Over the Yom Tob I finished reading “French, Jews, Turkish Jews” by Aron Rodrigue. I’ll share a brief reaction to it for the benefit of the group:This book is, at its core, a study of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and its work creating elementary and junior high schools in the Ottoman Empire. Its scope is between the antecedents of the founding of the AIU in 1860 and the takeover of non-Muslim school supervision by the Turkish state in 1925. Over these 65 years, the AIU went from an educational novice to operating hundreds of schools with tens of thousands of students. Although it never had a majority of Ottoman Jewish students enrolled in its institutions, it rose to become the largest, most centrally organized player in the field, with the most richly developed curriculum and even a formal teacher training school. The schools that competed with the AIU still incorporated many of its principles, making it the largest single shaper of Jewish educational norms in the Ottoman Empire from the 1880s-1920s.As much as this is a study of Sephardic education, it is also a study of Jewish modernity as experienced in France and the Ottoman Empire. As such it would be a meaningful text with which to study Jewish modernity in general. It begins with the emancipation of French Jewry and their self-understanding of what that experience meant for the world. Jews in France could now be citizens, having paid for equal rights by surrendering their corporate identity and privileges, modernizing communal organizations, and accepting duties and responsibilities to the nation. They were Frenchmen and then they were Jews, and they felt a need to “regenerate” their coreligionists in light of this new reality. Having engaged in this process at a time when French colonialism and print media were on the rise, they began to see the need for “regeneration” of their brethren in the “Orient,” a wide-ranging area extending from Morocco to Iran. (Rest in first comment…)