European liberals – Jews and non-Jews – were outraged, regarding the event
as an affront to western values. At this point, a coterie of European Jews
decided to intervene, and dispatched a delegation to the sultan that consisted
of the English Jew Moses Montefiore, the French Jew and statesman Adolphe
Crémieux, and the German Jews Solomon Monk and Louis Loewe.
For Monk and Loewe, in particular, this decision to intervene seemed to run
contrary to the terms of emancipation – that is, maintaining an extranational
sense of solidarity. They justified their actions in two ways. First, they claimed
that their solidarity was exclusively religious, like Catholics helping Catholics
across national borders. In addition, they regarded their actions as integral to
the values of their country. Freedom from religious persecution and civil rights
were European and not simply Jewish values.
In retrospect, despite such claims, this event marked the emergence of a
transnational sense of solidarity that was not only religious but quasi-national
in nature. This new mentality found expression during the 1840s in Jewish
newspapers such as the German-Jewish Allegemeine Zeitung des Judenthumsand
the Anglo-Jewish Jewish Chronicle. It found full expression two decades later
with the founding the first modern Jewish philanthropic organization, the
Alliance Israélite Universelle, in 1860.
The immediate origin of the Alliance was the Mortara affair, an incident
that took place in Bologna, Italy, in 1858. A Jewish child named Edgardo
Mortara was kidnapped from his parents by a papal guard on the pretext that
his nanny had already had him baptized secretly. In response, Adolphe
Crémieux and other French-Jewish leaders formed the Alliance to protect all
Jews who faced such persecution.
From the vantage point of these French Jews, the Jews who were in the
most obvious need of assistance were the politically second-class, relatively
powerless, and culturally backward (i.e. non-European) Jews in the Ottoman
Empire. The creation of the Alliance thus reflected a broader trend of
European intervention, and had the classically liberal aim of helping those
less fortunate by turning them into Europeans – in this case, European Jews.
To this end, the Alliance set up a network of dual-curriculum Jewish schools
in various parts of the Ottoman Empire. These schools were funded by the
Alliance and protected by French consulates.
For Jews in the Ottoman Empire, these schools offered a new alternative to
a centuries-old traditional Jewish existence: westernization. Unbeknownst to
the Alliance, this alternative would be the cutting edge of a wedge between
Jews in the Ottoman Empire and their Muslim neighbors. For centuries, they
had lived as neighbors as parts of the same world. As Jews became increas-
ingly westernized, they were seen by their neighbors as foreigners and, for
some, as agents of European imperialism. Later, such nascent sentiments
would be exacerbated, though not created, by the emergence of Zionism.
Thus, the Alliance extended the program of Haskala and the debate over
Jewish emancipation to the Ottoman Empire. The crowning achievement of
172 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880