepared to pay their share of the cost of employing them. 1 The problem of having to make do with Monitors instead of real teachers was to some extent alleviated by having Deputy Directors keep an eye on the teaching of the monitors, and in cases of dire need doing a little teaching themselves in the lower grades. In Edirne the teaching week of a Deputy Director was 38 hours, but to teach the French subjects of a particular class, only 27 were needed. Every Director had thus eleven hours that he could devote to shoring up the teaching in classes where Monitors did most of it. This arrangement was not formalized, and the problem of the quality of teaching in the lower grades still remained mostly unsolved. Again, to acquire a more precise assessment on how the work of teaching French taught subject was shared between Deputy Directors and Monitors it is necessary to have the "Emploi du Temps" (use of Staff time) reports that are unavailable. As to other Group B teachers like those that taught German and others there is no information in the files on their background and their teaching record at the schools.

1 AAIU, BULGARIA II-E, XXXII-E, To make life easier to Bulgarian teachers the official language of the Varna school was declared to be Bulgarian.

8 THE EARLY YEARS, 1867-1883

The Alliance arrived in Edirne, almost surreptitiously. The following is the text of the invitation it received in 1867; in response to which it took its' decision to open a boys' school in Edirne four months after it had received it: "We the undersigned directors of the Jewish School of Edirne called the Talmud Torah im Derekh Erets (Torah Study with Courtesy), convinced of the necessity of giving a good French education to our students in order to introduce to them to European civilization, we beg the very honorable Central Committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle to give its valued assistance by providing us with a suitable teacher for the teaching of the French language and of the elements of modern sciences... It seemed that the Alliance took over in effect a school by the name of Talmud Torah im Derekh Eretz, changed its n a m e to its o w n and so established its first school in Edirne. The Talmud Torah im Derekh Erets was a small school. N o n e of the m a j o r players of the C o m m u n i t y , the Community Council, the Grand Rabbinate, or the T T P invited the Alliance to establish a school in Edirne. Despite this intitial state of affairs the school opened with much fanfare, pomp and circumstance on October 20 t h of 1867. 2 Decorated with plants and flowers, the school had assumed a resplendent appearance. On the appointed day, the crowds, the carriages, the magnificence of uniforms, the glitter of the gathered, surpassed every thing, which Edirne had seen for centuries. As every one took up the place he was allocated, the one reserved for the Hahambashi remained empty. The Gentleman was not showing himself. Emissaries ran to inform him that the Military Band was readying itself to play the Imperial Hymn, and that the carriage of the Vali followed by a rich escort was on its way. His absence would produce a major scandal; it was his job to stand in the first row [of the gathered] to receive the August Functionary [the Vali], He only had the time to get dressed and a carriage was waiting at his door to take him. He is

1 AAIU, TURQUIE, IV-E, Joseph Shouhami et al, Andrinople, June 18, 1867, courtesy of Aran Rodrigue.

^ Leven, p. 67.

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The credit for turning the opening of the school into a major event in the annals of the city was due to Alsace born Felix Bloch, the first Director of the school. Bloch was a graduate of the Rabbinical Seminary of Paris. He had a flare for staging theatrical effects, a first class public relations person even for our contemporary standards and an uncanny ability to make little look a lot. Bloch was the major influence on the school for the first half of its early years through 1874, until he was promoted to be the director of the De Camondo School of the Alliance in Istanbul. It was the local Ottoman Authorities that gave the warmest welcome to the school. The benevolent attitude of the central authorities was referred to in Chapter 5. In Edirne it went further. The welcome went beyond the participation of persons whose names appeared in the "Who-is-Who-List" of local Ottoman Authorities. As a practical expression of their support, the Authorities appointed a teacher to teach Turkish at the school whose salary they would pay. 2 Little information is available on the goings-on in the school during the years between 1867 and 1883. Only one Annual report on the Boys' School from those years has survived in the files. 3 Most of the little information that is available is to be found in the Central Alliance annual, six monthly and monthly reports. During the first year of its existence, the school had 125 students, representing about 4 % of the primary school pupil potential of the Community, both boys and girls, or 8 % of boys alone. During 1873-1883, student numbers fluctuated between 111 and 215. After Felix Bloch transferred to the De Camondo School in Istanbul, and during the remaining nine years of this first period of school history there was considerable turbulence at the post of Director. It changed hands five times, with one Director following another at short intervals. 4 The first among them was Bendelac, a Frenchman. The others were ENIO graduates who were Ottoman subjects. Such frequent change in the school directorship can only indicate trouble in the running of the school, although, in the documents of the period there is no indication as to what the trouble was.

