In the beginning was a school: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and its Legacy

In 1790, the French Revolutionary Government had liberated France’s Jews and granted full civic rights to the Jews of Avignon and of Portuguese descent. Napoleon Bonaparte, who came to power afterwards, was a great admirer and supporter of the Jews. During his Egyptian military campaign against Britain, before becoming emperor, he issued a most remarkable proclamation regarding hem. In Jerusalem, on 20 April 1799, the following address to all Jews was published:

Buonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Rightful Heirs of Palestine: “This great Nation [France] is asking you to take what it has conquered for you. Make haste! This moment will not reoccur perhaps for another thousand years! Reclaim your civil rights, your place as a nation among the nations of the world. You have the right to worship the Lord freely and according to your religion.2

Unfortunately, Napoleon was defeated when Acre (today’s Akko) fell to the British. He thus returned to Paris, steadily rising in the government and finally becoming emperor in 1804. It is highly likely that had he not lost both this battle and his Egyptian campaign, a Jewish state would have been established in the Holy Land about a century and a half before the foundation of the State of Israel. Napoleon’s Judeophilia went further (although he did express some criticisms of Jews). In 1800 he stated, “If I were governing a Jewish nation, I would rebuild Solomon’s Temple.”3 After becoming emperor he ensured the passage of laws benefiting Jews throughout France and its Empire. Amongst them was the re-establishment of a Supreme Rabbinical Court (the Grand Sanhedrin). Also, in the many countries that he conquered, he freed Jews from ghettos. In 1807, Judaism was included among France’s official religions.

In 1830, the French government placed Judaism on equal footing with Catholicism and Protestantism and thereafter funded rabbis’ salaries and the synagogues (these subsidies ended when France formally became a secular state in 1905). French Jews thus became the first in modern times to be fully emancipated. Thereafter they became devotedly and fully French, eager to serve their country. It is hence not surprising that in France the idea of ‘civilising’ other Jewish communities first appeared. Adolphe Crémieux (1796-1880) was twice the Minister of Justice and the first Jew to become a senator (as well as being, incidentally, the great-uncle of Marcel Proust). It was he, together with six other highly distinguished Jewish Parisians, who founded the AIU.

The following is part of the Manifesto of the AIU, published at its founding in 1860:

To defend the honour of the Jewish name whenever it is attacked; to encourage, by all means at our disposal, the pursuit of useful handicrafts; to combat, where necessary, the ignorance and vice engendered by oppression; to work, by the power of persuasion and by all the moral influences at our command, for the emancipation of our brethren who still suffer under the burden of unjust legislation; to hasten and solidify complete enfranchisement, by the intellectual and moral regeneration of our brethren: such, in its chief aspects, is the work to which the Alliance Israélite Universelle hereby consecrates itself.

The Charter of the AIU’s current Network of schools preserves the principles expressed in this Manifesto:

The Network’s schools pass on the core values of solidarity and citizenship underpinning the AIU’s founding principles … They aid pupils to develop their intellectual independence and awareness of their responsibilities as a Jew and citizen.

After receiving the benefits of the Revolution, French Jews believed that less developed Jewish communities should make similar progress. Crémieux was instrumental in a law being passed in 1870 granting French citizenship to all Algerian Jews. Algeria was then a colony, with a large Jewish population. After its conquest in 1830, many Algerian Jews learnt the French language and became Westernised. Soon theyproved very useful to the colonial authorities, as minor government officials dealing with the large Muslim population (the Jews’ mother tongue being Arabic). The government was thus prevailed upon by Crémieux to grant French nationality to Algerian Jewry.

All the AIU’s ideals and intentions are well expressed by the contemporary British historian Lucien Gubbay, whose father was educated by the AIU in Aleppo, once part of the Ottoman Empire:

…the Alliance sought to remake the Jews of North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans in the idealised self image of the semi-assimilated French Jews of its own day. […] Once established, the Alliance schools were eagerly grasped as a lifeline by those Jews of the decaying Ottoman Empire able to do so, for it seemed to them that this was the only sure way in which their children could escape from the trough of helpless poverty into which most Jews had by then descended.

Before the coming of the Alliance, Jews could only get European schooling at Catholic or Protestant missionary establishments, which usually did not welcome Jews reluctant to convert to Christianity. And so, it was through the European-style education, provided by Alliance schools, that Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire were able to acquire the rudiments of a secular education […] So overwhelming was the French cultural influence promoted by the Alliance school system that my own father, brought up in Aleppo and then living in Cairo, told me that he really felt that he had finally come ‘home’ on first arriving in Paris. At the peak of its activity before the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, the Alliance was teaching some 40 000 pupils in something like 200 schools.4

From the outset, the AIU promoted Jewish self-defense and self-sufficiency through education,even though the word ‘education’ does not appear in its Manifesto. In effect, all of its good work was accomplished through education, which always included use of the French language and advancing French culture. Also, as will be recorded further on, the AIU interceded to aid victims of anti-Jewish persecution.

