The Jews of Bulgaria from Early Emancipation to Early Sionism: and in Between?

1 “Encounters and Estrangements”, Pisa, November 12, 2012 Marco Dogo The Jews of Bulgaria from early emancipation to early sionism: and in between? The story of the Bulgarian Jews is based on a plot that can be summed up in a matter of minutes. At the close of the Ottoman rule they were a religious group that enjoyed official recognition. Demographically, they were the result of multiple immigrations and stratifications, but their homogeneous outward appearance was determined by the language they spoke, which for the vast majority was Judeo-Spanish. They were suddenly injected into a radically new institutional context by the decisions of the Congress of Berlin. The Treaty defined their legal position in the newly formed Bulgarian nation-state: like all Bulgarian citizens they would enjoy to the full both civil and political rights, and like any other resident on Bulgarian soil they would also enjoy freedom of religion and religious organization. It must be said, however, that the main concern of the legislators for peace was to protect the Muslim citizens of the new Principality. In any case, these principles were incorporated nine months later into the Constitution of Tărnovo, with no record of any attempt to limit their range. It is true that the Constituent Assembly was working “under Western eyes”: but the eyes of the Russian provisional civil governor were closer. Rather than to external European influences, then, the liberalism and the democratism of the Constitution of Tărnovo should probably be attributed to the wave of euphoria following the liberation of the country, also as regards the question of minorities. Thus we may say that the Bulgarian Jews acquired citizenship at the very same time as did the mass of their Bulgarian fellow citizens. In other words, right from the beginning of their life in the Bulgarian nation-state the Jews found themselves to be, in principle and unconditionally, legally “emancipated”. That did not, in the following decades, save the Bulgarian Jews from repeated attacks, albeit isolated and not pandemic, in the name of the blood libel. 2 In the meantime the Bulgarian state, although in the midst of serious political turmoil, made a wide-ranging and successful effort in the field of popular education (an effort unequalled in south-eastern Europe at that time); and the Bulgarian Jews were included in this general trend in a yet more successful manner thanks to the contribution of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The result was their linguistic Bulgarisation, their patriotic integration and, somewhat surprising given these conditions, their wholesale and relatively early adherence to Zionism. For the period following World War 1 the main theme was the growth of anti-Semitism in the Bulgarian majority society, the combative response of the Bulgarian Zionists, and in the second half of the Thirties the rise of anti-Semitism to prominent (although not predominant) positions in politics. The conclusion, as we know, was not Shoah, but rather the escape of the Bulgarian Jews from Shoah. The salient facts in this plot, then, are early emancipation, early Zionism, and escape from Shoah. This last point lies outside the temporal and thematic range of our research, and as regards the circumstances in which the articles of the Constitution of Tărnovo on citizenship and religious freedom were worked out, I should like to defer the matter to further study. My intention here is to clarify the question of the early Zionism: I set out from Benbassa and Rodrigue, I read the not particularly extensive western historiography, I had an unsystematic look at the archival sources of the Alliance, I had the good fortune to come across the latest edition of Les Juifs espagnols en Bulgarie by Saul Mézan, first published in 1925, and then I returned to Benbassa and Rodrigue. Their explanation for the early mass success of Zionism in Bulgaria is: Alliance plus anti-Semitism equals Zionism. Now I should here like to expand on a few arguments and reservations concerning this formula, together with the factors and the timing it implies. The “Alliance factor” means simply that the modern European education that the Alliance made available to the young Jews of Bulgaria was an effective awakener, in a national sense, which went well beyond the intentions of the Alliance itself. The first generation of Bulgarian Zionists were all moulded in the schools of the Alliance. In the brief span of a school cycle the young Bulgarian Jews shot ahead from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. And in their national and therefore democratic 3 enthusiasm they came to find themselves in open conflict with the Alliance, which on account of its philosophy and convenience relied instead on the well-to-do notables of Jewish society. When Zionism appeared in Bulgaria around 1895 or 1896 – before Der Judenstaat – it supplied the intellectual