« Exactly one hundred years ago, on September 8th, 1916, my great-grandmother Estrella penned the last entry in her French notebook. At the time she was attending an elite preparatory school for Jewish students in Paris. Like hundreds of other Sephardic teenagers from around the Mediterranean, Estrella had been plucked from her tiny Jewish community on the island of Rhodes and taken to France for an intensive four-year training hosted by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. She thus spent the bulk of World War I far from her family, the sprawling Leon-Alhadeff clan who lived in La Juderia, Rhodes’ Jewish quarter.
Estrella’s notebook records not only a particular time in a young Jewish woman’s life, but also a distinct period in European Jewish history. As I have written elsewhere, theAlliance Israélite Universelle was a Jewish philanthropic organization established in 1860 that saw France as producing models of “the citizen-Jew.” (It continues to operate today.)
The spread of the Alliance’s influence in the late 19th and early 20th century is truly astonishing. According to Aron Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa, between 1862, when the first Alliance school opened in Morocco, and the start of World War I, 183 schools were established with over 43,000 students in places ranging from Istanbul, Salonica, and Teheran to Aleppo and Tripoli. The very best students were recruited to travel to France and train for free in the Alliance academies, with the attendant expectation that they would teach in Alliance schools for a certain number of years after graduation.
For my great-grandmother, who was born at the tail end of the Ottoman Empire’s rule over Rhodes and lived there as the island transitioned to Italian rule, the opportunity to study in Europe must have been thrilling and scary. What was it like to sail from Rhodes to Paris in 1914 or 1915, leaving behind several siblings, her mother Rivke, and her father Samuel, a wealthy winemaker? Who is the beautiful friend standing in my family’s sole photo of Estrella from this time period? While living in one of the Alliance’s female boarding houses in the suburban neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, did Estrella ever sneak into the sparkling metropole for an adventure? Was she relatively cloistered or did she have chances to meet other Ottoman Jewish families in Paris? » […]
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