The initial programme of the AIU was set out in Article I of its Statutes, whereby it stated it would assist Jews and their Judaism in three ways. Firstly, by providing education, it would work towards the emancipation and intellectual and ‘moral regeneration’ of Jews. Next, firm support and protection would be provided to Jews persecuted on account of their religion. To this end, appropriate funds were obtained, especially to help Jews outside Europe, and close contacts established with political leaders in Europe and diplomats in countries where Jews were persecuted. Leaders of such countries were pressurised by both the AIU and the European nations to establish human rights and remedy injustices.

Thirdly, not only Europe but European Jewry was alerted to Jewish suffering and injustices by such AIU’s publications as the Bulletin de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860-1913) and its successors, often in collaboration with the (London) Jewish Chronicle usingmaterial provided by the AIU.

The AIU always held itself aloof from any direct participation in French or other political stances. Its members’ religious opinions (in current terminology, whether orthodox or non-orthodox) were never allowed to influence the AIU’s actions or policy. Nor did the AIU wish to disseminate a Jewish variant of French colonialism. It always emphasised its solidaritywith all fellow Jews. This was clearly demonstrated by its motto, the well-known Talmudic principle (Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh – “all Jews are responsible for one another”).

Many appalling incidents in the previous twenty years in part prompted Crémieux and his partners to found the AIU. In 1840, there had been the Ritual Murder accusations in Damascus.After one Father Thomas, superior of a Franciscan Friary in Damascus, went missing, a group of prominent Jews were accused of killing him to obtain blood for use in a Passover ritual. After severe torture two Jews “confessed”, another died and one converted to Islam. Crémieux, Sir Moses Montefiore and Solomon Munk, an eminent French scholar of Arabic, immediately went to Egypt to intercede with Syrian ruler Mehemet Ali. They succeeded and the remaining Jewish prisoners were unconditionally freed. Jewish journals and newspapers in many countries appealed at the time for an institution to be established to defend Jews against injustice.

In 1858, another gross miscarriage of justice generated worldwide publicity and outrage. This was the kidnaping of a six year-old Jewish child, Edgardo Mortaras, from his home in Bologna on the orders of the Papal Government. The reason was an ‘emergency’ baptism that he had received from a Christian domestic servant some years earlier, because she feared he would die from an illness and could not attain paradise without baptism. She informed the authorities and, because then it was illegal for Jews to raise a Christian child, Edgardo was abducted, raised as a Roman Catholic, adopted by Pope Pius IX and finally became a priest. In spite of liberal press outrage in France and other countries and Emperor Napoleon III’s personal intervention, the Papacy retained Edgardo. This disgraceful incident reinforced a Jewish desire for effective protection.

The French acquisition of its Algerian colony in 1830 brought about direct contact with Jews living in a Muslim country. The Central Consistory in Paris now began receiving many reports about anti-Jewish discrimination and persecution in the colony. All Jews in Islamic countries were officially ‘Dhimmis’, a form of second class citizenship. An additional tax was exacted from them, the Djizia. They were very poor, prevented from following many careers and forced to live in unhealthy, crowded ghettos (or Mellahs) often ridden with epidemics. Their humiliation was compounded by, amongst other things, having to wear distinctive garments, being obliged to walk barefoot when near mosques, having the heights of their houses or synagogues always lower than comparable Muslim buildings, being forbidden to allow their laments or songs to be heard in public places, only allowed to own donkeys (not horses) and forbidden to drink wine in public.

Many accounts of extortion, murders of Jews and other violence directed against them by Muslims were reported in the AIU’s Bulletins. The AIU aided the victims, not only by establishing schools, but by improving ghetto life where possible, and often achieving greater protection for them. Reacting to pressure from the AIU, the major European nations and the US repeatedly prevailed upon the Moroccan government to punish those guilty of anti-Jewish crimes.

With the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the AIU’s contributed to improve the legal status of the Jews of Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia. After the pogroms of 1881, it aided immigrants from Russia, collaborating with other Jewish organizations.

During World War II, the AIU Administration left Paris, first for the non-occupied zone of France, then for Algiers. While Jewish children were expelled from French government schools in Algeria, because of antisemitic Vichy Laws, paradoxically the AIU’s own schools continued to function. The AIU was supported by General de Gaulle’s Free French Government and after the war it appointed René Cassin as its President. Cassin, a human rights jurist, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 for his work with the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After the war the AIU, aided by American Jewry, resumed its normal activities and dealt with displaced persons and other turmoil affecting Jews. It was also fully committed to supporting the founding of the Jewish State.

The AIU was not universally supported. Some conservative French Jews, including rabbis, opposed it when it was established. They believed it could result in religious ties being loosened and its pupils consequently becoming assimilated. On this, Gubbay comments:

In its enthusiasm for all things French and European it was claimed that the Alliance failed to foster appreciation of the old, that it diminished respect for religion and opened a gulf between secularly educated children and their more pious parents. Of course the Alliance schools – with their vocational training, with their education of girls and women, and with their initial hostility to Zionism, were very different from the traditional religious schools of the poverty stricken Jewish areas of North Africa and the Middle East.