1

Paix et Droit, N° 4, April 1923. Leven 2, p. 68. 3 AAIU, TURQUIE VI-E, Bonfrado to "Paris", Andrinople December 13, 1883, Annual Report 1882/83. 4 AAIU, FRANCE XVI-F, Mitrani to "Paris" Andrinople, August 30, 1904, Annual Report, 1903/04, names of directors: Bendelac, Semach, Daffa, Benforado, Cazes. 2

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Felix Bloch visited Edirne in 1877, as an Alliance Inspector but he mostly busied himself with the purchase of a new building for the Girls' School. 1 He paid a second visit in April 1879 and wrote a positive report on his findings. 2 Mr. Veneziani from Paris made an additional inspection trip, but he too mainly concerned himself with the condition of the Girls' School. 3 Lastly, Felix Bloch who came to be formally appointed "Inspecteur des Ecoles de VAlliance" (The Inspector of Alliance Schools) paid another visit to Edirne in November 1880 but again mostly focused on the purchase of a plot for constructing a boys' school. 4 In none of these visits there was a record of awareness of the real problems of the schools. Major interruptions in student attendance occurred beyond the control of the school management during this period that caused the school to close down for extended periods. There is a record of three school years mostly lost. In 1868, one year after opening "The school building mysteriously went up in flames and had to be rebuilt".5 During the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877/78, the two schools ceased to function for two years. The main reason for this was the inflow of 2000 Jewish refugees into the town. Their story was told in Chapter 3. The Jewish community and its institutions were ill equipped to handle the refugees. Most of the parents of the original students withdrew them from the two schools, as the children of the poor families among the Jewish refugees took up their places.6 These children were mostly illiterate, and the schools became a refuge for them in a welfare assistance context. As mentioned in Chapter 5, during the initial years following its establishment, the Alliance gave School Directors considerable authority to establish their individual school programs. The Directors used this freedom to meet local specificities in different countries and in particular concerning the language of instruction. The following are examples from two countries on how directors made use of this freedom, and they concern the language issue: In 1868 in Tetuan, the Alliance agreed to reserve half the school day for Hebrew and religious lessons, which native Rabbis would teach. 7 In 1883, in the Galata [district of Istanbul] where Yiddish- speaking Jews lived, the language of instruction was

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N°.5 May 1877, p. 81. NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N°.4 April 1879, p. 99. NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N°.8 August 1879, p. 99. NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N° 11 November 1880, p. 247. Rodrigue 2, p. 59. NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N.4, April 1878, p. 54. Silberman, p. 75.

