The Abergel Family

Before being a lineage, Abergel is a name — and the history of this name illuminates that of the men who bore it. The great repertoires of Judeo-North African onomastics agree on its deep Maghrebi character and its wide diffusion. According to Joseph Toledano, it is a "patronymic name of Arabic origin, indicative of a physical peculiarity, the one-legged person, literally 'the father of the foot', borne in the three countries of the Maghreb equally by Jews and Muslims" [Joseph Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. This porosity between communities is in itself a lesson: in premodernMaghreb, Jews and Muslims drew from the same Arabic linguistic fund, shared the same surnames, the same registers of designation. The name Abergel testifies to this convivencia in North Africa, where the confessional boundary did not erase the common language.

The geography of variants maps the landscape of exiles and adaptations. In Constantine, in Algeria, the form hardened into Bordjel [Joseph Toledano, Une histoire de familles]. In Tunisia, the lineage flourished under the form Borgel, which scholars confirm has the same origin as the Maghrebi Abergel [Joseph Toledano, Une histoire de familles] [Paul Sebag, Les noms des Juifs de Tunisie]. In Morocco, the name maintained itself under forms close to Abergel and Abergil, while French colonial registers, transcribing by ear, generated Bourgel, Borgès or Porgel. This graphical proliferation is not disorder: it is the signature of border crossings, changes of sovereignty and alphabet, of Hebrew, Arabic and then Latin scribes who, each in their turn, fixed the same sound according to their own grid.

The hesitation between Arabic etymology — the foot — and Hispanic etymology — the orchard — is no less significant. It places the lineage at the hinge of two Jewish worlds: that of the Toshavim, the autochthons of the Maghreb established there since Antiquity, and that of the Megorashim, the expellees from Sefarad welcomed after 1492. That the name could be read in both registers says enough that Sefardi identity in the broad sense nourished itself from this double belonging [Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Sefardica]. In preserving, under its multiple spellings, a recognizable core, the Abergel lineage exercised a discreet but tenacious virtue: fidelity to the father's name, this hafatsah of family memory that Jewish tradition holds to be a duty.

To situate the Abergel within the long arc of time, one must remember what Maghrebi Judaism was before the great modern upheavals. The Jewish communities of North Africa count among the oldest in the Mediterranean basin, predating Islam and even, in some places, Christianity itself. To the Toshavim, these Berber-speaking and Arabic-speaking Jews rooted for centuries, was added, at the end of the fifteenth century, the wave of Megorashim driven from Spain and Portugal, bearers of high Sephardic culture, its liturgy, its jurisprudence, and its language [Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Sefardica] [Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands].

The Abergel lineage, through the double etymology of its name, seems to have partaken of this encounter. If the hypothesis of the Spanish vergel holds, it would connect certain branches of the family to Iberian exile; if Arabic etymology prevails, it inscribes the lineage on the side of the indigenous. It is likely, as for so many Maghrebi families, that the two currents mingled through marriages and internal migrations [Abraham I. Laredo, Les Noms des Juifs du Maroc].

What tradition transmits here is not a continuous genealogy — archives are lacking for these distant centuries — but a way of being in the world. The Jews of the Maghreb lived most often under the status of the dhimma, protected and subordinate at once, bound to capitation, exposed to vexations but also capable, at intervals, of prosperity and honors [Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands]. Within this framework, they cultivated virtues of endurance and discretion, but also of internal solidarity: the community, the qehila, took charge of its poor, its widows and its orphans, upholding the commandment of tsedaqa, justice made charity. The Abergel, scattered throughout the Moroccan mellahs and Tunisian haras, were ordinary threads of this fabric — and it is in the ordinary faithfully upheld that Jewish tradition recognizes, often, its truest greatness.

It is in Tunisia that the lineage, in the form Borgel, reached its highest historical visibility. There, between the late eighteenth century and the late nineteenth, a veritable rabbinical dynasty was established, occupying on several occasions the supreme function of Chief Rabbi of Tunisia and presiding over the rabbinical court of the Regency [Paul Sebag, History of the Jews of Tunisia].