Actually, the AIU always intended its schools to advance Jewish studies. Hebrew, Judaism and Jewish history constituted an important part of all its curricula, both in its schools and in its teacher-training colleges in Paris.

Because it promoted French education and culture, the AIU was strongly supported by the French government. However, as a consequence it was sometimes accused of having a role in French colonial activity. The fact that AIU’s education was based on a French model also saw its influence in some regions being reduced after both World Wars since it clashed with the increasing nationalist spirit in certain countries. This was especially the case after the independence of the French colonies and protectorates post-World War II.

Organisation, Finances and Library

The AIU has always had a typically French strong, central structure, based in Paris. Currently its central committee numbers seventy, including representatives from Morocco, Israel, Canada, the UK and USA, with a large majority from France. It has mainly depended on donations for income. Its funds and membership steadily increased till 1884 and then donations decreased. However the French government continued its support in Morocco until the latter became independent.

In 1868, the AIU’s library in Paris received a large donation of 10 000 gold francs and additional running expenses from Benjamin Rothschild. The library became the largest Jewish-owned library in Europe, initially possessing over 130,000 items. In 1940, the Nazi occupiers of Paris stole its holdings and sent them to the German Institute of Research on the ‘Jewish Question’ in Berlin. After the war, the Russians took some of this material to Moscow. Its presence there was discovered in 1992 and then, little by little and with great difficulty, it was returned to the AIU. In all, the Russians returned more than 900 files containing over 35 000 pages of documents, with the final crates being delivered in 2000. In 1989 the library was enlarged and researchers can now access its material via the internet.

Publications

The Bulletin de l’Alliance, the AIU’s official organ, was published in Paris between 1860 and 1913. The Bulletin was replaced, in 1921, with Paix et Droit, which was published until 1940. Les Cahiers de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle appeared between 1952 and 2006. The AIU no longer publishes a journal. Instead, it produces a Newsletter at irregular intervals and frequently updates its extensive website with newsworthy items.

The Bulletins covered in detail most of the important events that concerned Jews everywhere, such as the mass emigration from Russia during the 1880s and the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. Relevant extracts from regular, detailed reports, sent by teachers and school principals to the central committee about the schools, curricula and specific problems with teachers, parents and the local communities were also published. The reports allowed the AIU to function effectively, since without detailed local knowledge it was difficult to work against legal discrimination. Knowing the number of Jewish pupils in each community where the AIU was active, or planned activities, allowed for appropriate funding and determined the numbers of schools and teachers required. Information about the parents, their incomes, occupations, religious practices, etc., was also required for planning and fundraising purposes.

One of the AIU’s founding principles was a mission civilisatrice, to emancipate and Westernise the Jews of the Mediterranean region by providing French education and culture in their schools. It built 210 schools in sixteen countries, mostly around the Mediterranean basin and to date has educated over one million Jewish pupils. Initially, most AIU schools were primary, some co-educational and a few vocational. Today all schools, including high schools, “believe in the principle of mixed-gender education.”

The first AIU school in North Africa was founded in Tetouan, Morocco in 1862. This was followed by other Moroccan schools, in Tangiers (1864), Fez (1883), Mogador (1888), and Casablanca (1897). There were also girls’ schools established in Tetouan (1868), Tangiers (1879) and Mogador (1897). Before World War I schools were established in other North African countries – Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

In 1928, the French Protectorate Administration in Morocco amicably agreed with the AIU that its schools would become the responsibility of the Public Education Department. The Protectorate Administration supplied financial and other support for the AIU schools, because the French authorities needed educated personnel. To this end they employed bilingual, Arabic and French speaking, AIU-educated Jews. However, before Moroccan independence the AIU’s syllabus did not prepare pupils for the French Baccalauréat, the qualification needed for entry into any university. As a result, several professions remained closed to the AIU’s Moroccan pupils.

During World War II the AIU continued its work in Morocco, with the support of the Sultan and his government, and after 1945 it thrived. Its 14 000 pupils in 1945 had doubled by 1952, mainly in the large towns (Marrakesh, Fez, Rabat, and Casablanca) and reached 30 123 pupils in 1959. A photograph, taken in the 1950s, shows a pupil in a Casablanca AIU school working at a blackboard on which the same text is written in French, Hebrew and Arabic, indicating how all three languages were being taught. Also in Casablanca, the AIU founded a School for the Blind and an Institute for the Deaf and Dumb (collaborating with ORT and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee). But soon after Moroccan independence in 1957, pupil numbers fell steadily, to 13 527 by 1963. In part this was because the Moroccan government integrated some AIU schools into its own school system in 1960. However, the AIU retained some independent schools.