Caveat emptor, if there be such for Jews and Muslims, the somewhat misleadingly renamed work that has passed in review twice before—originally in Paris in 1989 as De l'instruction à l'émancipation: Les enseignants de l'Alliance Israélite Universelle et les Juifs de l'Orient, 1860–1939, its most descriptive title; then, in 1993, in an “expanded, updated and revised” English translation as Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860–1939 from the University of Washington Press; and now again, from the same publisher, without benefit of expansion, revision, or updating, as Jews and Muslims. Although the title has been revamped, Aron Rodrigue's book is still, as it was from the beginning, a collection of documents originally in French, most of them letters, from the staff of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and dating from its founding in 1860 to the outbreak of World War II.

That chastisement aside—and perhaps, after all, we cannot have too much of a good thing—this book by Rodrigue, who is now a professor of Jewish studies and history at Stanford University and has gone on to write both broader and more detailed studies of the Sephardim, remains an interesting and highly instructive archive on the course of Middle Eastern colonialism and Westernization. More specifically, it provides a privileged view into both the ideals and aspirations of the Ashkenazi Enlightenment and slow deterioration of Sephardic Judaism at the turn of the 20th century.

The Alliance Israélite Universelle was a prodigious and prodigiously influential educational initiative by French Jews that opened its first school in Tetuan, Morocco, in 1862. By 1939, it was operating 127 schools, with nearly 48,000 students across the Sephardic diaspora from Morocco to Iran. In the main, they were partially secularized primary schools, separate schools for boys and girls (oddly, there were three co-ed Torah–Talmud schools in Algeria) that were set up after a French model though with considerable Judaic refitting (pp. 25–33). The teachers, who were trained at the alliance's école normale in Paris, were generally recruited from within the school system, and most came from what was, in the 19th century, the Sephardic heartland: Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria (pp. 34–67).

The alliance teachers were thus Sephardic men and women for whom such training and such a post, which underlined their promotion into the Western elite of their communities, was an enormous step forward and upward in the larger society that regarded the West with increasing respect and admiration. Their mission was to lead others along the same path, an enterprise that was to prove, in Rodrigue's words, “extraordinarily corrosive to the position of Jews in Muslim lands” (p. 6). The alliance, whether it intended it or not, was in the vanguard of European, and particularly French, colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East in the second half of the 19th century, which was clearly a source of pride and, at the same time, of apprehension to these alliance teachers, with their finely attuned sense of the politics of the place (pp. 179–203).

But these high-minded missionnaires laïques may have been working an even more profound damage on Sephardic Jewry itself. The alliance had in mind not merely the protection of the Sephardim but their “regeneration,” and the letters of their newly Westernized teachers are filled with frequent and often fierce critiques of the belief and practices of the Sephardim they were sent out to “civilize” (pp. 105–24). At the same time, the local rabbis often, and not unnaturally, looked on them as dangerous intruders and forbade children to attend their schools. The alliance's success in teaching French and its lack of skill and enthusiasm for Hebrew instruction (pp. 125–34) merely drove the point home.

Rodrigue's rich and varied collection of texts, with his own enlightening commentary, are no mere ethnography of Sephardic Jewish life before that world was shredded almost beyond recognition (see especially pp. 135–78). They are also interesting and illuminating communiqués from the 19th century's culture wars by some of its most animated warriors, who, in one place or another, had to wrestle with colonialism, nationalism, and Zionism (pp. 245–66). Whatever it is next called, Rodrigue's book will still be well worth reading.