At the source of this dynasty stands Nathan Borgel, Chief Rabbi of Tunisia, who left a work published in Livorno — that great Tuscan port which was, for the Jews of Tunis, the capital of Hebrew printing and the bridge to Europe. His son, Élie Borgel, also called Eliahu Haï Borgel I or Élie Vita Borgel, born in 1760 in Tunis and died in 1817 in the same city, was a Tunisian rabbi who held the office of Chief Rabbi of Tunisia; he was the successor of his father Nathan Borgel as Chief Rabbi and president of the rabbinical court. He left a work entitled Migdanot Nathan (Gifts of Nathan), a series of more or less developed commentaries on talmudic treatises, published in Livorno in 1778 for its first part and in 1785 for its last part.

The very title of this work — Migdanot Nathan, the "Gifts of Nathan" — speaks of the filial piety that animates the lineage: the son publishes to honor the father, and talmudic erudition is transmitted as a sacred inheritance. Élie Borgel was the father of Nathan Borgel II, who in turn became Chief Rabbi of Tunisia. Thus, over at least three generations, the house Borgel gave to the Jewish community of Tunis its spiritual guides and its judges. Isaac Taïeb succeeded him as Chief Rabbi of Tunisia and president of the rabbinical court, proof that dignity circulated among the great learned families of the city, of which the Borgels were in the forefront.

In devoting their lives to the study and interpretation of the Law, these rabbis embodied one of the highest virtues of Judaism: talmud Torah, study as divine service, and dayanut, the exercise of justice in the name of the Law. To preside over the rabbinical court was to settle disputes, protect the widow and the orphan, guarantee the equity of contracts and the validity of marriages — in short, to bring halakha concretely to life at the heart of an entire community. The Borgel lineage thus bore, for the Jews of Tunis, the burden and honor of collective responsibility.

In the nineteenth century, the dynasty experienced its most striking figure in the person of a second Élie Haï Borgel. Here, the archival item serves to nuance and clarify family memory, making this chapter a site of intersection between tradition and document. According to genealogical research based on death certificates, the period of the Protectorate was above all, for the family and the Jewish community, marked by the strong personality of Élie Haï Borgel II, who was probably born in Tunis in the early nineteenth century, perhaps around 1810, and died in that same city in December 1898. Sources diverge on the name of his father — Moses according to one testimony, Solomon according to civil status records — illustrating the way archival items sometimes correct oral tradition.

The greatness of this man lay in the fact that he accumulated, at a time of decisive transition, positions stemming from three legal worlds. He indeed held three titles: that of Chief Rabbi of Tunisia, that of Qaid of the Jews — charged with administering the Tunis community as in the time of the Beys — and that of Hakham Bâchî, a Turkish title, Chief Rabbi, spiritual leader of the Israelites also charged with administering religious affairs. In his person converged religious authority, administrative authority inherited from the Beylic regime, and the honorific dignity linking the Regency to the Ottoman Empire.

This accumulation occurred at the very moment when the French Protectorate, established in 1881, transformed from top to bottom the status of Jews in Tunisia. The Qaid of the Jews, a very ancient position maintained by the Protectorate, was notably charged, as treasurer, with collecting the head tax paid by the Jews of Tunis and remitting it to the Beylic authorities. Thus, after the death of Élie Haï Borgel, the post disappeared, Jews being henceforth subject to common law in fiscal matters. With him ended thus a secular order: he was the last to fully embody the old communal organization before Tunisian Jews entered French legal modernity.

The name of this figure is inscribed today in the very topography of Tunis. The great Jewish cemetery of the city, inaugurated in 1894, bears the name Borgel, in tribute to the Chief Rabbi who presided over its foundation and was buried there after his death in 1898 [Wikipedia, entry "Borgel Cemetery"]. That a place of memory for an entire community bears the name of the lineage speaks volumes about its role: the Borgel have exercised, even in death and the rest of the deceased, that care for the collective — the hessed shel emet, the true kindness rendered to those who can no longer render it — which Jewish tradition holds to be the most selfless of virtues.

If Tunisia saw the flowering of the rabbinical branch of the Borgel, Morocco remains the territory where the original form Abergel most widely maintained itself. There, the lineage merges into the great history of Moroccan Judaism, one of the oldest and most dense in the Arab world [Robert Assaraf, A Certain History of the Jews of Morocco].

