The Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) collection

With 165,000 books and 1,500,000 archival documents, the library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle is one of the largest Jewish libraries in the world. It was founded in 1860, at the same time as the Alliance, by six young French Israelites[1]Aristide Astruc, Isidore Cahen, Jules Carvallo, Narcisse Leven, Eugène Manuel and Charles Netter. imbued with the Enlightenment spirit. Its main mission was to defend persecuted Jews and to work for their emancipation through “regeneration” and modernization by promoting French language and culture.

At the end of the 1980s, the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) hosted the Yuval Association for the preservation of Jewish musical traditions in its premises on rue La Bruyère (75009 Paris). In 2006, together with the Fondation du Judaïsme Français and the Fondation Henriette Halphen, Yuval founded the Institut Européen des Musiques Juives, which remains in close contact with the AIU.

On several occasions, the AIU has deposited music collections at the IEMJ. On December 20, 2023, the director of the AIU library, Jean-Claude Kuperminc, handed over to the IEMJ a number of documents (45 and 33 rpm records, scores and various archives) that have joined and completed the AIU collection, which now numbers over a hundred documents.

Among them are three rare printed and handwritten scores dedicated to the Alliance:

  • L’hymne à l’Alliance by Alexandre Brody, dedicated to Narcisse Leven, President of the AIU from 1898 to 1915
  • Hommage à l’Alliance by Mr. F. (?) Goldenberg on a text by Judith Rousso
  • Salut à l’Alliance (1912) also dedicated to Narcisse Leven, words and music by “student Alberto Hemsi“, then about 16 years old.

Also noteworthy is the general catalogue of the record collection of the Service Technique pour l’Education du Fonds Social Juif Unifié (Technical Service for the Education of the United Jewish Welfare Fund), then located at the Centre Communautaire, rue Poissonnière, Paris. This catalog of collections, drawn up by Ch. Rosenthal in 1969, lists 425 discs of classical, liturgical and paraliturgical music, folk music, diction and music for children and young people. This document is all the more valuable as it gives a precise picture of the Jewish music collections at the end of the 1960s, the fate of which is completely unknown today.

Among the audio documents in the AIU collection are recordings of Yiddish songs (Myriam Fuks, Ana Vinocur, Espe, David Peled…), Hasidic and liturgical songs (Lubavitcher Nigunim, Moshe Koussevitzky, Zawel Kwartin, Haim Harboun…) and Israeli music from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Finally, there is a fascinating article by Léon Algazi on “La musique des Juifs de Russie” published in Musique russe – 2 volumes (Collectif – P.U.F. 1953).

Completely digitized and catalogued, the AIU music collection is now accessible in its entirety in the libraries of the Rachel network (Alliance Israélite Universelle, Institut Européen des Musiques Juives, Maison de la Culture Yiddish, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Séminaire Israélite de France…) and partially from any other location by clicking on the following link.

Browse the AIU collection

Learn more about the Alliance Israélite Universelle

References
1 Aristide Astruc, Isidore Cahen, Jules Carvallo, Narcisse Leven, Eugène Manuel and Charles Netter.

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