The Alliance schools: from Tetouan to Tehran

The Alliance Israélite Universelle was founded on 17 May 1860 in Paris; its first president was Adolphe Crémieux. The first school anywhere opened at Tetouan, Morocco, in 1862. Baghdad—1864 or 1865 (both dates in reputable sources; probably founded in 1864 and opened in 1865), the Baghdad girls' school in 1895 (1893 is sometimes printed). Tehran—1898, the girls' school 1899; the Alliance's agreement with Nāṣer al-Dīn Shah was signed in Paris on 12 July 1873, and implementation took twenty-five years. Then Hamadan 1900, Isfahan 1901, Shiraz and Sanandaj 1903, Kermanshah 1904, Kashan 1911, Yazd 1928.

Figures: Morocco in 1912—fourteen schools and 5,500 pupils; in 1939—forty-five schools and 15,761 pupils. Baghdad in 1899—254 boys and 132 girls. Tehran in 1913–14—455 boys and 190 girls, from a community of six thousand.

What it changed. Language and orientation: French, then English, alongside Hebrew and Arabic—and a graduate became employable by European banks, shipping firms and consulates, and after 1917 by the British administration of Iraq. Occupations: Iraqi Jewry's over-representation in the Mandate civil service, the railways, customs, the port and the banks is a direct consequence. Girls' education: female literacy in Baghdad and Tehran begins here, decades ahead of Muslim and Christian girls' schooling. Stratification: a francophone stratum emerged with interests distinct from the rabbinate's—and it did not go peacefully: in Baghdad the community had already banned consorting with missionaries in 1845, and in 1876 it backed Rabbi Yosef Ḥayyim in a public dispute against a Viennese teacher.

Three corrections. The Alliance did not bring literacy to an ignorant community: Baghdad in the 1860s had thirty-odd synagogues, each with a ḥakham and two teachers, plus the Bet Zilkha midrash and a Hebrew press of its own; what was new was not reading but European reading and a secular curriculum. The Alliance was not the vehicle of Zionism—if anything its competitor: its programme was French-republican, entry into the civic life of one's own country; the Zionist society in Baghdad existed briefly in the early 1920s and was suppressed by 1929. And Iran received its schools last: Tehran 1898 against Baghdad 1865—a gap of thirty-three years, and a substantial part of the explanation why Iranian Jewry entered the twentieth century poorer and politically weaker than the rest.

A consequence visible only over the long run: it is the French education that explains why a large part of Moroccan Jewry went to France and Canada rather than to Israel.