Just to the left of the entrance to the Clal Building on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem stands a gate leading nowhere. The only clue to its history is the engraving on its artisanal 19th-century wrought iron.
The year 1882 is engraved, along with the words “Alliance Israélite Universelle” and “Institut Professionelle.” This gate appears to be a portal into the history of the effect that French liberal culture and education had on the Jews of Jerusalem and the Arab world.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s revolutionary reforms in the treatment of the Jews were only about as far away from that year as we are from the Holocaust. Things were good for the Jews in France, the cultural center of Europe, as well as for those in the French territories of North Africa and the Middle East. Paris headed the leading civilization and had recognized the rights of Jews to be full citizens.
Nevertheless, many of those Jews, flung across the French territories, were not educated to the level befitting citizens of such a culturally advanced society. Therefore, the Paris-based international Jewish organization Alliance Israélite Universelle was formed “to work everywhere for the emancipation and moral progress of the Jews; to offer effective assistance to Jews suffering from antisemitism; and to encourage all publications calculated to promote this aim.”
The Alliance Israélite Universelle was founded in 1860 by a group of influential and successful French Jews led by Charles Netter, who a decade later established the Mikveh Israel agricultural school, close to Jaffa. Tel Aviv was not yet built.
One of the Alliance’s founders was Jewish engineer Jules Carvallo, director of the canalization of Spain’s Ebro River delta, which enabled the irrigation of enormous, hitherto unproductive, tracts of land. Other founders were scholar and journalist Isidore Cahen; essayist Élie-Aristide Astruc, who was the grand rabbi of Belgium from 1866 to 1879; poet and man of letters Eugène Manuel; Nathan Narcisse Leven, Alliance Universelle’s general secretary from 1863 to 1883 and then its vice president from 1883 to 1898; and former and future justice minister Adolphe Crémieux, who would serve as Alliance president from 1863 to 1867 and 1868 to 1880.
Establishing French-language schools for Jewish children throughout the Mediterranean, Iran, and the former Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Alliance Israélite Universelle was on a mission to advance the fate of Jews.
Although the Alliance remained Jewish in its majority, it began to include sympathetic Christian notables who were dedicated to the promotion of Jewish self-sufficiency through education and professional development.
Alliance schools also admitted Muslim students, although they were a small minority.
Among them, most ironically and tragically, the infamous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini attended an Alliance school in Jerusalem for a period.
Crémieux meets the shah
In 1873, the central committee of the Alliance Israélite Universelle met with Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, then shah of Iran, when he was on a trip in Europe, to discuss the situation of Iranian Jews, at the residence of the president of the French Parliament, where the shah was staying. Crémieux addressed the injustices suffered by Iran’s Jewish community.
He added: “Your Majesty, the Alliance Israélite wishes for your Jewish subjects to be well acquainted with their obligations to their nation and sovereign. It is imperative to introduce them to the enriching fruits of education from a young age. We propose the establishment of schools in several cities across your realm, akin to those in North African cities, to be overseen by our educators. Does this notion meet with the king’s approval?”
The shah answered: “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Yes, I will endorse your educational endeavors. Coordinate the arrangements with the grand vizier, and I shall ratify them.”
The Alliance also interceded with the governments of Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands to grant the Jews full civil and political rights. In the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, the Jews were comprised in the stipulation that in Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria, no one should be discriminated against based on their religion.
With the Talmudic motto “All Jews are responsible for one another” (Shavuot 39a), over the years the Alliance came to focus increasingly on education and improving the welfare of Jews.
The first Alliance school in Jerusalem opened in 1868 as a free school.
The second, a boys’ high school opened in 1882, was the place our gate once led into. The building was demolished after the Six Day War.
One of the most noteworthy Jews who studied there was David Yellin, who went on to found and run the Hebrew Teachers Seminary – now known as the David Yellin College of Education – in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood, Until 1882, he had studied in the Etz Chaim Yeshiva, also on Jaffa Road. Finishing his studies at the Alliance school, he subsequently trained to become an Alliance teacher.
Opening the future for girls and women
Until the founding of the Alliance, basically only girls from wealthy or rabbinical families were being educated, presumably alongside any poorer girls who might be living with them.
Suddenly, in North Africa the advent of Alliance schools massively impacted educational and professional opportunities for girls and women. All the classes were taught in French and exposed pupils to subjects such as geography, history, and arithmetic.
Economic independence was promoted, and the Jewish girls were encouraged to train as secretaries, bookkeepers, laboratory assistants, or industrial chemists, or to specialize in needlework or sewing.
Many North African Alliance women graduates spent time in France training to be Alliance teachers before returning to their countries to teach.
Representative of the power of French colonization, the Alliance popularized Jewish education for both sexes, moving away from the sole premise of rabbis as teachers to secular, European-trained Jewish instructors.
The Alliance also used its power to advocate for the assimilation of Maghrebi Jews (from today’s Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) into French society. Alliance teachers were instrumental in calling for the naturalization of educated Moroccan Jews.
Testimonies from Alliance graduates from Morocco and the Middle East alive today illustrate the impact the schools had on the Westernization of the Arab Jews, enabling them to participate in the non-Jewish world as equals, even learning to speak fluent French and English, in addition to their native Arabic.
The gate that goes nowhere is somehow a monument to the Napoleonic genius of the man who, while experiencing narcissistic personality disorder and depression, led France from 1799 as first consul of the French Republic and then as emperor of the French until 1814, enabling the emancipation of the Jews along his way.