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mainly German and French was taught as a foreign language.1 In Edirne files there is little record of how Edirne made use of the freedom the Alliance granted its Directors. The Boys School the Alliance school established in the city in 1867 had four grades initially. Its staff then consisted of the school director, a Hebrew teacher, and a Turkish teacher. Bloch himself was managing, at the time, both the Boys and the Girls School, and in addition, acted as the only French teacher in both schools. During this year most of the teaching was presumably done in Ladino and in Turkish. Assuming that the Rabbi did not know a word of French he must have taught Hebrew in Ladino. One can assume that the remaining hours of the teaching week were devoted to the teaching of Turkish, probably two hours a day and the balance to the teaching of Jewish related subjects, taught in Ladino including the teaching of some Hebrew. "[In 1868] All the boys in Edirne studied Hebrew, Spanish, French, Turkish, and arithmetic' This state of affairs continued, and as late as 1874, seven years after its establishment, the school staff consisted of a Director, three Rabbis and a teacher for Turkish. 3 The Director, Bendelac, was the only one in the school staff who had any knowledge of French. As mentioned earlier, a director was expected to teach 24 hours a week. Of the 24 hours, he allocated six to teaching French at the girls' school where he was the only teacher that could do this. He thus had 18 hours per week left that were available to teach in French to about 120 students divided into four grades. This meant less than an hour of teaching in French a day per grade. By all appearances, therefore, the Alliance accorded initially some importance to the teaching of Turkish, whether by default or not by default. This appearance is consisted with the general view the Alliance held during these early years of the Edirne school was that a good knowledge of the language of the country it established a school in, was an absolute necessity if the Jews were to deserve their emancipation and this applied to the Jews of the 4 Ottoman Empire. Only in 1879/80, the school got its first teacher of Deputy Director rank. As a result, there was a distinct increase in the number of hours that could be devoted to teaching in French, but still less than half of the number of hours required in the teaching program, with the remaining time still being

1

2 3

4

Silberman, p. 206. Silberman, p. 75. NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N.3 March 1874, p. 4. Rodrigue 2, p. 86.

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filled in with teaching in Turkish and Ladino. There is confirmation that French was still not taught in the lowest two classes.1 The year 1883 is the one in which the first Teaching Program the Alliance expected to be followed in its schools in all over the world was formulated. This Program triggered resistance from both the Directors of its Edirne schools. The Edirne Directors claimed that time was needed to adjust to it suggesting that the proposed program was substantially different than the one they had been using for nearly two decades in their schools.2 In 1879/80, the school got its first teacher of Deputy Director rank. As a result, there was a distinct increase in the number of hours that could be devoted to teaching in French, but still less than half of the number of hours required in the teaching program, with the remaining time still being filled in with teaching in Turkish and Ladino. There is confirmation that French was still not taught in the lowest two classes. 3 How much students learned under these conditions is a little speculative. Of course, the acid test is examinations, the questions the pupils were asked and how well they stood up to them. End of year examinations were regularly held during this period. There were yearly references to them. However, all the evidence suggests that they were essentially ceremonial, and perhaps even of a theatrical content. The "audience" consisted of senior representatives of civil authorities, the army, the consular corps, churches, the Rabbinate, directors of major companies in town, such as the railways corporation, teachers from other schools, Community Council members, and other Community grandees. The numbers of the "audience" varied from about 20 to 50 persons! 4 Monthly Alliance reports contain detailed lists of such participants. One can presume that only a few of them knew French or were knowledgeable on the subject matter of the examinations. The timing of these exams varied from year to year between the months of May and September. It is possible that the availability and convenience of the "audience" was a factor determining their timing. In some years exams were held in September, which was really the first month of the new school year. Given the size of the "audience", one can assume that the watchers sat in a theater like arrangement, with the students sitting in on something like a stage and with the teachers who were the examiners sitting around a table,

1 2

NLJ, AIU, Monthly Report N . l l , November 1880, p. 247.

AAIU, RE-2, "Paris" to Loupo, 15 January, 1884, Paris to Behar, January 15, 1884. 3 NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N . l l , November 1880, p. 247. 4 NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N.6 June 1880, p. 203.

