In Educational Oases in the Desert, Jonathan Sciarcon provides an engaging microhistorical treatment of the establishment and twenty-year operation of a school for Jewish girls in Ottoman Baghdad at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, he adds depth and texture to our understanding of the modernizing transformation in education that took place on a global scale between 1890 and 1930. This movement was intimately connected to state modernization, and it involved many actors, including local government officials; states engaged in building their administrative infrastructure; Christian missionaries; and transnational organizations, such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), that supported communities of religious minorities. The education of girls was one of the critical components of this modernizing project. It was also, particularly in the case of the AIU, deeply connected to the processes of the professionalization of women and integration of minorities.
Founded in 1860 by French Jews in response to concerns about antisemitism in Muslim-majority and eastern European countries, the Alliance Israélite Universelle was also an expression of a new and growing feeling of solidarité with Jews outside of western Europe. Its mission was to improve the economic situation of Jews through education, specifically secularized education that included academic subjects such as mathematics, history, and language (usually French and the local language, such as Arabic or Turkish), as well as vocational training. Sciarcon argues that educating girls was seen as a critical step in molding the modern woman, who would in turn socialize her own husband and children. In this the Alliance resembled Protestant missionary organizations that “viewed women as key agents in the quest to transform indigenous societies” (xx).
Sciarcon organizes Educational Oases in the Desert chronologically around the tenure of each of the female school directors. This approach serves well, particularly over such a short time span, to underscore the connection between the directors’ personal experiences and different phases of institution building. The introduction and first chapter situate the 1895 establishment of the first girls’ school in the debates concerning female education over the previous thirty years. Baghdad provides an interesting case study. In contrast to many other predominantly Muslim cities, Jews were far from a small minority—in fact they constituted one-third of the city's population. (There were far more Jews in Baghdad than in all of Iran, for example.) Baghdadi Jews, particularly among the upper classes, had generated their own homegrown interest in Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and therefore eagerly embraced secularized education. Additionally, the Ottoman Empire provided a friendly environment for such endeavors. Having begun its own modernizing secular education project in the 1820s, it was generally extremely receptive to the establishment of Alliance schools, which were viewed as providing a high-quality education not just to Jews but to Muslims as well, without proselytizing.
In the first chapter, Sciarcon introduces the reader to the AIU's Baghdad girls’ school's first director, Rachel Danon, whose husband Joseph served as the boys’ school director at the time. Inexperienced, young, and French—in this way representative of both male and female directors—Danon nonetheless undertook the difficult tasks of locating a suitable physical space, hiring teachers, ordering teaching materials, and establishing policies concerning tuition payments. Here, as in other chapters, Sciarcon's microhistorical approach and detailed attention to Danon's letters to the AIU's Paris headquarters pay off. The struggles of each AIU school director, whether female or male, were both unique to the specific landscape and shared commonalities with their colleagues’ experiences. Therefore, the work of recuperating individual narratives provides a vibrant illustration of the local social and communal landscapes. Sciarcon emphasizes the self-appointed modernizing role that turn-of-the-century Alliance female school directors played vis-à-vis their female students. Like her female Christian missionary counterparts, Danon sought to model a new, modern woman to her students and change the way that they dressed, wore their hair, and took care of their bodies. Another expression of her modernity was the fact that she herself had a formal education and worked outside the home.
Subsequent chapters take the reader through the balance of the school's twenty-year existence and the experiences and concerns of the directors who followed Danon. As the school consolidated its successes and expanded, it confronted issues that critically affected students, the directors themselves, and the community at large, such as child marriage, outbreaks of diseases like cholera and the bubonic plague, and the evolving gender roles of AIU alumnae. Educational Oases concludes with a brief history of the AIU girls’ schools founded in the provincial cities of Hilla, Mosul, and Basra. With the onset of World War I, the 115 Alliance schools in the Ottoman Empire closed, having provided an education for approximately 35 percent of Ottoman Jews.
Sciarcon relies primarily on the letters of the female Alliance school directors for source material. He openly acknowledges the sources’ limitations, in particular the fact that they reveal little about the students’ experiences. (Scholars studying countries where Alliance operated more recently, such as Iran, are able to access memories of students’ experiences through interviews with alumni.) Future studies will undoubtedly benefit from examining Ottoman archives, particularly collections that relate to state educational administration. Fortunately for the reader, the AIU letters are a rich source, especially when read and understood in their context as organizational human resource correspondence.
Sciarcon is right to frame Educational Oases as a contribution to the fields of Jewish and women's studies. However, it also fits into a larger global story of the history of educational philosophies, practices, and innovations. This history—like other social histories—transcends national boundaries and is thus best explored simultaneously on the global and local, even hyperlocal, scales. Pairing Educational Oases with other books on education based on equally local sources but in other places, such as Elizabeth Vanderven's A School in Every Village: Educational Reform in a Northeast China County 1904–31 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), yields rich opportunities for comparison and theorization of a global history of the modern education movement and the role of the Alliance Israélite Universelle within it.
