WESTERN influences began to penetrate the Middle East as early as the eighteenth century, manifested in the adoption of western dress, western-style military and administrative structures, and technological and economic developments. European ideas also infiltrated the East, transmitted by Muslim travellers and diplomats in Europe and by western visitors to the East, including teachers, missionaries, expert advisers, tourists, and European consuls. More specifically significant in the case of Syria, however, is Muhammad ≥Ali's takeover of this region, which saw the opening of his regime to the West, politically, economically, and educationally. Egyptian rule brought the official inauguration of the first foreign consulates in Syria, whose presence fostered contacts between representatives of European Christian powers and the local Damascus population. With the return of Ottoman rule, western influence continued to intensify.

The most fundamental single contributory factor to the process of change was the launching in 1825 of a regular steamship service, which ‘shrank’ the Mediterranean, leading to a sharp rise in the number of travellers to and from Syria. As these vessels, referred to in rabbinic sources as ‘ships of fire’, plied their way between Europe and the Levant, the effects of the new traffic were described by Rabbi Isaac Abulafia, a member of the Damascus rabbinic court: ‘From the cities of Ashkenaz [Europe] there are convoys by ship and many from there [Europe] come here [Syria] and many more go from here to there.’

Other innovations affected daily life in Syria. These included faster and more comfortable land travel from the 1860s, with the paving of roads to carry stagecoaches, and improved communications, with the introduction of the telegraph to the large centres. The forging of closer economic ties with Europe flooded local markets with European goods. Great advances in health and sanitation services significantly lowered the incidence of epidemics in Syria. Western schools, mostly missionary institutions, comprised another significant agent of change, as already noted in previous chapters.

The prevailing picture of the Syrian Jewish communities at the end of the nineteenth century as backward perhaps conveys the misleading impression that only a small degree of modernization reached Aleppo and Damascus, and that even less penetrated the consciousness of their Jewish communities, with the exception of the students in Alliance schools.