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also on the stage. When it was the turn of one of the students to be examined he would be called, and then, he would approach the table of the examiners to face them. Given such a setting it would not come as a surprise if most students were terrified by the experience, no matter how good they were in their studies. To give an example, in 1873, exams were held on May 11, in the presence of an audience totaling no less than fifty "worthies". 1 During that year, there were 120 students and the whole examination process lasted four hours. This means only two minutes per student, and the only tenable assumption is that not all 120 students were present in the examination, and even among those who were, not all of them were called to answer questions. It can't be doubted that the students called to answer questions were the best of their classes. It is therefore not to be wondered that Alliance reports on such examinations ended up with a glowing account of the performance of the students and on how good they stood up to examiners' questions. How many students were examined, how many passed them, their grades, and how many failed was not reported. From what has been so far described, it is clear that during the whole length of this initial sixteen-year period, counted from the day of its founding, the Alliance Boys School of Edirne was an Alliance school in name only. The best testimony to this conclusion is a detailed report Samuel Loupo wrote on the condition of the Boys' School, four years after he had taken over its directorship in 1883.2 In it he mentioned how small the school building was, its location in the poorest district of the town, the humidity that prevailed in it, with the odor of rotten wood pervading in the classrooms. The walls of the school had many holes. Prevailing hygienic conditions were bad, and made worse by overcrowded classes. During the last year of the period, when the school counted 250 pupils, Loupo had to put two students in one seat because of the lack of a sufficient number of benches. Loupo confessed that he did this because it was difficult to expect a good handwriting from students if they had to write while standing! He stated that all these handicaps represented long-term problems that required large funds to be solved. He mentioned that he came across some intelligent students who wanted to learn; but how to help them to achieve this was a major problem. Loupo ended up allocating his pupils into grades not by their qualifications but also by their condition of health, by how old they looked and how tall they were!

1 2

NLI, AIU, Monthly Report N.4 June 1873, p. 6. AAIU, TURQUIE, VIII-E, Loupo to "Paris", Andrinople, 9 May 1887.

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Loupo found himself diverging quite a bit from the Teaching Program prepared in Paris. He focused on matters not requiring intellectual discipline. In his words, he neglected grammar, geography, and history. He wrote that he constantly ran out of time and had to look at his watch many times an hour. Initially, he started off with very detailed outlines of what he was going to teach in every class hour, but soon gave up on this. He also gave up finding out how much the students had learned in previous lessons as required by the "concentric circle" method described in Chapter 5, the Alliance expected its teachers to follow. Loupo launched on new material straight away. According to Loupo, under the best of conditions, only half the class was paying attention to what he was teaching and of those, only half of those were really learning. Comparing what Loupo had to say about the condition of the Boys' School in 1883, 16 years past its establishment, and what various Alliance visitors wrote about the TTP, one has to make quite some effort to observe a difference between the two as to the level of learning. Of course a comparison with the established Greek, Bulgarian and the new Turkish schools in the city opened under the reform act of 1857, could produce even less favorable results. As explained in Chapter 3, at the time the first Alliance school first opened its gates to its students, there existed in Edirne an intelligentsia that consisted of a small group of persons who wanted to extricate the Jewish religion and its associated way of life from the rut it had got into following the Shabtai Tsvi Trauma, with Yosef Halevi and Moshe Mitrani as the leading figures. Like other Jewish thinkers and ideologues of the period, the two saw in the Alliance an attempt to institutionalize Jewry on a world scale that would eventually lead to nationhood. Felix Bloch, who was French born, French educated and a Frenchman through and through, had an entirely different view of what the Alliance wanted to do and on the capabilities of members of the Edirne Community. In his words "he ... was appalled at the ignorance he found in Edirne where, according to him, there were perhaps fifteen people who wanted to instruct themselves [I]"1. However, despite this predisposition, upon entering the Edirne scene, Bloch quickly found himself on the horns of a major dilemma. On one hand, even while undervaluing it, he could not ignore the educated elite in the town and in particular, its leading lights. These persons wanted to reform the primary school system not less than the Alliance did. Also, given the size of the primary school education problem of the Edirne Community, and the severe shortage of human resources the Alliance was capable of mobilizing to 1

AAIU, TURQUIE, VI-E, Bloch to "Paris", Andrinople, September 25, 1867.

