After learning the craft of blacksmith at an Alliance professional school in Rue de Rosiers in the Marais – Paris' historic Jewish quarter, he studied engineering at the Écoles d'arts et métiers in province – at Châlons-en-Champagne, and Angers.

He records experiencing difficulties in his dealings with both American and Ashkenazi Jews, denouncing the "arrogance" he thought characteristic of the former, and episodes of violence, such as a physical assault and death threat from a German representative of the latter when he refused to comply with a demand that he expel Muslim students from a school he ran.

"[1] He disliked the idleness of many European immigrants, and thought their growing, subsidized presence in Palestine risked provoking an antisemitic reaction throughout the Ottoman world.

[b][c] Indeed he regarded the publicity surrounding Zionism as responsible for the rise of antisemitism in the Holy Land, and advised a strategy of silence if emigration were to continue without arousing local resistance.

[6] As early as 1901 he wrote: "Zionism has been created, its leaders say, in order to tighten the bonds of Judaism: the only result has been to stimulate the birth of struggles between (different) nationalities".

In his testament, he expressed the hope that Palestine would develop along the lines of the Swiss cantonal system, under an interallied protectorate or French-English condominium, which would allocate lands without proprietors to immigrants, while keeping the country free of German and Russian communists.