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Jewish schools in Beirut once served purposes of integration
From Daily Star - 09/10/2003

Jewish schools in Beirut once served purposes of integration - But their effects on Arab Jews was noted and denounced by Zionists.

Mazen Wehbe

Special to The Daily Star

The year is 1870. The building no longer exists, but was located somewhere in the bourgeois and aristocratic neighborhood of 19th century Achrafieh.

Antoun Shehayber, lawyer and businessman, was addressing the director of the Jewish School of Beirut: “Yes, director, it is impossible for us to forget what suffering you have endured for our sakes and what efforts and zeal you have shown for our moral upbringing and education. First of all, in order to plant in us the spirit of the noble religion of Judaism you brought us an energetic rabbi. Secondly, you implanted in us the grammar of the Arabic language of our homeland, and how much expense and effort you have borne to bring professor Bekhor Leon for French. We want to assure your excellency, director, that we the Syrian Arabs are grateful for your favors. Although we are Arab in appearance, and our costume is Syrian, we still strive to attain the highest degree of science and progress. Friends, who have nominated me to undertake this noble task, raise your voices with me in calling out: Long live the Syrian, Arab and Jewish director from Sidon, Zaki Effendi Kuhin.”

Sadly, this speech survived but the school didn’t. It was shut down in 1904, probably because of lack of funds. Even though other institutions succeeded the school, and used a similar “Levantinesque” approach to Jewish education, its contribution to Beirut society was unique. In today’s world, the adjectives Syrian, Arab and Jewish would probably be met with disbelief if they were used to describe a rabbi who headed a Jewish school in Beirut.

The remaining Jewish community in Beirut (around 60, according to unofficial estimates) does not even have a rabbi. The synagogue survived the civil war and still stands, deserted and damaged, in Downtown Beirut, awaiting restoration and the return of the Lebanese Jews, something that might not happen soon.

Most of the Jews of Lebanon fled the country when their quarter in Wadi Abu Jmeel in Downtown Beirut became a battle zone in 1975.

But this is the present, and our story begins in Beirut in the 19th century. The city was still under Ottoman rule. European protection and the “civilizing missions” had transformed the non-Muslim inhabitants into agents of “social change.” Beirut was becoming Westernized.

According to author Leila Tarazi Fawaz, during the 19th century Beirut was transformed from a provincial town of 6,000 to a political and cultural center of 120,000. At this time of profound social change in Beirut, Kuhin (or Cohen) established what would be the first and largest Jewish-Arab college of its kind. Children of the small Jewish community in Beirut (around a thousand at the time) were taught Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, French, German and other foreign languages.

Kuhin and Shehayber (who was either Jewish or Christian, the records are not clear) even set up a Jewish-Arab theater on the same premises in Achrafieh. People from all sects came to the often-packed theater to watch Arabic adaptations of Moliere, as well as original plays performed in Hebrew, and sometimes French and Turkish. In many ways, the Beirut Jewish-Arab Theater was a response to the classic misrepresentation of the Jew in European theater.

Ironically, it was in the city of Beirut in the 19th century that Jewish characters transcended stereotypes and found depth to become the protagonists of European tales hostile to Jews in their original versions. It was not uncommon for a Jewish actor on the stage of the Beirut Jewish theater to quote Koranic expressions and Arabic poems, and mix French with Hebrew.

The whereabouts of what was the Jewish school is now a mystery. The information above was taken from a single article written by P.C. Sadgrove and published in 1992 in the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Sadgrove said the plays are now in the possession of the Abulafia family in Israel. The plays interested Sadgrove because to him they were an affirmation that, at the height of the Arab renaissance, Arab Jews were committed to “broader cultural, social and political values of parallel Arab and Syrian identities.”

This cultural participation was not confined to Lebanon. Around the same time in Egypt, Yaaqoub Sannouh, an Egyptian Jew who was also a member of Jamaleddine al-Afghani’s Islamic nationalist circle, was calling himself the “Egyptian Moliere.” His plays were aimed at a general Egyptian audience, and he played a prominent role in the development of the Egyptian dramatic tradition.

In fact, Egyptian Jews are acknowledged to have played important roles in Egyptian culture, specifically theater, cinema, music, the printing industry and the Arabic press. It is well known that Um Kulthoum in Egypt never performed without Daoud Hosni, an Egyptian musician who was Jewish.

In Iraq, we find a multitude of different Jewish authors making similarly important contributions. In fact, until 1948, we could still find outspoken authors like Murad Faraj in Egypt advocating Egyptian nationhood based on equality and fraternity, and Murad Mikhael in Iraq writing patriotic stories entitled He Died for his Country, and She Died for Love.

Kuhin’s school in Beirut was replaced by what some Lebanese still remember as the “Alliance.” The “Alliance Israelite Universelle” was the first international Jewish organization of its kind. Founded in Paris in 1860 by a group of liberal French Jews, it believed that emancipation of the Jews would come through education (L’Emancipation par l’Instruction).

By the turn of the 20th century, there were over 100 Alliance schools across the world in most of the cities with Jewish communities. The schools taught over 26,000 students.

The Alliance’s effect on Arab Jews was seen and denounced by Zionists, who abhorred Jewish integration into Arab society and accused the Westernized Jewish schools in the Levant of weakening the racial awareness of Middle Eastern Jews. Yehuda Nini from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry in Jerusalem said the Alliance schools “paved the way for a gradual alienation from Jewish tradition and Jewish nationalism, and for the perception of Western lands, rather than the land of Israel, as destinations for migration.”

Many Zionist authors argued the Jewish Arabs were only superficially “Arabized.” Zionist writers like Itamar Levin and Norman Stillman generally minimized the role Jews played in Islamic civilization and Arab culture.

The story of the Jewish school in Beirut and the Alliance contradict this version of history. It shows a degree of cultural integration that could have lasted until the present had it not been for militant Zionism, which sought to remove Jewish Arabs from their natural setting and create a new kind of Israeli Jew.

Ben Gurion said: “We do not want the Israelis to be Arabs. It is our duty to fight against the spirit of the Levant that ruins individuals and societies.”

But the spirit of the Levant gave the Jews a voice. After all it was in Beirut, not in the Yishuv (Palestinian Jewry), and certainly not in Europe, that a biblical play called The Sacrifice of Isaac was performed in the 19th century. One night in 1883, the characters of Abraham, his wife Sara, and Hagar, the bondmaid, stood together on stage with his son Isaac, ancestor of the Jews, and Ismail, ancestor of the Arabs.
(c) 2003 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.
Date: 09/10/2003
Publication: Daily Star

Filed under: History by admin