Creating Cultural Capital: The Education of Jewish Females at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) School for Girls in the City of Tunis, 1882–1914

Based on rarely viewed images from the fin de siècle, this article will contribute to the burgeoning field of Jewish women in the world of Islam. At the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) School for Girls in the city of Tunis, 1882–1914, after a seven-year course of study, Jewish and non-Jewish girls acquired certification of their academic or vocational skills through a certificate or diploma of couture. Such credentials, according to Bourdieu (1986), constitute “cultural capital.” Furthermore, “cultural capital … is convertible … into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications.” A young woman could create cultural capital and transform it into economic capital through employment. Reading the sources, the influence of the Tunisian Muslim woman on the Jewess becomes apparent. Moreover, cultural capital could afford the Jewish female wage earner increased economic independence and social mobility, as she journeyed on the road to modernity.

Memories of Salonica: Estrea Aelion celebrates her one hundredth birthday

Estrea Aelion was born in Salonica in 1884. She belonged to a well-off family; her grandfather opened Salonica’s first department store and her father was a jeweller. In 1994, she celebrated her hundredth birthday in London and dictated her memories for her family and, especially, for her great grandchildren. Estrea Aelion lived at the beginning of a period of great change for Salonica and the Jewish community. Her memories are not a formal historical document, they are personal experiences. She was one of the first girls to go to school, in her case a missionary one, although her brothers went to an Alliance Israélite Universelle school. She witnessed the arrival of modern inventions such as electricity and running water. She lived through the catastrophic 1890 and 1917 fires. Estrea Aelion’s memories, however personal they may be, are a document of great interest to all those interested in a vanished world.

Western Europe

This chapter looks at how the achievement of equality in western Europe was limited in scope. In England, it turned on removing the disabilities that prevented Jews from exercising political rights. In France, it entailed removing vestiges of inequality that qualified the Jews' supposedly full and unconditional emancipation. In Algeria, emancipation recapitulated the experience of Alsace: the full scope of rights was at stake. Jewish leaders mounted concerted political campaigns that constituted an emancipation politics. The chapter then considers the founding of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860), which marked a high point of confidence in emancipation: the Jews of France, the Revolution's beneficiaries, would now strive to bring emancipation to Jews everywhere.

Who is Afraid of Jewish Universalism?: Adolphe Crémieux in Liberal Vision and Antisemitic Forgery

This article deals with two spurious texts by Adolphe Crémieux, the French Alliance israélite universelle, and neo-Nazi distortions and antisemitic ideology aiming at Jewish universalism. Based on a detailed reading of French, German, and English sources, the author’s point of departure is the German neo-Nazi Horst Mahler and his antisemitic,conspiracy-driven agitation against Crémieux in recent years. Crémieux was a representative of French Jewish liberal and universalistic circles in the nineteenth century. For example, as a politician he stopped slavery in the French colony of the Caribbean in 1848. Neo-Nazis as well as Islamists defame Jewish universalism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are invoked by both neo-Nazis, who base their hatred of Judaism and Jews on French Catholic as well as Nazi German sources, and by Islamists.Keywords: Alliance israélite universelle, Adolphe Crémieux, Horst Mahler, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Radio Islam, universalism