22 · Avigdor Levy
population.^19 In subsequent years, growing numbers of Jews attended
state secondary and higher educational institutions. Thus it is important
to note that the first organized effort to modernize and transform Otto-
man Jewry through education came from the state, and its main purpose
was similar to that which guided the government’s efforts in creating a
modern-oriented Muslim elite, namely, government service.^20
While the first successful, though limited, attempts to modernize Ot-
toman Jewry through education were initiated by the Ottoman state,
western Jewish philanthropic organizations assumed the leading role in
this area in the late nineteenth century. But the Ottoman state institu-
tions played a pioneering role in creating a modern, educated Jewish elite
whose members facilitated the work of western Jewish organizations.
Already in 1848, twelve years before the establishment of the Alliance
Israélite Universelle (AIU), Jacques de Castro, a graduate of the Otto-
man medical school and a senior medical officer at the military hospital
at Haydarpasha in Istanbul, wrote to the editor of Archives Israélites, the
Jewish journal in Paris, urging western Jewry to help improve the educa-
tional standards of the Jews of the Levant.^21
Several attempts were made to establish modern Jewish schools in the
Ottoman Empire in the 1850s, usually through the cooperation of western
and local modernist Jews. This is how the first modern Jewish school was
founded in Istanbul in 1854. The school was immediately embraced by
the top westernized Ottoman bureaucracy, especially Fuad Pasha, the
Ottoman foreign minister and a leading figure of the Tanzimat reform
movement. When conservative rabbis forced the school to close in 1858,
the Ottoman authorities immediately intervened on the side of the Jew-
ish reformers, and the minister of education, Hayrullah Efendi, issued an
order that the school be reopened.^22
A new era in modern Jewish education in the Ottoman Empire began
in the 1860s with the establishment of modern schools sponsored by the
AIU. The AIU’s aims were to work everywhere “for the emancipation
and moral progress of the Jews,”^23 as well as for their integration as pro-
ductive and loyal citizens within the general societies of their respective
countries.^24
The AIU’s mode of operation varied from place to place and over time.
In general, however, it provided some of the funds necessary to estab-
lish and operate its schools; it also provided principals, teachers, cur-
ricula, a plan of action, and leadership. Its success depended, however,