coordinates for the social and generational struggle. And the battlefield par excellence was the school, education. On this interpretative outline there is general agreement in the literature. In fact, the agreement is so broad that the empirical picture of the question remains partly disordered and not thorough. For example, while it is certain that around 1901 the Alliance covered about 40% of the overall budget of the modern Jewish elementary and Progymnasia education in Bulgaria, what is not clear is the respective importance of the other factors that contributed to supporting the Jewish education system as a whole, namely the communities and the State (in 1890 in Sofia a large educational establishment was set up with tripartite funding, but this seems the exception rather than the rule). Still, according to certain opinions the Alliance in 1901 had already lost the match to rising Zionism; according to others the “game over” should be put at 1914 or even 1920. However, what ought to interest us more, in this competition for the dominance of the educational system, is that there were at least three aspects to the victory of Zionism, each of which would already on its own be sufficient to catch our attention. The first aspect is the fact that “prevailing” over the Alliance meant for the Zionists being able to take over or substitute the schools of the Alliance with self-funding community schools, which presupposed a certain economic capacity on the part of the communities themselves. The second aspect is that the victory of Zionism meant substituting Hebrew for French as the teaching language, whereas Bulgarian, in conformity with the state school curricula, remained the teaching language for subjects connected with the national culture (Bulgarian). The third aspect is that this expansion and democratisation of Jewish education was not carried out within the four walls of Jewish society, and not even as a reflection of a hypothetical general trend of European Judaism, but rather in the context of a nation state investing a considerable quota of its budget on educating the mass of its illiterate 4 population, and doing it with generally remarkable results, especially within the urban component of the population. I’d like you to consider some simple yet eloquent figures. In 1880 the rate of literacy among the Bulgarians was 0.3% in the countryside and 3.5% in the city. Thirty years later, in 1910, the average rate of literacy of the Bulgarians had risen to 35% in the countryside and 63% in the city. In the same year, 1910, some 75% of Bulgarian military recruits turned out to be literate, which meant a percentage far from the almost 100% of Germany, England and France, but close to that of Austria-Hungary, 77%, and decidedly superior to that of Greece, Italy, Serbia and Romania. Now, within this general Bulgarian average of 75% literacy, the Turkish and Rom conscripts figured extremely low down, while the Armenian and Jewish conscripts were close to 100%. Perhaps it is not clear, and needs to be spelt out, that this was about literacy in the Bulgarian language! This means that the Bulgarian Jews, who under the Ottoman rule spoke Judeo-Spanish and Turkish, had within a span of thirty years acquired Bulgarian as a language of fluent communication, and had participated profitably in the literacy drive of the national majority. This also means that, around 1910, a Jewish youth of call-up age had on average better means of access to the Bulgarian press and literature, as well as to higher education, compared to a Bulgarian of the same age. And this is not a sociological abstraction: it is exactly the cultural profile of Saul Mézan, which brings us to the second potential factor in the rapid success of Zionism in Bulgaria. The hypothesis is that Bulgarian nationalism had exercised a kind of demonstrative effect upon Jewish youth. In conformity with its integrationist aims, the Alliance had made it obligatory to study Bulgarian language and culture in the syllabus of its schools. And, apart from the integrationist philosophy of the Alliance, the study of Bulgarian language and culture was a necessary requirement so that the curricula of the private/communal schools would be recognised by the State. On the school benches, then, the young Jews familiarised themselves with the Bulgarian national ideology, obviously focussed upon the C19th Revival, and through this Bulgarian acculturation they would have acquired a model for their own Jewish nationalisation. I cannot disguise the fact that on first reading this hypothesis seemed to me to be both abstract and apologetic. It recurs in modern Bulgarian historiography, and seems made 5 with the express purpose of supporting the idea that if the young Jews had been able to shape their transition from a religious identity to a national one on the model of the Bulgarian experience, then the Bulgarian ambience could not have been so inhospitable to them.

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