The Abergels of Morocco belonged to those dispersed urban and rural communities stretching from Fès to Marrakech, from Meknès to the presaharan borders, living from commerce, from craftsmanship — goldsmithing, metalworking, tailoring, tanning —, and sometimes from brokerage functions between tribes and cities. The name, in its reading of a possible Hispanic vergel, could link certain branches to exiles from Spain settled in the great centers of the North; its Arabic reading anchors it instead in the indigenous foundation [Abraham I. Laredo, The Names of the Jews of Morocco].

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Morocco were, for these families, a long crossing between precarity and hope. The Jews of Morocco experienced the vexations of dhimmi status, famines and episodic violence, but also, from 1862 onward, the emancipatory action of the Alliance israélite universelle, whose schools opened to the children of the mellah the French language and modern knowledge [Mohammed Kenbib, Jews and Muslims in Morocco] [Robert Assaraf, A Certain History of the Jews of Morocco]. Part of the Abergel lineage took these new paths, moving from the traditional workshop to urban professions.

The supreme trial came with the Second World War and the Vichy regime, whose exceptional laws struck the Jews of Morocco. We know the protective role that memory attributes to Sultan Mohammed V, who refused to surrender his Jewish subjects and thereby marked his solidarity with them [Robert Assaraf, Mohammed V and the Jews of Morocco in the Era of Vichy]. The Abergels crossed these dark years within a community that, in adversity, tightened its bonds of solidarity — this arevout, this mutual responsibility by which each Jew stands guarantor for his brother. Here too, the virtue of the lineage is not read in the brilliance of a few names, but in the collective faithfulness of a multitude nameless.

The middle of the twentieth century marked, for all North African Judaism, the time of great uprooting. Between 1948 and the 1970s, the centuries-old communities of the Maghreb emptied almost entirely, their members emigrating to Israel, France, and Canada [Georges Bensoussan, Juifs en pays arabes]. The Abergel lineage, in all its branches — Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian — experienced this dispersion.

In Algeria, Jews, French since the Crémieux decree of 1870, lived the independence of 1962 as a third exile, leaving en masse a land where the Bordjel of Constantine had long lived [Benjamin Stora, Les Trois Exils. Juifs d'Algérie]. In Tunisia, the community that had given the chief rabbis Borgel was reduced to a few thousand souls, while the Borgel cemetery remained, in the heart of Tunis, the stone witness of a multi-century presence. In Morocco, emigration emptied the mellahs of Fez, Meknes, Marrakech.

From this dispersion was born, paradoxically, a renaissance. Carried to Israel, the Abergel lineage — under the forms Abergil, Aberjel — became part of the renewal of Sephardic Judaism and its tradition of study, while in France it participated in the recomposition of a North African Judaism that had become dominant in the synagogues. It is here that tradition and History answer one another: the name that had crossed the Maghrebi centuries under twenty spellings continued to be transmitted, carrying with it the Memory of the chief rabbis of Tunis and the craftsmen of the mellah.

In this movement of reconstruction, the lineage expressed a virtue that Jewish tradition names tiqvah, hope — the capacity to refound elsewhere what seemed lost, without denying what was. Rebuilding synagogues, transmitting names, preserving the Memory of abandoned cemeteries: this was the way in which the sons of Abergel, exiled once more, honored the covenant of fidelity that their fathers had kept through so many lands and so many centuries.

At the end of this journey, the Abergel lineage appears as a condensed version of the entire history of Maghrebi Jews. Born from a modest name — the father of the foot, or the garden of Spain — it traversed the centuries in a multitude of forms, from Atlantic Morocco to the hills of Constantine, to the narrow streets of the hara of Tunis. It experienced the ordinary condition of dhimmis, the solidarity of communities, repeated exiles and rebirths.

Among all the virtues that this lineage carried, one stands out with particular clarity: the transmission of the Law and the service of the community. In the dynasty of the Borgel of Tunis — Nathan, Élie Haï I, Nathan II, Élie Haï II — the lineage gave to an entire Judaism its spiritual guides, its judges, its administrators and even the name of its great cemetery. By devoting entire generations to Talmudic study, to the presidency of the rabbinical court, to the care of the living as of the dead, these men embodied this collective responsibility — arevout — through which Jewish tradition links the destiny of each to the salvation of all.

Thus, by engraving their singular name in the topography and memory of their city, the Abergel-Borgel made their family history a fragment of the collective memory of Israel. The foot that limped in the founding ancestor became, through the grace of knowledge and service, the firm step of a lineage that, from land to land and century to century, never ceased to march ahead of its people.