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solve it, the Alliance much needed their support, and even more so, their active cooperation with the Alliance as teachers and in other forms. To solve the dilemma, during the first years of Alliance presence in Edirne, Bloch groped towards coming to terms with the intelligentsia of the city and cautiously explored the idea of cooperation. The first try was with Joseph Halevy whose reputation and deeds prior to the arrival of Alliance to Edirne were described in Chapter 3. Because Halevy thought that his and the Alliance's agendas were almost similar, he optimistically, or perhaps naively, must have thought that he could bring the Alliance to establish the school according to his own agenda. But this try of Halevi's' came to nothing. In fact, in all the correspondence of Felix Bloch with "Paris" during his tenure as director of the school, there is no trace of evidence that Halevi's' proposal was even considered. The Alliance then cautiously groped towards adopting in Edirne the "Mikveh Israel" school mentioned in Chapter 4 that was headed by Baruh Mitrani. However, soon enough, Mitrani found out that he and the Alliance had different agendas as to the ideological base of the school. The orientation of Mitrani leaned towards a school where subjects such as geography, world history, and mathematics were to be given their due weight, and taught as such, while French would be studied as the most important second language. However, generally speaking, the teaching would still have a pro Hebrew and strong Haskalah content. In such a school Ladino would not be eliminated altogether but would continue to have some role. ... surprisingly [so], Bloch and his successors from 1874, had most trouble not with the traditionalists but with... Baruch Mitrani. This student of Halevy [was] passionately concerned with the revival of the Hebrew language as a living medium... He and Bloch quarreled and made up many times... Mitrani published many diatribes against Alliance teachers.... accusing them of ... desecrating the Sabbath, giving more importance to French than to Hebrew, and looking down on the [Jews] of Edirne...1 There c a n ' t be a doubt that there must have been communication problems between Bloch and the locals, which caused him to develop an exaggerated view on how backward the Edirne Community was while underestimating its cultural, and intellectual life, its leading lights, and their publications, not to mention its rich history. Modest as they were, they did not deserve to be ignored the way Felix Bloch appeared to have ignored them. Very few of the locals could have possessed more than a smattering knowledge of French. The Ladino press of the times was mostly located in 1

Rodrigue 2, p. 61.

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Istanbul or in Salonika. Of course, Bloch could not read it as he most likely did not know the language with its admixture of Hebrew and Turkish words. If Bloch had such capabilities he could have had a better appreciation of the local cultural level, which though not comparable to Paris, still had substance and could have offered him real help he much needed, given the difficulties he faced. Bloch had no problems about describing Ladino as a language equivalent to Yiddish "that abominable Polish Jargon" as he characterized it, showing this way that he lacked even the faintest notion of Yiddish, which is a form of mediaeval German sprinkled with Hebrew words, with almost no Polish words in it. He obviously had not read any Yiddish literature either, not one of the least rich in the world. Of course Bloch could have communicated with the local intelligentsia in Hebrew, if he knew it as well as Halevy, Mitrani, and in a later generation Avraham Danon. However, it would come as a surprise to no one, if it turned out that Felix Bloch had a limited knowledge of the language over and above the one used in religious texts, and even if he did, the considerable differences between the accents with which Hebrew was spoken by European Jews and those of the Spanish exile ones were not conducive to the creation of a satisfactory level of communication with the locals. Thus two opportunities to integrate Edirne Maskilim into the Alliance enterprise came to nothing. There is no record of the negotiations between the two parties, indicating the specifics of the disagreements. One last try was made with Avraham Danon almost a generation later. Beyond this third failure, no more attempts were made to join forces with the local intelligentsia. The Alliance ultimately did not like persons such as Halevi, and Mitrani because they were not pro French enough. The commanding elements of the community establishment and especially the Rabbinate did not like the local breed of reformers either, because they felt that with their Haskalah ideas, they were dangerous revolutionaries bent on destabilizing centuries of Jewish religious orthodoxy. Thus the Jewish reform movement of Edirne gradually died a natural death; there were only a few mourners at the burial.

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