Archive

First Alliance Israelite Universelle School, Damascus, Syria

Description

AIU System:

The creation of French Jews who felt a responsibility to aid the Jewish communities across underdeveloped areas of the Middle East and Balkans, the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU), was founded in 1860 as the first international Jewish organization.[viii] Based out of Paris, the group aimed to reestablish Jewish cohesiveness, a sentiment which had been revived in the Jewish community following the 1840 Damascus Affair in which Jewish community members had been accused of the ritual killing of a Capuchin friar and his Muslim assistant.[ix] The episode saw rabid anti-Semitism exhibited by not only local Muslims and Christians, but Western European authorities in Syria as well as the European press.[x] More directly, the abduction by the papal police in 1858 of an Italian Jewish boy who had been secretly baptized by a Christian domestic servant spurred the international Jewish community into action to "defend the civil rights and religious freedom of the Jews."[xi] Led by members of the Parisian Jewish elite, the group officially began its activities in May of 1860.[xii] AIU was active politically, most notably lobbying for Jewish rights at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and later the peace conference at Versailles after the First World War.[xiii] Believing education to be the most powerful effector of change, the AIU turned to establishing a network of schools, the first of which was the school in Tetouan, Morocco, built in 1862.[xiv] Within the next three years, schools in Tangiers, Damascus, and Baghdad were established.[xv] Donations from Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch in 1873 and 1889 totaling over 11 million gold francs allowed AIU to expand significantly, and it soon had a school in almost every major Jewish community in the Islamic world.[xvi] By 1913, 183 AIU schools spanning from Morocco to Iran taught 43,700 students.[xvii] A combined French and Jewish curriculum, though regarded by some as highly-modern, made AIU establishments and their teachers propagators of Western civilization and French colonialism (in North Africa).[xviii] The AIU network was centered on French primary and secondary education in addition to “modern” Jewish education which included religion, biblical Hebrew, and Jewish history.[xix] The schools were also revolutionary in their concern for women’s education, and it established the first mass educational system for Jewish girls throughout North Africa and the Middle East.[xx] However, an out flux of Jews emigrating to Beirut and cities across North and South America led to a rapidly diminishing Jewish population in Damascus, numbering 10,000 in 1900 to only 6,000 by 1926.[xxi] 

Demise:

Following the 1947 Arab-Israeli War and the consequent mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries, all of the AIU schools in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt shut down.[xxii] Similarly, in the 1960s following Moroccan independence, most of the country’s Jews emigrated to France and Israel.[xxiii] Finally, in Israel, most Alliance schools were either shut down or integrated into the Israeli education system.[xxiv]

Damascus, Syria

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